Michael’s Spiritual Autobiography

I come from a deeply religious background, though I’ve long felt that religion and spirituality are not the same thing. They can overlap, and sometimes do—but they are not identical. In my own life, that distinction has become essential.

As I’ve researched my family history, I’ve discovered that I come from a lineage rich in religious devotion. At last count, I have seven or eight Catholic nuns in my family tree. Most of these women lived within the last hundred years. I knew a few of them personally, while others I’ve come to know through my genealogical research. One of them, however, is my own biological mother.

As a young woman, my mother had profound spiritual experiences. At eighteen, she entered a convent and spent the next eight years in religious service. In her own words, she eventually left because she did not find the convent to be a genuinely spiritual place. It felt to her like a system of rules and hierarchy, populated by people carrying a great deal of unresolved pain. She was searching for something more real—more alive.

That search shaped her life, and it shaped mine.

After leaving the convent, she met my father. We attended a Baptist church during my early childhood, and later, when I was about eleven, my family joined a large Pentecostal church—one with nearly 1,500 people on a Sunday morning. It was an intense, all-or-nothing environment, rigid in its beliefs and often emotionally toxic. Yet, paradoxically, it also contained something rare: a palpable sense of spiritual experience.

Charismatic and Pentecostal churches attract people because something happens there. There is a feeling of Spirit that you don’t often find in more conventional religious settings. For me, those years were both deeply damaging and deeply formative. I had experiences of transcendence that I have rarely encountered since—alongside teachings grounded in fear, shame, and absolutism.

That period taught me something essential: that spiritual experience exists beyond doctrine. That something real can be felt, even when wrapped in a distorted framework. Over the decades, I’ve worked to extract what was genuine from what was harmful.

At the same time, from the age of six, I was immersed in music. Like many musicians, I was highly sensitive. I didn’t yet have language for it, but that sensitivity was energetic as much as emotional. As a child, I struggled with something mysterious: in first grade I missed nearly a month of school due to what felt like a persistent problem in my throat. Doctors ran tests. Nothing was found. I told my father that it felt like I was constantly trying to clear my throat. He shrugged it off.

Years later, during my first Reiki sessions, I recognized it for what it was: an energetic blockage in my throat. As that area was worked on, I experienced a deep and lasting release. What could not be diagnosed medically found its language in energy.

In college and graduate school, depression intensified. Even as my external life expanded, I felt trapped inside myself. It wasn’t about circumstance—it was internal. That suffering led me toward holistic healing. I became vegetarian in the late 1990s, began studying nutrition, and grew fascinated with the relationship between body, mind, and spirit.

The true turning point came in 2002, around the death of my mother. Five years after her initial cancer treatment, her breast cancer returned and metastasized. What we thought would be a routine hospital visit became the last month of her life. Her organs began to fail. She entered a coma. We were told she would not wake.

Then, unexpectedly, she did.

For about a week, she was conscious again. During that time, I sat with her, knowing she would soon be gone. I felt guided to tell her something essential. I said, “Mom, I think I want to be a healer.”

I didn’t fully know what that meant. But I knew it mattered more to me than anything else—even music. It felt like a declaration of who I was becoming.

After her passing, something began to open up within me. One day walking the streets of New York City, I picked up a Learning Annex brochure and saw an event led by a spiritual teacher from India named Sri Siva. The description mentioned his connection with Wayne Dyer—whose work I was deeply immersed in at the time—and included a line that struck me to the core: that Sri Siva was “known to have the ability to change his followers’ destiny.”

That single sentence felt like it was written for me.

I attended the workshop he offered in New York. Over the next several years, I studied and traveled extensively with Sri Siva, participating in multi-day programs in the United States and journeying to India as part of his offerings. There, I received Nadi astrology readings and undertook temple remedies designed to address deep karmic patterns and life blocks. These experiences reshaped my sense of reality and opened me to a living, experiential relationship with Spirit.

During this period, I trained in multiple energy-healing modalities: Usui Reiki through the master level, Shambhala Multidimensional Healing, Integrated Energy Therapy, DNA activation workshops, working with ascension literature, and receiving my Angel Therapy certificate in California with Doreen Virtue. My consciousness opened to material that my evangelical upbringing would have rejected outright—karma, guides, archetypes, divine intelligences. Yet these were not abstractions. I could feel them.

By 2006, I was among the top master instructors worldwide in Integrated Energy Therapy. I traveled, taught constantly, and worked with hundreds of people. But I was never comfortable being confined to a single system. I’ve always been a synthesizer, an innovator.

In that same year, I was introduced to Spiritual Response Therapy—a structured clearing system using charts and pendulum work. It resonated deeply. I formally studied it like my life depended on it, and devoted myself to mastering it. It gave me what I had been missing: precision, structure, and the ability to work with specific subconscious and karmic patterns--and the ability to deeply release people's entities.

Yet even here, I eventually reached a limit. After the founder’s passing, the system became fixed, guarded, and resistant to evolution. I realized I could not live inside a framework that could no longer grow.

Over time, I began developing my own clearing methodology—one that integrates everything I’ve lived and learned: Western energy healing, structured subconscious clearing, and the ancient Vedic understanding of remedies. In India, remedies are sacred technologies designed to realign a person with divine order. I realized that their essence could be transmitted energetically, without physical ritual.

I began working directly with archetypal intelligences—what religions call gods, angels, and divine forces—not as objects of worship, but as living spiritual energies available to all.

Breaking free from the fear-based religion of my youth, I discovered what religion was always trying to reach: direct connection. No guilt. No shame. No hierarchy. Just presence, alignment, and truth.

I am still a student. I am still healing. But the journey becomes gentler when you know you are connected. And the deepest fulfillment of my life is helping others rediscover that same connection within themselves.