As a physician and intuitive, I combine spiritual awareness and intuition with mainstream medicine, a mix still considered heresy by many statistics-equals-reality oriented physicians. What I do isn’t my job. It’s my life’s passion. With patients and in my workshops, I listen with my intellect and my intuition, a potent inner wisdom that goes beyond the literal, the rational. I believe intuition comes from a limitless spiritual source that we can all contact. I experience it as a flash of insight, a gut feeling, a hunch, a dream. By blending intuition and spirituality, with orthodox medical knowledge I can offer my patients the best of both worlds.

Now, in my life, listening to intuition is holy to me, but learning to trust it has been a long journey. I grew up in Beverly Hills the only daughter of two-physician parents with twenty-five physicians in my family. From age nine, I had dreams and intuitions that would come true. I could predicts illness, earthquakes, even the suicide of one of my parent’s friends. This confused and alarmed me, as it did my parents who were entrenched in the hard-core rational world of science. We had no idea that intuition was a gift, that it came from my early, natural spiritual connection. At first they tried to write my intuitions off as coincidence. Finally, though, after I dreamed my mother’s mentor would loose an election for judgeship--which to my horror, came true--she took me aside and told me, “Never mention another dream or intuition in our house again!” I’ll never forget the look in my dear mother’s exasperated, frightened eyes, nothing I ever wanted to see again. So from that day on, I kept my intuitions to myself. I grew up ashamed of my abilities, sure there was something wrong with me.

Luckily, I’ve had many angels in human form who’ve pointed me to my true calling as physician. In the Sixties I got heavily involved with drugs in an attempt to block my intuitions out. Following a nearly fatal car accident at age sixteen when I tumbled over a treacherous 1500 foot cliff in Malibu Canyon, my parents forced me to see a psychiatrist. This man was the first person who ever “saw” me--not who he wanted me to be, but who I was, the magic that therapy can be. He taught me to begin to value the gift of intuition, and referred me to Dr. Thelma Moss, a intuition researcher at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. She was to become my mentor and guide to developing my intuitive side.

While working in Thelma’s lab I had an amazingly specific dream which announced, “You’re going to become an MD, a psychiatrist, to help legitimize intuition in medicine.” When I awoke, I felt like someone was playing a practical joke on me. I’d never liked science, and I was bored around all my parent’s doctor-friends. I was a hippie living in an old converted brick Laundromat with my artist-boyfriend in Venice Beach, working in the May Company’s towel department. (I’ve had a great love of towels and sheets since!) The last thing I envisioned doing was medicine. But because I was beginning to trust my intuition from working with Thelma, I enrolled in a junior college just to see how it would go. So one course became two, became fourteen years of medical training--USC medical school and a UCLA psychiatric internship and residency.

The irony was, that during my medical training I strayed far from the intuitive and spiritual world again. Traditional psychiatry equates visions or even an extra-assertive inner voice with psychosis. Working in the UCLA emergency room, I’d keep seeing psychotics who were wheeled in screaming, strapped to gurneys, accompanied by cops with billy clubs. These patients professed to hear God and to be able predict things. They also felt their food was poisoned, and that the FBI was on their tail. A mishmash of claims no one even tried to sort through. Typically, these patients would be medicated with Thorazine, hospitalized on lock-down inpatient units until their “symptoms” subsided. Seeing this so many times I doubted whether it was safe or appropriate to integrate my intuitions in medicine.