About Me ~ Bio
WHO AM I? I feel like a cat who has lived nine lives. When people look at my life’s journey and my professional resume, they don’t always believe I am not embellishing the facts….but truly I am not.
I was born and raised in Windsor, Connecticut, although I currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have spent over thirty years working full-time in the corporate insurance industry, but my personal passions outlined on this website, which I have pursued prior to this point on a part-time basis, are what feed my soul.
I became interested in the performing arts at the age of 16 when I witnessed my first Broadway show. For the next 15 years I performed on stage with a variety of community and regional theater companies. In 1992 my interest in the craft took a more serious turn and I studied with some of the best teachers in Manhattan. I pursued a full-time professional acting career in New York for two years until the untimely events of my second marriage brought that career to a screeching halt. In 2005 my passion for this art form was re-ignited through my participation in a documentary film that I was asked to be part of.
At the age of 28 I experienced a “spiritual awakening”. As a result of that awakening, combined with an extremely painful loss shortly thereafter, I was catapulted into an intense spiritual journey for the next 10 years of my life. During this time I studied with a variety of spiritual teachers, however there was one in particular that not only changed my life as a whole, but who also encouraged me to teach others everything he had taught me about spiritual growth and more importantly, self-empowerment. His last words to me were “Go forth into the world and teach it as if it were your own. So be it.”….And so I have.
I was not totally comfortable teaching others without any formal credentials or training so that is when I began my academic journey to obtain my BS in Spiritual Psychology from the University Of Massachusetts. In addition, in the year 2000 I was ordained as a minister and certified as a pastoral counselor at the D’hartma Center For Life Mastery Church in Torrington, Connecticut. Several years later I opened a small church of my own and re-invented myself as an interfaith minister in service to mankind. The First Church Of Diversity & Empowerment was created to help others to re-think traditional religion and all of its dogmatic limitations to a more global approach to spiritual understanding.
Unity In Diversity
For a variety of personal reasons I closed the church and relocated from the east coast to the west in 2004 and currently reside in northern California with the intention of migrating to southern California sometime during 2010. I am a single parent of a 14-year old daughter who currently attends Ygnacio Valley High School, and I also have a 27-year old son who resides in Washington D.C.
WELCOME TO MY SITE!
Namaste…………….. Reverend Mary
