I was raised in an aggressively non-spiritual family. The only practice that was encouraged was developing a keen sense of humor. Which is nothing to sneeze at. But it isn't the whole nose. (I'm not sure that metaphor works.)

Stalwartly plugging away through school, and then the early efforts of a career as a performer in New York, I didn't realize I was missing anything until my Manhattan life took a nose-dive. Within a period of a few weeks, my first "real" love affair tanked ignominiously, I was fired from a job I liked a lot, and the flare-up of a childhood illness landed me in the hospital.

Now that the life I had constructed was razed to the ground, it occurred to me I might want to rebuild on a different foundation. (That metaphor worked better than the "nose" thing, right?) I inhaled Out on a Limb, which Shirley MacLaine had just released; that was the beginning of a spiritual chain-reaction that included psychic healers, clairvoyants, channelers, Tibetan spirituality, metaphysical workshops and, ultimately, A Course in Miracles. I loved the fact that there was no "leader" of the Course; it was a self-study program without human agendas. Paradoxically, I learned so much from studying it with Marianne Williamson.

I became a Reiki practitioner, a minister with Universal Life Church (well before it became a "thing to do" on the Internet), and began giving nondenominational spiritual lectures. My first lecture series was called "Living Free of Debt: Getting Out of Spiritual, Emotional and Financial Impoverishment." (Would it be glib of me to say that I stopped doing that series because it didn't make any money?) Subsequently I began the talks called "Spirituality without Religion," and continue those today on a weekly basis in Ventura, California.