What led you to Consciousness Studies? How did you find out about it?

I had been studying anthroposophy for a number of years, and had reached a place in my own work where I had reached a kind of wall where I wanted to go deeper but didn't really know how to do so. I could see that the depth was there and that I didn't have the means to get to it, so I went on a search. From the time I got in involved with anthroposophy, I have been on a quest for living anthroposophy. It started in the Waldorf movement because of my children. I got very involved in a Waldorf school in Albequerque, and then I came out here to kind of get a sense of what was behind the Waldorf education, and it was like coming home. It's a typical story that a lot of people get to tell. So I just took it up. I went to the bookstore and bought a bunch of books--I had a friend that I studied with. We actually went to a few study groups that didn't meet what we were looking for, so we became study partners. I went to a lot of conferences. I spent a lot of time coming out here for conferences, and that's where I met Dennis. Years and years and years ago I had been to three different conferences with him over a period of about ten years. In fact when I first met him I don't think that Consciousness Studies was even incarnated yet. Then I went through a series of events in my life--in my thirties I went through some textbook thirties stuff, and in my thirty-fifth year I went through a year of physical trauma. It was one thing after another after another, which culminated in cutting my fingers off. That was my initiation. It was the doorway into the depth that I was searching for. I guess that sounds kind of strange, but that's really how I see it, and if I had to choose to do it again, I would, because for who I am and my particular configuration I don't know that there was another way to learn what I needed to learn. So that happened in February, and I went through a series of reconstructive surgeries and then that August I went to the Boulder summer school where Dennis was teaching. That was my third time that I had been with Dennis, and I was primed for the world cracking open. And that's really what happened, it just cracked open and then I spent a year trying to figure out a way to make it all work for me to come out here. My intention was to come out hear for a year and then go back to New Mexico.

Was it what you expected?

I had somehow intuited a lot. I look back on it as a mystery in a lot of ways--how did I really know what I thought I knew? It certainly far surpassed my expectations, and yet there were certain elements to it that I intuited. I knew it would change my life--it did change my life, in ways that I hadn't even anticipated--certainly meeting my husband was something that I had not expected. That was the last thing that I was looking for amongst all the other things I was looking for. So that was a definite extra bonus that I got along with everything else.

Then what in Consciousness Studies was most memorable for you?

Several things came out of it for me. I think I got the tools that I was looking for. I wasn't looking for a teacher--I got the tools that I needed to continue on the journey that I had already been on. And the validation that my worldview was not crazy, that there was somebody else on the planet that I could relate to in a very deep way. It was a validation which was really important for me in order to get over a lot of childhood stuff and to really continue on the path of becoming who I was meant to be. I think the most important tool that I got out of Consciousness Studies--the most multi-purpose tool which I use the most and share the most with other people, and I use it in so many different ways and have expanded on it--is the sequencing. Sequencing and the idea of 'doing it backwards'. I had a very profound experience with that. I think it was the second week of class and I've just built on that ever since. It's really become a part of my life. Daily. Yeah, hourly. I use it a lot.

What is your work in the world, and how has Consciousness Studies affected that work?

I believe my work in the world is to work with groups of people on communication and learning to Meet one another with a capital M, and to help people access the space in between. That can only happen when two human beings come together. What Consciousness Studies did for me is to give me the alchemical pictures and vocabulary that I believe lives in me in a very very deep way, that I had no idea of before. I'm sure I had heard the world alchemy before I came here, but I didn't know anything about it, and it lives so deeply in me. That was the world I needed to connect to. The pictures and the vocabulary give me a handle on what I had already been seeing and working with.

If you had to describe Consciousness Studies briefly, what would you say?

I would say that Consciousness Studies is a program where one has the possibility to embark on a path of becoming a human being. Very simply put--that is how I explain it to myself. If I was explaining it to someone else I would certainly go a little bit further. But that is what Consciousness Studies means to me.