When I was a child, I was raised in the Greek Orthodox faith, but truthfully speaking, what I heard in church and what I experienced all around me when I was in church, Greek school, or Sunday school, felt very “off” to me somehow. Even though I was very little, I had a highly attuned radar as to what felt true to me, and what felt wrong and hurtful. And the experiences I had in church and how I saw people behave to each other didn’t fill me or connect  me with love and inspiration – quite the opposite.

As I matured, I started developing my own ideas about how a loving “God” would speak and behave – and it was clear that my own definition was very different from the dogma I had been taught and the rigid beliefs I was exposed to. Very different indeed.

I didn’t know how to process those differences, and I thought to myself “who am I to think I know what a loving God would do and say?” so I swept the idea of having a spiritual life under the carpet for many years. I just couldn’t reconcile my own heart’s longings for more love, compassion, connection, forgiveness and inclusiveness in the world, with everything I was seeing around me that was being touted as religion.

I even had the amazing experience of singing for a year in NYC’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral choir, as a non-Catholic. While I’m grateful for the experience, I saw once again first-hand how exclusionary and prejudicial organized religion can be. I remember one  woman in the choir leaning over to me and whispering in a critical tone “We don’t cross ourselves like that here,” referring to my Greek Orthodox way of doing the sign of the cross. Even in my 20’s I knew that a truly loving God wouldn’t care at all how you cross yourself.

Then something happened that altered my life and thinking dramatically. I was ejected from my corporate life at age 41 (laid off in a brutal way that crushed me, in the days following 9/11), and like so many of us who had a huge wakeup call after the tragedies of 9/11, something cracked open in me that couldn’t be ignored. I suddenly and desperately wanted to connect from a spiritual place with others, and to build more of a spiritual life that felt right to me. And suddenly I was committed to do it.

But I faltered in that process as well, trying on different paths that still left me feeling either hurt or disillusioned, or that I had not quite yet found my spiritual truth or “home.” So I kept exploring, researching and trying on new and older spiritual teachings and practices, to see if they felt right, good, loving and life-affirming to me personally.

During my time of professional transformation when I left corporate life and was studying to be a marriage and family therapist and coach, my heart and spirit opened wider than ever before, working with people who had been through so much trauma, pain, abuse and cruelty in their lives. I worked one weekend with first responders who’d had served in 9/11 and witnessed the unspeakable and were struggling in themselves and their relationships to process the trauma, and I felt more love, admiration and compassion for others than I’d literally ever experienced in my entire life. I still cry when I think of it. Something shifted, and I started relating to people differently – from a deep love in my heart and soul, not from my head.

Then I found the books of Neale Donald Walsch – Conversations with God – and said, “Yes! Finally! These are messages that I can wrap my heart and soul around. These are messages that for me, help me see a true loving force in the world, not the common messages of exclusion, punishment, hatred, and self-rejection that we so often hear in the name of “religion.”

My eyes were opened to the fact that millions of others in the world were going through their own spiritual exploration and were pursuing their own efforts to develop an authentic spiritual life that may or may not align with the religious teachings we’re exposed to daily.

A next step in my professional training included studying REIKI and other forms of energy healing, which I truly adored. These studies brought me even closer to feeling the experiences of others, connecting deeply with them. Studying energy healing unlocked in me so many ways to feel (in my body and in my emotional and energetic field) what another person is experiencing without the use of words. These approaches and tools are with me today and I use every one of them in career/executive/leadership coaching, training, my writing on Forbes, Thrive Global, and LinkedIn, in my media work and speaking engagements today.

About 8 years ago, I was drawn to take a class with Trudy Griswold, a bestselling author of the book Angelspeake about how to connect with your angels, and I found my work with Trudy another amazing and eye-opening experience. I began writing to my angels, and receiving incredible, uplifting messages of love, wisdom and guidance that offered insights that I felt were not coming “from me” but were emanating from a higher level of support.

Then, in 2016, my connection with angels evolved into a deeper practice and experience. In December of 2016, I learned of Lorna Byrne through the work of Mike Dooley (whom I truly admire and enjoy). From the minute I watched Lorna’s videos, I felt a deep urge and calling from way deep inside me to learn more about her and her work and experiences with the angels. That Christmas week, in 2016, I spent the entire 7 days reading every one of her books and listening to the 9-hour audio version of the amazing, bestselling book Angels in My Hair, and I was thoroughly mesmerized and moved.

From that experience, I mustered the courage to reach out to Lorna to ask if I could interview her. She said Yes! and I had the immense privilege and pleasure of interviewing her via video in our Messages From the Angels webinar.

Here’s the first interview of two we did together: