I had an intense flash when I was about six years old. The image that came was of some kind of a house where I would have a whole group of foreign children in it. It never felt like they would be my children. It seemed as though I would be a caretaker of some sort. It's an image that I had quite young.

As far as parenting is concerned, I've always been good at it. I work well with children. I was successful working at Stanford Children's Hospital. But I've never really had a sense that I needed to have children of my own. In fact, those many years that I was at the Children's Hospital at Stanford were rewarding, joyful years, just being connected with children, and playing with children, and working in rehabilitation with children. It was delightful. But there was never a sense that I needed to have a child myself. It wasn't until I was forty, when the biological time clock went off, that all of a sudden I started thinking about this. I was between jobs, living up in the mountains in Lake Tahoe, and I was wondering how I could afford to have a child and family. I was with a person who was willing to parent a child, it would have been a co-parenting type of thing. It was an ideal situation.

But at that particular time came a very severe event in my life. My brother and his wife were swept out to sea. We never found their bodies. And two weeks or three weeks later, I had cancer and I had to have a hysterectomy. When the doctor told me I had cancer, the very first feeling that I had besides fear was relief. The issue was settled. I felt like I had been going against my own path by attempting or thinking of having a child. It wasn't really on my path. But everyone else was talking of it at the time, so that is why I was talking about it. Some women have this heartfelt knowing that that is what they are going to do. And that's never been mine at all. Most of all my parenting skills of taking care, nurturing, have always gone into other people, as an occupational therapist, as a teacher, and as a psychotherapist. Plus going to other countries and doing the same thing, like working with the Cambodian refugees in Thailand. And I also went to Russia just recently to birth the bilateral peace exchange. The U.S. had just bombed Libya and Chernobyl went off when we were there. Despite that, there was a whole birthing of the movement of initiating the bilateral peace exchange with the Soviets. The program was actually initiated by the Soviets, and paid for and hosted by the Soviets while we were in the Soviet Union. We were 9 Americans, and five months later we took care of 9 Soviets over here. The next year was when the Soviet's Visit Middle America program got started. They sent over 400 people to the U.S. this year. So for me there's been a lot of birthing, not only psychologically, but on a national level. Birthing the people of other nations, of other cultures.

My path is working with something much larger than a family. It's with the bigger family. In fact, I would say that my own personal family is not really coherent as a family. All I have left is my sister and her four children that act like a little unit unto themselves, and I've been the aunt that comes in and out once in a while on holidays. Since my mother's death four years ago, this has changed somewhat. I call my biological family my relatives, but my family of friends is really what my true family is, where there is constant in-depth personal contact. It's been said that one's real family is very seldom one's biological family. I didn't grow up in a large family, I never knew any grandparents, and there were seldom aunts and uncles or friends around, so there wasn't an extended family at all. It was isolating, and I really didn't have a sense of family until I got older. A sense of family started emerging with close friends, people I could laugh and cry with, and they could do the same with me. Those friends are still my close friends, from 25, 30 years ago.

I was thinking about what I parent, and realized more than anything else that I parent the collective unconscious. I'm really a right-brain person. Even though I have a Ph.D., I was very much a mystical child. I feel comfortable in the inner world of the unconscious, with all of its mysterious ways. I bring the unconscious into consciousness in my own work, and with others through the creative unconscious by way of drawing, storytelling, symbolism and imagery. I feel comfortable with people's process, and I feel comfortable with my own process. That's probably what I parent more that anything else. Frances Vaughn was the first person that really helped me get in touch with the unconscious through the imagery work she was researching when we were both in the same Masters program at Sonoma State University. So from then on I was on an inward journey, learning how to express myself in the outer world. I saw that my Ph.D. in psychology was a bridge between the traditional and the untraditional. My dissertation was on the journey into Self, a woman's journey seen from a Jungian perspective.

I think if I do any kind of parenting, it's letting people know that the unconscious is a friendly teacher. Along with consciousness, it is an important aspect in our lives. It's a very much needed balance for health and well-being. I was a "psychologist" on a medical team working with the Cambodian refugees at Camp Khao I Dong on the Thai border. We had the family medicine ward. I worked with the creative unconscious and have many of the adult's and children's drawings. The art was a common language that all people could speak, especially because we didn't have a verbal language in common. Self-expression through their art, dance and music was very cathartic. It was just wonderful. I was facilitating a rebirth for these people who had gone through a tragic kind of death, the death of their culture, their village, their land and their families. There are some very profound stories in all of that. Actually, I wrote an article about that experience for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology , and I have all the drawings. Someday I will find someone who can use them.

In my own life, in order to develop a balance between the conscious and the unconscious, I was led through the dark night of the soul. I had to dip deep into the unconscious to strengthen my spiritual side and transform my personality in a profound way. I had to learn to reparent myself. This is an ongoing process. I get a rest and then, oops! there's another piece for me to look at and integrate.

Currently I am gaining insights into how the original wound with mother is a direct relationship to adult disease. Let's say your mother made you feel diminished. I'm finding that people turn that diminishment in on themselves, which directly affects their immune system. With a diminished immune system, a disease like cancer or AIDS can develop.

I have an auto-immune disease from being radiated from Chernobyl while I was in the Soviet Union. My experience of my relationship with my mother was that she verbally attacked me at inconsistent times. Out of the blue, she would scream at me for no apparent reason. I turned this within myself, and now at 49, almost 50, I realize I have been attacking myself. My immune system is attacking myself. The healing is actually going back and healing the wound with mother, and not necessarily doing all the things one does to heal auto-immune disease. So that's another piece of the parenting, or reparenting that I've been working on with myself and with my clients. Facilitating unconscious healing through deep meditation, imagery, drawing, dialoguing, fasting, music and sleep deprivation are wonderful ways of letting the unconscious speak.

Many of us who have chosen not to have children and who are parenting or reparenting ourselves are thought of as being selfish, with so much focus on ourselves. But reparenting one's self is really a gift to the world. Chilton Pearce said that 95% of learning is modeling. 5% of learning is cognitive. If one person models reparenting themselves in a loving way, that opens it up for me and for everyone else to do. I think that's a major gift that we have to give the world. I know some of my clients feel selfish because they work on themselves so much. One of the ways I respond to them is through the concept of "morphogenetics," the concept of how you really leave an energetic imprint and impression even though you are not aware of it, and how that forcefield helps other people. It's like leapfrog. My parents only went so far in this growing and development. And I'll go so far, and the people behind me will jump over me and go further, so it's like each one of us is just a piece in the whole pie. Many of the ideas that we are thinking of right now are all going to be obsolete 5 years from now because they will be springboards for new ideas.

My mother used to accuse me of being selfish. According to her, I didn't have any commitments because I didn't have any children. This felt like a powerful knife in my gut but I learned not to talk back to her. She was saying that she could not relate to me, that I was not included in the family and I was selfish because I didn't have children. It was another way of excluding me. She never approved of my psychology or art work. After a while, it didn't matter because I wasn't looking for her approval any more. I guess her identity has been more with the children. So as long as I was matching that, she thought I was fine. There has been a subtle family code of ethics where everyone has children and thus can talk to each other. If you don't, you are an outcast - breaking the family code. What I don't have in common with my sister and her 4 children are children. Thus a certain bonding is lacking and there is a certain distancing. It's like they don't know what to talk to me about and seem to forget that I am a human being, too, who also has something to contribute to the world. They distance me like my mother distanced me because I don't have children. It is painful but also fascinating to see how psychological thought forms and patterns get carried down generationally. Part of my salvation which kept my self- esteem intact was to go into my unconscious, into my inner world, my world of spirit art, creativity...places where my mother couldn't control me.
Sometimes the obstacles in our lives are just the things we need to point us in our true direction. I wouldn't want them again, but they have definitely been gifts. My relationship with my mother and this auto-immune disease have been gifts. I always have faith that I am going somewhere. And a faith that it is going to be right, a faith that it is going to be for whatever is needed on the planet. So much is needed right now that I can become overwhelmed and have no idea which way to go. When Dominie asked me to go to Cambodia I said, "Okay." I knew that was a direction. And when I was asked to go on the bilateral peace exchange to the Soviet Union I said,"Yes." And I will say yes to whatever the next direction is because I have no idea how life wants to direct me. But I'm willing to go. I call these directions "my assignments" and liken the process to the TV show Mission Impossible. When he got his assignment, he had the option to say yes or no. If he said yes to the assignment, he always had helpers coming out of unknown places to help him complete that assignment. That's how I see life. Life has assignments. My assignment right now is to be a psychotherapist and to heal my body. And it will shift. It's okay. I'm being parented by something greater than me. I trust it, and it is friendly. It certainly expands and grows me a lot.

I have a strong feeling, not an emotional feeling, but a very deep, deep sense inside that life is always moving us toward more wholeness. As long as I say yes to life, I will be guided wherever I need to go in the inner or outer world. I find peace in following whatever I need to do while I am here on the planet.

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