I have always looked for spiritual practices with integrity — ones that change the inner life, and change the daily life along with it. Nothing held me for long unless it did both.
This search took me through many modalities of healing and meditation, in college and in the early years of my work.
I began in the classroom — teaching middle school in the inner city, kindergarten to children learning English as they learned everything else, and reading and mathematics to students for whom both came hard. I was completing my Master's degree through all of it.
The children were all different, and so were their parents. I learned to meet a person where they are, because there is nowhere else to begin.
I left teaching to work with families caught in teen drug addiction, and that year taught me something I have kept ever since: it does not matter what a client is told — the change is theirs to make, or not make. Everything I do now rests on that. Personal choice is the ground.
In 2007 I trained in Reiki, and while taking a certificate in theological studies at seminary, I opened a healing practice. Most of my patients were dying. I helped them reach some clarity before the end — and some did not reach it, and I stayed with them anyway. I sat with their families in their grief, and held the staff in theirs. Those years went deep. At the end, the unimportant falls away, and there is only the heart of the thing.
When my wife finished her doctorate in physical therapy and her work asked everything of her, I became a stay-at-home father. It was a foundation under our family — I could be wholly there for our daughter, and then our son. That time widened what I could hold of another person's search, and gave me the room to go deeper into meditation and my healing work. I built a greater silence in myself.
Wanting to be a better father, and wanting to know my own inner landscape, I found my teacher — Samuel Sagan MD, who founded the Clairvision School of Meditation. In 2014 he recognized me as a practitioner of Inner Space Techniques (IST), and my meditation practice has rested there ever since. He sharpened my inner sight and refined my hand as a healer.
Another grace was Mama Gaya, of the Ruiz family, in the last years of her life. I was with her in India, and with the Ruiz family in Teotihuacan, Mexico. I have a deep love and respect for their teachings, and for the time she gave me. She was blunt — she went straight to what I needed to see, and to change.
A second body of work grew up beside the healing, and it came out of all of it — the years among the dying, the grief I sat beside, the long quiet of raising my children. Siṃhī: The Becoming is a literary novel in the old Indian tradition, and around it I built a set of books that teach Sanskrit through story. To anchor that work, I took up formal study of the language in the Sanskrit Advanced Certificate Program at Yogic Studies, where I presented my Sarpa and Siṃhī Reader at the program's symposium.
The books and the sessions come from one root. Under both is dhāraṇā — the body holds what the mind has not yet been told. In a session, we turn inward and let the body lead. In the books, the old language and the old stories come the same way, felt first and understood after. One is practice. The other is story. Both are the work of becoming.
I offer this work in IST sessions and in one-on-one intensives.
I keep studying with the Clairvision School of Meditation, sitting in week-long intensives through the year — taking apart the beliefs that limit me, and refining the practice.
When I am not working, I read myths and legends, surf skate, run, chant and play the harmonium, hike the hills of Ashland, and go up to Mount Shasta with my family.
Whether you come to sit with me in a session, to walk into Sanskrit through the lioness, or simply to read — I'm glad you're here.
