I make no secret that, at the fairly young age of 27, I completely lost control of my life and witnessed helplessly as my body gradually stopped functioning. By the time I turned 28, I could no longer process most foods, suffered regular bouts of surprise “fainting spells” and in the words of a doctor in London “had the vital signs of an ill 80 year old”. I was constantly out of breath and without much immune resistance. I would find my face completely distorted from one day to the next without being able to identify what would trigger the changes. After eating certain foods, my face would suddenly become wrinkled as if I had aged 30 years within a few minutes. It would be hard to believe if I didn’t have witnesses who can account that these are no exaggerations.  At 29, I also lost my voice, not completely, just enough to become unable to pursue my career as an actress. Adding insult to injury, these were just the years when I had finally started to get career “breaks”, after signing with The William Morris Agency at age 26. Now I was “failing” publicly, at least in my professional world.
 
First I became hard to film because of the unpredictable distortions of my face. Photo sessions became equally unmanageable. I was terrorized to commit to a job because I couldn’t control the “transformations” affecting both my face and my voice. Then I became impossible to hear on stage, or unable to gather the vitality needed to even be on stage. I felt like I had lost all creativity anyway, always concerned about my body’s potential surprised manifestations. I turned to dubbing, where I thought I could somewhat be saved by the use of a microphone. But even there, I quickly became the nightmare of sound technicians. I remember one painful occurrence in particular: I was dubbing Courtney Cox in a movie where she played a blind character. In a scene, she was being attacked and screamed to save her life. So did I, mouth glued to the microphone. When the sound tech played the track back, it sounded like I had been recorded 100 yards away from the mike. It was shocking. It took many, many, takes to get a decent one, to my utter despair and public embarrassment. This nightmare went on for years. Years made of long days, weeks & months…

What event(s) got me to that stage – no pun intended – is irrelevant. We all have our stories and traumas. We are all instruments in each other’s lives for fate or destiny to unfold. Suffice to say that an emotional shock due to a loss was the trigger for the accumulation of all the other shocks and disappointments I had been unconsciously holding within since childhood to make me crumble. It was “the straw that broke (this) camel’s back”.

Sounds familiar? I am not the only one with such an experience.

I began an extensive search for answers in all areas possible. While I was still traveling for my career I became acquainted with various spiritual traditions, in Australia, Thailand, England, France, with Native Americans in the US. I searched everywhere, from the esoteric world – I was a student-member of the College of Psychic Studies of London for a while – to the mystical, the religious, the holistic, you name it. I tried a Japanese form of Buddhism, I tried “yoga”. Each time I would get a temporary relief but nothing definite and my hopes were crushed when I would wake up several days in a row “looking like Quasimodo (2)”.

I finally met with Kundalini Yoga after a chance encounter with its healing branch, Sat Nam Rasayan®, while on a visit back home to California. I had not been able to sleep for several weeks. A friend (3) recommended a healing session and I went to a class as the healing teacher’s “guinea pig”.
It was instant recognition. I felt like I could breathe fully for the first time in many years. Something in me recognized the “space” created by the healer (4) and it felt like the promise of being eventually reconnected with a long lost part of myself. Within weeks I attended an intensive with the Master (5) of this healing discipline, who was in Italy.

Back in California shortly thereafter, I was dragged to a Kundalini Yoga class “given by the Master Yogi Bhajan”. I was dubious. This yoga turned out to be interesting though, different from what I had ever tried. I don’t remember much of the lecture. Just being struck by Yogi Bhajan’s presence. After class my friend proceeded to introduce me to this intimidating and imposing man. Out of the blue, she said I was her friend and “a great healer”, to my complete surprise. He scanned me up and down & to my even greater surprise replied: “it appears to be true”. With his words began an incredible journey of learning, discipline, self-re-discovery and ultimately salvation and second chances, under the tutelage of the master himself. It was not easy every day, but well worth it.

I focused on studying and practicing as a healer, getting steadily better myself. Soon I was even well enough to appear in a few stage productions again and to begin to reconnect with the acting world. I had every intention of resuming an acting career eventually and no desire to teach yoga whatsoever. To deepen my own healing and my practice as a professionally certified healer, I continued to study Kundalini Yoga, which would in turn bring more clarity to the “why”s and “how”s of my own story. When Yogi Bhajan died I sensed I had to find another way to keep learning and enrolled in Kundalini Yoga Teachers Training. With time and before I knew it, I had completed all of Teachers Training levels and more. Every program that had been made available I had done.

Then a couple of events happened in my life that made me realize how completely recovered I was and how far I had come… Fast forward to today: I can swiftly climb my friend Chantal’s 5 flights of stairs carrying 2 heavy suitcases, when she remembers my having to stop on each floor for several minutes to recover my breath, carrying no extra weight. I am never told I cannot be heard anymore, even when I give a class to 60 people in a ballroom (which happened recently: I hadn’t even thought of requesting a microphone, to the surprise of the organizers). People peg me for way younger than I am. Doctors now say I have the vital signs of a much younger woman. That’s true sweet victory over these many years of nightmare. I am deeply grateful, and loyal, to the technology that got me to this point, and to the Teacher who dedicated his entire life to teach it in the open. Sat Nam.