From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary
- My Uneasy Journey to Freedom -

I was born into an ordinary family, and my life has been filled with many ordinary experiences.  Yet, somehow the ordinary and the extraordinary have found a deep and surprising union within me.  You see, I-this contentedly ordinary, everyday person-gradually discovered that I had been chosen and destined for an outside—the-box life—one of Divine service.

I feel moved to share with you how I discovered this calling and the steps I took to identify with it.  Through many years of gradual awakening, my purpose expanded, my identity enlarged, and my gifts magnified-from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

I started my life as an extremely sensitive person.  I was born energetically fine-tuned and emotionally sensitized. Yet, I was not aware of the mystical or powerful aspects of this sensitivity. Instead, my total focus was simply on surviving my human experience.  I spent most of my childhood in varying degrees of shock and overwhelm, as I asked, "What is life here all about?"  And "Why am I feeling so much pain?"

The first response to these questions came when I was just 13 years old. I heard an inner voice for the first time in my life. This voice shocked me to my depths, and I was totally baffled by its message: "Bill, I want you to be my priest." The idea of becoming a Catholic priest was most strange to me (my family wasn't that religious), but I followed that calling—in fact, nothing in me would allow me to escape it. Yet, through those years of preparation, my deep sense was "I'm just an ordinary person with an unexplainable drive to be a priest."

I served as a priest in my mid-twenties. It was then that several unexpected and unwanted spiritual gifts started expressing through me.  For example, in the middle of my carefully crafted Sunday sermons, an unexplained force often came over me, and I began speaking a much bigger, deeper truth. Some higher power had chosen me to be the vehicle, the spokesperson, the embodiment of a deeper wisdom. Rather than rejoicing over this phenomenon, however, I felt deeply disturbed by it because, after all, such things don't happen to "ordinary people."

Deep within myself I was afraid—even terrified.  All I wanted to do was run from this puzzling and increasingly demanding spiritual force. But it followed and found me wherever I ran.  In fact, its uninvited gifts entered my life more and more after I left the priesthood and became a psychologist. 

In my psychological years, for example, I noticed that my patients were getting healed and empowered a lot faster with me than with other therapists.  I simply assumed that it was maybe because I loved them a little more than the other therapists. But then gifts appeared that I could no longer explain away. I began to see people's energies, their auras and chakras. I could hear their subconscious minds and then their souls speaking to me internally. Then I noticed I could speak inaudibly to their souls. Amid it all, I saw even more healing and wholeness happening, in much bigger ways.  People were getting downright healthy, and with less and less effort.

Was I impressed? Externally, yes. Yet internally, I continued to try to hide from these gifts and their annoying spiritual source.  The result was less than satisfying-that source only shortened the leash on my attempts to remain ordinary! Indeed, the gifts kept coming—more vision, more wisdom and knowing. Now I could see within people's depths, know their truth, become one with the depths of their beings.  I realized that I was on a one-way street to not getting my way.

Finally, the command that I had unconsciously spent years avoiding spoke to me from within: I had to leave the world of psychology as I knew it, and enter the vast world of spirituality—and strong spiritual leadership.  I had no choice; the free will game was over for me; the Divine had its way. So, realizing that I had reached the corner into which I had been craftily painted all these years, I complied.

Gradually, I stopped running from my strange and unwelcome destiny.  Once I did, I experienced these gifts not just flowing through me, but somehow also living in me. They were now a part of me.  God and I had begun to merge, to become one; the Divine had now taken over my heart, my soul, my person.  So it finally happened: with a blend of relief and reluctance, I timidly but bravely embraced the source of those previously unwanted gifts-the source from which I had run so hard—the Divine Source.

What was it like for me after that?  Well, I discovered that, with this internalized state of unity with God, grace simply took over and led me by the hand to an even fuller freedom.  I had already found personal freedom in the structures of religion, and then in the mindsets of psychology. Now, I found even greater freedom in the expansiveness of spirituality, and then in the myth-rich world of philosophy.  Yes, with large doses of grace, I had lived each of these systems fully and found its promised path to freedom.

One facet of my path that you may find interesting is this: I was never allowed the nice, comfortable path of following a guru, spiritual master or teacher. For me, growth had to happen internally and seemingly "all alone." It was all about being one with the Divine—the Divine as it lived in me and moved me from within.  I had to listen carefully, to fine tune internally. I had to discover that Inner Voice and live my life totally aligned with the Truth as It lived and spoke from within my own being.

Several years ago, grace invited and allowed me to graduate from the usual human styles of growth.  I moved from my decades-long paths within the forest of life to a delightfully peaceful perch above the forest.  From this centered space amid life's proverbial storms, I am now privileged to serve our human family—with all the love, grace, gifts, power, and devotion that live within and flow through me.

Today, my message to people is simple and pure: the truth lies within. I help people discover their own truth, connect with their souls, access their wisdom, and find the power and strength of their spiritual core.   I offer myself as a model-of an ordinary person who, by saying yes to his own inner calling, has found the freedom and peace that are available to us all-and now humbly and happily serves others on their personal path to that same freedom.

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