Spirit Tapestries

The symbolism and archetypes throughout Spirit Tapestries are cross-cultural, trans-religious, and often shamanic.

Bachelors in Art/​Art History from Mills College. Peace Corps Volunteer working with weavers and spinners in the Peruvian Andes, 12,000 feet above sea level. Master of Fine Arts in Fiber Arts, University of Washington and a year-long teaching position there. A Fulbright Grant in Denmark, studying Prehistoric Danish textile techniques to use in my tapestries. Masters in Counseling Psychology University of Arizona.

A spiritual emergency while in Copenhagen led me to study yoga and meditation there, because I’d heard that through yoga one can learn all about the self.

Back in the USA, I taught fiber arts at Moore College of Art. A National Endowment for the Arts Grant awarded me the chance to study Tantric art, to delve deeper into this yoga that promises to bring a person to center of the self.

I left my college teaching position and took up the life of a monastic at an ashram in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, where I was also tapestry weaver-in-residence. We rose at four in the morning, 20 (or so) of us to meditate around the candle flame. Then hatha yoga, scripture study, Sanskrit, worship, gardening, cleaning latrines, scrubbing pots, baking bread, periods of austerities (fasting and silence), and learning to teach all that I was taught.

After a couple of years, the ashram's American guru became abusive. I was relieved when she pushed me out and on my way.

In Tucson, Arizona, I opened my own yoga and meditation center in a large adobe home on three acres in the Catalina Foothills. We had a resident great horned owl, a Siamese cat that climbed giant saguaro cactus, and a jovial black old-English Sheep dog mix. I trained several yoga teachers, held workshops, worked with medicine women, hosted trance mediums and psychics, and took visiting friends on shamanic adventures into the desert.

While running the yoga center I studied for a Masters in counseling psychology and opened a private practice. Later I completed certification in Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful technique for entering altered states of consciousness, with Stan Grof.

At the end of the 80's, needing to move on, I sold my yoga center and moved to the high desert, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and opened a counseling practice, picked up weaving again, and led women's spiritual growth workshops for artists.

In Santa Fe I met a bonafide guru, the Indian humanitarian Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi), also known as the hugging saint. I had wanted nothing more with gurus. But Ammachi embodied universal truth and love, and all the spiritual ideals I'd been seeking.

I put everything in storage and took off for Amma's ashram in India for four months. Thereafter I spent months at a time in India every year for the next ten years, including following Amma's tours through Australia and around the USA. In the midst of all the traveling, I eventually moved into Amma’s Santa Fe Center, a branch ashram in the foothills, and lived there for five years along with six to twelve other Amma devotees who came and went.

Amma's Swami who headed our ashram was transferred elsewhere and we were left with no spiritual guidance, no classes on the Hindu epics, no sense of all-is-well. A couple of years later, in 2003, feeling burned out and disenchanted with the down-sides of my USA ashram living (similar to the Pennsylvania ashram), I left the Amma Center of New Mexico and moved to Maine, near Acadia National Park--to the ocean, to moisture, and to the pleasure of meandering down wooded trails, along lake shores and streams. Here I wrote an autobiographical fiction novel of my later life, The Sophia Secrets.

I entered counseling with a psychologist of Jungian persuasion, who prefers to think of himself as an alchemist (and perhaps he is). In any case he is a perceptive, non-egoistic, gentle, no-nonsense fellow, who knows how to listen well, and has used my horoscope as his map. I did sand tray work, dream work, art therapy, and down-to-earth, practical, behavioral psychology.

From him I learned to free myself from the negative aspects of ashram living, all the ways it had replicated my negative early childhood experiences. I learned how to stop escaping through spirituality and the highs of it. How to integrate life, and all experiences, into the foundations of my spiritual path. He taught me how to how to stay inside my body, to sit and breathe into my feelings, no matter how painful or joyful, and to let all of life live inside of me and run through me like a river.

And so here I am in Maine, continuing my spiritual practices and my connection to Amma. Gratefully, I'm also weaving again, doing my counseling practice again, all in addition to writing and nature contemplation.