Stephanie Hull
Energy Therapy Practitioner
As long as I can remember, I’ve been on a quest. You might call it the search for the meaning of life. I didn’t always know what I was looking for exactly, but still had the uncanny knack for knowing it when I saw (heard, read, felt, and, yes, smelled) it.
So it was, when I was nine or ten, I picked up the newspaper and read about Unity Consciousness in, of all places, the Jackson Twins daily comic strip. The dad had just gotten hip with long hair, side burns, bell bottoms, platform shoes, and Transcendental Meditation (TM). It struck a deep chord in me, and that tableau has remained with me ever since.
When I met my husband in college, we were sitting around a large round lunch table in the student union with a motley collection of other Anthropology students, and he began regaling the group with funny stories about his personal experiences with psychics, spiritualist healers, and flying TM-ers. We’re together still after 40 years.
Not to say I always jump in the spiritual fire with both feet (my little joke is that he will drag me kicking and screaming into enlightenment), but talking about God and consciousness is always something I did, in a lot of different ways; raised Lutheran, never agnostic, a theist certainly; I never said I was this or that, Christian or not. Labels don’t suit me much, but the voice of Love I understand…and a path of practice. So, we read and discussed many of the great Eastern texts and teachings of the Hindu and Buddhist masters, and tried to understand how to live them.
Through happenstance, we found ourselves drawn to spiritual community with the living Hindu saint Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, Amma, the “Hugging Saint” as she is called in the West. For awhile we traipsed back and forth to California twice a year to see her, occasionally traveling to other US cities she visited, and made several trips to her home ashram in India. It was an intense, grace filled time that opened all kinds of inner doors.
It has been our great fortune to see several renowned spiritual teachers in person including Amma, Dr. David Hawkins, Byron Katie, and Bernadette Roberts. In hindsight, it just wasn’t that surprising when we took another sudden left turn. Inspired by Bernadette’s journey and her remarkable books, we took her workshop twice in LA, and her writings continue to inspire awe and contemplation. Now, here we are knee deep in classical Christian Mysticism, re-exploring faith from a new ground.
After so many profound experiences, it seems to me that most of our doors are closed by fears we can’t face, or beliefs we are afraid to challenge, bits of identity that define us and keep us separated from our deeper humanity. Yet, that inner fire, as small and weak as it was, propelled me on. Why not, it said. What is the Truth here? What do you have to lose?
Big question…Answer? Everything!
During that time, my mother died, my faith was challenged to its depth, my body and spirit broke down, self-loathing loomed, but there was always a light on Truth… a book someone recommended… a new personal process that changed your thinking… a workshop that wakes you up…healing for body and soul. Not the whole answer, but a direction, a path of practice.
It was a connection to Amma that brought us into energy healing. Eight years in Bozeman and we never met anyone who knew Amma until we met Bear McKay, founder of the The McKay Method® School Energy Healing.
Energy healing? It seemed like a good idea at the time…Why not.
To me it was about personal growth, and a spiritual experience, like all the things we’d done. It was clear, all healing comes from within, reconnecting with our Source, our relationship to wholeness, the Divine. It is only through the growth and expression of our being that we move in directions of wellness. And I want That, for myself and others.
Hearing about our life with its unexpected twists and turns, a friend once described it as a subtractive journey, and I have to agree, it has been about letting go and living with less…less beliefs, less rules, less fear, less judgment. Yet, what remains, That, is infinitely more…more kind, more abundant, more life giving, more satisfying, more graceful. And That is what we want to be.