My earliest memory of symbols goes way back to when I was under 5 y.o. My grandmother, a spiritualist minister and astrologer, was visiting. I am told that while my parents could barely contain my ball of energizer bunny constant momentum they found me mesmerized by the cover page of one of my grandmother's astrology magazines sitting there with my finger tracing and retracing the planetary and zodiac sign symbols, lost in my own world. As a psychotherapist, a gift I have been blessed with is to remember things most people may not - like other people's dreams or information from long, long ago. Case in point, a client I had previously worked with who left therapy, moving to another state, and getting married returned to NYC on business and came in for a check-up session. As she was talking, I said to her, "Oh, what you are saying reminds me of the dream you told me about (10 year ago) of the one-eyed fish with you looking down on it from a house built on stilts." Both of us looked at each other in amazement. How did I remember? There was no accounting for it and to this day I remain amazed when a sudden recall of such information floods forth! A voracious reader, my library is filled with many book on psychology, spiritual matters, sci-fi, how-to's, biographies, health, and philosophy. I continue to study with the non-profit organization Builders of the Adytum, LLC and over the many years I have studied with them have been greatly influenced by the width and breadth of their amazing curriculum.     

One of my biggest achievements was teaching school in Harlem. I was either the 3rd or 4th teacher hired to teach an unruly 8th grade class beginning Oct. 1. The other teachers had left wanting nothing more to do with teaching this class. Would I last? There where moments when I though I should leave, too, but I stayed. I cannot say what it was about these students that so touched and matured my heart and me in ways it had never been touched before. At the end of the year, each student wrote me a good-bye letter saying I was their best friend, they would never forget me, and that I had given them a wonderful year of learning. What did I teach? The usual subjects. But I also introduced them to inspirational quotes and classroom visits by positive role models in their culture and community. Together, every morning, we journaled about how living the principles embedded in the quotes could help make them and me ordinary human beings living extraordinarily! Each and every one of these students still lives in my heart and mind some thirty years later.