Spiritual Life Review, Part #1

Hello friends of my blog,

As a Unitarian Universalist Seminary student hoping to go into ministry, I am in the process of writing several versions of my “Life Story”. Each of these LIFE STORIES serves a specific purpose but should be in alignment:

1. Marylhurst University M.Div cohort course: Pastoral and Spiritual Identity: In our final class, we shared our life stories aloud from the Third person perspective, in seven minutes or less. My Heroine's story is entitled “No Longer a Stranger in a Strange Land”.
2. Also for Pastoral and Spiritual Identity, our final assignment is a 20 page reflection paper telling our life story, with discernment about our formation in the Myers-Briggs Personality TYPE as well our Enneagram Type.
3. Marylhurst University M.Div cohort course: Pastoral and Spiritual Frameworks. This course requires a 20-page reflection paper about our theological frame.
4. For application to the Unitarian Universalist Association's Ministerial Fellowship Committee considered as an Aspirant for Unitarian Universalist ministry, I must also write a life story.

As a result, I am reviewing my life story, with particular attention to my many spiritual, nominal, awakening experiences.

This week, the particular experience that keeps coming back to me is the seven years that I spent at the Academy for Psychic Studies / Spiritual Rights Foundation in Berkeley from 1984 until I left on January 13, 1991. I first encountered this SRF while attending a course at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California on Mysticism. I didn't actually encounter SRF at JFKU, but the course in Mysticism whetted my longing, my yearning, and my intense desire to "find my teacher".

This course had a recurring theme that: "when the student is ready the teacher will appear". While I was participating in this course, I responded to an advertisement in the Berkeley, California free newspaper (Eugene, Oregon's equivalent of the Eugene Weekly) for a free psychic reading. I was preparing to change jobs after five years and hope for a FREE inspirational opportunity.

What I got was not at all what I expected! The three individuals who "read" my "energy" in a "psychic reading" repeatedly told me that the "pictures" in my "aura" suggested that I was a healer and should learn concrete techniques for using this ability to "heal" others.

Wow, that blew me away... and so they began the process of reeling me and recruiting me to become a first a beginning student, then a student in the clairvoyant training program, then ordained and on to take minister's classes interpreting the the Gospels, one book at a time.

I thought I was going to learn to help others. What I learned instead was how to give the Founder and his two wives all my money.

One of the key ingredients for me in healing from this experience (21 years after the fact) is a blog by Mike, another former SRF student, who came after I left. Mike's blog with comments from other SRF and Berkeley Psychic Institute survivors  has revealed to me that the entire experience was a mind-poisoning brain-washing exercise in following the teachings of L.Ron Hubbard, of Scientology fame. 

I have been searching for a long time. And hopefully now, I've found the right path for me. More to come.