As a child, I felt a deep connection to nature. My family lived near a zoo, and I would hear the lions roar during the daytime and the peacocks hooting and screaming at night.

At 18, I had an awakening experience while living on the East Coast of Florida. I was walking home from the beach after a long day of body surfing. When I was about halfway home, a sudden thunderstorm came out of nowhere and opened up the sky with thunder and lightning. The lightning struck about 100 yards in front of me, and it gave me a jolt. Then suddenly I felt at one with earth, sky, storm—with everything. No separation. That was the first significant awakening experience of my life. I didn't tell anyone about it, feeling that my family and friends wouldn't understand. I also felt I couldn't adequately explain it. But that started me on my spiritual journey. I read the book Siddhartha and a few years later became a follower of Ram Dass.

In subsequent years, other awakening experiences occurred, experiences where there was no sense of a separate "me." These additional awakenings that occurred were the more common, "mundane" experience awakenings that occur for people, not an unusual lightning bolt awakening like the first one that occurred with me.

I became drawn to Eastern mystics, wanting to make sense of the awakening experiences. Beginning in my mid-thirties, I became a devotee of a South African female spiritual teacher who came to Marin County, California, to offer satsangs. Satsangs are sacred gatherings of teaching and meditation with an enlightened teacher. I had longed for an awakened female spiritual teacher, and Leslie epitomized that for me. Leslie's teachings were a mix of jnana yoga (path of knowledge), bhakti (devotional) yoga, and Vedic teachings. In the Year 2000,  I completed a teacher training with Leslie, and I traveled with Leslie in South Africa and Egypt in 2004 and 2005. While in Egypt, I was ordained by her as a Minister in the Temple of Isis in Egypt. The ordination vow I made was to serve others and all of life before myself.