My journey into numerology began in 2001, when I had a four-hour numerology reading with Marcelle Bergstrom. I walked into that reading knowing nothing about numerology.

I left in tears.

For the first time in all my searching over many years, I had been given a picture of who I was and how I had arrived at this particular point in my life. I began to understand why I had this particular husband and these particular children, what my soul wanted me to learn through those relationships, and what I needed to understand and change within my own life.

It opened a door I couldn’t close again.

Despite quite a lot of resistance from people around me, I began studying numerology. What started as a search for answers about my own life gradually became something profound.

Over the years I have read thousands of charts and worked with people from many different countries, cultures and circumstances. I have also taught more than 100 students, most of them one-on-one and in person, and a few of them are presently managing their own numerology practices. And that is where much of my real education in numerology happened — not only through studying the numbers, but through seeing how they actually manifest in the lives of real people.

Books can teach you how to analyse the meaning of a number or the meaning of a particular position in a chart. Those are largely left-brained, analytical skills.

But synthesising an entire chart into one big picture is something very different.

A human being is not a collection of separate numbers. Every part of the chart interacts with every other part. You also have to take into consideration which areas of the chart are operating in their positive, negative or destructive phases. And people can move between those phases depending on the situation.

That kind of synthesis is a right-brained skill. I believe there needs to be an inherent ability for it, but even then it has to be developed through experience and through working with someone who already understands how to see the chart as a whole.

That is one of the most important things I teach my students.

My own life hasn’t been neat or particularly conventional either. I have experienced enormous love and devastating loss, difficult family circumstances, relationships that taught me a great deal, financial ups and downs, and major changes of direction.

I have also literally lost my life. After being shocked back three times and ultimately left for dead, I survived by the Grace of God alone. Surviving was only the beginning. It took me many years to regain even basic physical functionality and to build a life again. I have also lived through the loss of children and grandchildren.

So when I speak about challenge, loss, change and rebuilding a life, I don’t speak about them only as concepts I have found in a numerology chart.

Numerology didn’t prevent any of those things.

What it did was help me understand what was happening, what I was learning and where I was in the larger pattern of my life. It showed me where I had karmic debts to repay and to whom those debts were due. It also gave me a clear knowing of what I needed to understand and what I needed to change.

But numerology couldn’t do the work for me.

I still had to do that myself — and that is never easy.

I don’t believe numbers dictate your life, and I don’t believe a numerology chart should put you into a box. I see it as a remarkably detailed map. It can help you understand your natural tendencies, your strengths, the areas that may challenge you, your relationships, your timing and some of the recurring patterns running through your life.

More importantly, that map doesn’t tell you there is only one road available to you. It reveals a range of possibilities — different ways in which your own numbers can be lived and expressed — and helps you recognise the possibilities most likely to bring greater joy and fulfilment, contentment and peace.

Today my work includes private numerology readings, teaching students, writing, researching and developing educational material that takes people far beyond simply learning what the numbers 1 to 9 mean.

After more than 25 years, I am still learning, still questioning and still testing what I think I know against the lives of real people.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons I still love numerology so much.