Everybody has a story

The forest where I grew up. Ohio is very green.

GROWING up in the midwest

I grew up in a quiet, little, picturesque town in northeastern Ohio, named in honor of Revolutionary War heroes, and home to the academy where 25th U.S. president William McKinley was schooled that would later become the high school I would attend. As a little girl, I preferred to listen to my older brother’s record collection, build makeshift towns with my big sister in the neighbor’s yard, and swing on long, low-lying branches of willow trees. Today, the village is still dotted with the original colonial-era structures and newer buildings maintain the same quaint colonial look and feel.

cookies, a lot of cookies

In photographs of myself when I was a little, I was always eating a cookie. My mother took me to see a doctor because I would only eat cookies. Years later, I would identify this as the beginning of a lifelong food addiction. As a child, I’d figured out a way of numbing painful feelings eating sugar, fat, and carbs. It was also at this time when I began to express myself musically, singing and playing songs on a children’s organ and embellishing my father’s musical recordings with percussive, vocal sounds, maybe to his dismay!

Homecoming day. You can see my white long underwear peeking out from under my blouse. I might have been smiling, but I was sick.

ohio is very cloudy

For all the natural beauty in Ohio, only about a third of the year is sunny. Growing up, I had seasonal affective disorder. In the winter, I would get depressed and put on weight. I was sensitive to fluorescent light indoors and dense gray, cloudy skies outdoors. Winters were downright cold, and I was always freezing, having an underactive thyroid. I was active in school—a type-A overachiever—but to my detriment, health-wise. Like clockwork, a few days into a new school year I would get sinus infections and swollen glands that would linger until spring. Then my allergies would start up. It’s no wonder that I always wanted to live in a warm, dry, sunny climate!

The newspaper headline read, “It was hot!” Performing at the county fair in 90 degree temperatures.

i’ve always loved to dance

In high school, I was on the dance line. The girls and I would perform during halftime at football games come rain, snow, or shine. That didn’t help my sinus infections. My doctor would prescribe antibiotics, before it was known that antibiotics kill the flora (good bacteria) in the gut and don’t kill viruses (from a sinus infection). After a few years, the antibiotics stopped working; my body built up a tolerance. My doctor said that if I wanted to get better, I would have to rest. I thought he was a horrible doctor. But today, I appreciate his foresight—he was ahead of his time. However, the damage was already done, and I would suffer from leaky gut syndrome and other intestinal problems for most of my life.

The visible signs of stress working 60–80 work weeks: weight gain, blemishes, pale skin, dark circles under my eyes… and bad hair days!

i never slowed down

In college, I studied mathematics and computer science while working two or three jobs and keeping up activities for a scholarship. I loved being a software engineer out of college, but the deadlines were stressful working 60-80 hours/week, and I didn’t like sitting at a computer for long hours. By the time I was 30 years old, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I would binge eat. I saw a therapist and took antidepressants but neither helped. I switched careers, teaching at a university, and studied creative writing and piano performance, penning short stories and writing music. I felt happy and alive whenever I was doing anything creative.

Laidback after getting henna while traveling in Morocco.

the move to nyc

A few years later, I joined a dotcom in New York City, and my world exploded with excitement. It was a thrilling time in my career; never before had an industry ascended so rapidly and profitably. It was a thrilling time to live in New York City; the city was cleaned up and safer. I advanced to executive management and was enjoying all the city had to offer. I wasn’t making music but I had friends who played at great venues around town. It was one of the best times of my life. And yet something was wrong: I was always sad. Then 9/11 happened, and it became a symbol for a devastating time in my life. My world came crashing down.

In Central Park, New York City. After my second round of chemo, my face was puffy and my hair began to thin.

diagnosed with breast cancer

One day while I was showering, I found a lump the size of a tiny pebble in one of my breasts. I’d been having suicidal thoughts… it wasn’t the first time… but this time I was resolved. I couldn’t do it myself, so I asked for it to happen. Be careful what you wish for. Though my tumor was tiny and stage 1, cancer cells had invaded my blood and lymphatic vessels and was thought to have spread. But the unexpected happened; once I was faced with death, I decided that I wanted to live. I decided I would make it. Little did I know what the experience would lead to down the road.

At a vineyard in Sonoma, California. After a year, I was recovered and enjoying life again.

From New York to CAlifornia

In short, I began conventional treatment but stopped early and decided to take a natural approach. I’d read accounts of survivors who relied on the body’s healing abilities, and I wanted to do the same. On a business trip to Los Angeles I saw Southern California as a healing mecca. With my body temperature just 95°F and my body badly damaged by the chemo hanging on by a thread, I moved to Venice Beach and got to work. You name it, I tried it—so many healing modalities. A year later I was recovered: The physical symptoms were gone; the damage from the chemo was gone; and the aging effects from my illness were gone. In short, I had never felt better. To this day I believe that I would have died if I hadn’t left New York City that winter.

Hiking in magical, majestic Big Sur became a yearly pilgrimage.

out of nowhere, a spiritual journey

With my health crisis behind me and elated with my new lease on life, something happened seemingly out of the blue. One moment, I was compelled to learn about physics and the cosmos, consuming issues of Scientific American and Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. And the next, I was enraptured with Zen Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and metaphysics. Southern California is also a mecca for spiritual discovery. Over the next two years, I explored a number of spiritual, traditional, and nontraditional perspectives, and came away from the experience formalizing my philosophy on life. I was in a good place, but there was more healing to come.

A time to understand the reasons for my longstanding sadness.

a time to look at things

I never stopped researching health topics once I recovered from cancer. I wanted to understand for myself, What must we do to be healthy? I was writing The Simple Seven when suddenly an outpouring of painful emotions began. Slowly, I pieced together a methodology to help. This became The Method. In subsequent years I would undergo an intensive healing period. The emotional pain that was buried in my unconscious mind would surface in explosive bits and pieces in a grueling process that became a way of life. The pain was also physical; it could bring me to my knees. I wasn’t sure whether I would make it or if I wanted to. I was having suicidal thoughts again. But in time, I would begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel and believed that someday I would come out the other side, free.

In addition to my healing practice, my interests in music, dance, **writing**, and art are coming together in alternative rock music.

Time to rock ‘N’ roll

In retrospect, I’ve thought of this part of my journey as a long and winding way of stripping away the “old me” to reveal the “true me,” a gift. Perhaps the best gift of all was a cosmic wink that came one day in a flash of understanding, foretelling something unexpected. Something that would surprise and shock even myself: a newfound interest in rock music. I was shocked and surprised. But it isn’t incongruous with my journey. To me, the essence of rock ‘n’ roll is freedom, and my journey has been about liberation from stagnation, illness, and emotional suffering. I believe that everything serves a purpose, including, however unlikely, rock ‘n’ roll. I’m not sure what lies ahead. I’ll continue to go with the flow. And so the journey continues.