After graduation, I moved to Boston and being the rare commodity I was as a woman architect meant I had my pick of jobs. The firm I worked with last specialized in hospital architecture and my first assignment was to design an Intensive Care Unit at Mass General Hospital. My initial design meeting was with the head of facility improvements and the head surgeon only. Being all of 24 years old and idealistic, I insisted that other user groups such as janitors and nurses be included in the design process. This did not go over well with the surgeon who tried to have me fired from the job. My firm backed me up and the design ended up receiving awards in large part due to the additional input from all users of the space, not simply those with the most power in the hospital.

Yet, coming home to my personal power began in earnest at 25 years old. I was diagnosed with four chronic conditions (including infertility) after many emergency room and specialist visits. The irony was not lost on me how I was a designer for some of the world’s best medical experts, yet all these experts could offer me was “to make peace with living with my chronic conditions”.

So I turned to older systems of healing instead for supporting my body’s healing vs “learning to live with it”. This was my trial by fire to trust myself enough to create something  better for myself, my life, my health. Few along the way were encouraging, but hours spend in nature as a child taught me to trust what I felt within myself as true and I kept up with my quest for better health. I learned how critical it is to make different choices for creating what we want, how what challenges us invites us into claiming more power for living true to ourselves and our dreams in life. Flash forward, I have 3 children, no chronic conditions,  and I am blessed to need no daily medications.

I married the college sweetheart and moved into a spiritual community living in double-deckers in Boston. We soon moved to the burbs and the community began to experiment with less hierarchal governing through day-long planning meetings. While this worked for people without children and most fathers, it left out the mothers due to lack of childcare. Mothers who often were the experts on the state of affairs within the community as many were home during the day with young children. This inequity motivated me to set up childcare at the hotel so mothers could contribute valuable input for the community’s decisions.

I realized that the community was no longer a place I could serve as it held fast to behaviors I could not align with. I signed up for a course on negotiation and mediation at Harvard University and found I not only enjoyed it but had a gift for“getting to yes”. I was offered an internship in a mediation firm as a pro-bono mediator in the Boston Courts. My first case involved the main Boston newspaper and a sole individual who were in conflict about telemarketing which would not cease and desist. My supervisor advised me not to aim for an agreement he thought would be elusive as the newspaper had so many lawyers involved, but to practice the skill sets I had been taught in the mediation program.

Three lawyers were present representing the newspaper and the defendant had no lawyer. I asked the lawyers to wait in another room so I could speak privately with the person who had filed the suit. I asked him what would satisfy his desired outcome and his response was that all he wanted was to have the incessant telemarketing stop. It was a simple request and he offered a simple solution-to be given the cell number of 2 people in the Boston Globe organization who had the power to stop the marketing calls to his home. 

Once I got the lawyers to understand it really was a simply as having someone at the newspaper’s management be accountable, they fell over themselves getting this set up and giving the plaintiff the phone numbers. He walked out happy, the paper’s lawyers walked out happy, and my supervisor was stunned I had crafted an agreement. What this taught me I’ve engaged in my work with people ever since; that people want to be heard, that what they are struggling with has merit, and that a human willing to be responsive on the other side of a problem is worth it’s weight in gold.

A few years later, my then husband and our divergence of values came to a head in his hiding marital assets with help from his father and people in the community and then filing for divorce. I had 3 children counting on me and needed to figure out how to heal from the divorce and pay the bills. I heard a voice within me say “time to show what the wisdom and spiritual teachings you’ve learned the past 25 years are made of!”. 

So I set my alarm for 3:30 am, got my favorite warm blanket, and chose a place on my living room floor to start my day. I committed to a year of giving the first 10% of my day to prayer, meditation, and journaling for calling on my spirit and soul as my partner for keeping a home for my family and supporting my children through the changes and challenges of divorce. I created an altar on which I placed my bills as well as any money I made for a time of 24 hours, to make concrete that I was trusting my partnership with spirit and soul. Soon, problems seemed to solve themselves, dollars stretched in ways miraculous, and my children emerged as adults happy in their life. Now I teach and support others to learn to trust their power and presence to meet their challenges and to create the changes needed for what they seek in life or love.