These facts, though relevant, don't reveal the extent of Deborah's risk-taking nature nor her devotion to honoring her dreams by bringing them into reality.

Her professional life began when she moved West.

She started a private practice as a psychotherapist but after working for nine years in that capacity realized she needed to follow her own advice.

"Listen to your heart, to your belly's wisdom.
Follow your soul's prompting, no matter how difficult that might be.
Recognize your fear as a barometer that reveals you are no longer stuck -
embrace that fear and move toward it - that's what courage is ...
that's where you find your aliveness."

Deborah left her practice and pursued writing as well as expanding the creative workshops she already facilitated. At one pivotal week-long class held in Glacier National Park with her colleague, a watercolor teacher, Deborah picked up a watercolor brush for the first time in twenty-five years. Her forgotten love of painting came barreling into the present. A year or so later, she spent two months in solitude on an island in British Columbia in order to reclaim her childhood dream of being an artist. Using watercolor as her primary medium, her work has been described as visionary and whimsical, colorful and magical. Her images have been shown in a number of galleries and have been published both here and abroad. She illustrated her first book, Garden of the Spirit Bear - Life in the Great Northern Rainforest, published by Clarion in 2004. Written by her friend and teaching colleague for sixteen years, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, the book chronicles the life and habitat of the rare white "black" bears of British Columbia's Pacific coastline. The book is an informative read for anyone, but is aimed for the primary school reader.

During that same solitude time, Deborah prayed for a spiritual practice that would provide community and be based on Earth Honoring Traditions that relied on her own belly-button heritage. She discovered Ecstatic Trance and Ritual Body Postures, the theories and practice of Hungarian born anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman. Certified to teach this practice in 1996, this work now forms the "coeur" of Deborah's passion and inspiration. She calls the work, Ecstatic Wisdom Postures, and they reliably illuminate modern, urban human consciousness, nurturing the backbone of Sacred Activism.

In 1991, she founded Athanor Arts - a Haven for the Creative Spirit just outside Missoula, Montana.