About Me
I started out as a teenager looking for the meaning of life. In particular, for a meaning to my life, and why I should continue with it. This led to investigating the mental/emotional patterns that were causing me distress or limiting my potential. That turned into a lifetime focus, which continues.
The trail includes:
~ Creating my own form of Voice Dialogue. Long before it became popular, based on reading Gestalt books by Fritz Perls and others, I developed and still use my own form of what is now known as Voice Dialogue. This is a very effective way to identify and work with patterns that can otherwise be hard to grasp. When I was 18 I helped a classmate quit smoking with one session of this method.
~ A year at the Rochester Zen Center, with more than 1000 hours of sitting meditation. This established a base of mindfulness that has served me well.
~ Living on The Farm in Summertown, TN, with Stephen Gaskin for a year and a half. This was quite transformative in learning about myself and how people relate to each other. I learned there is an up and a down to consciousness, and that we choose the level we occupy through attention, which is both consciously and unconsciously directed.
~ Encounter group training in Chicago, where I met Eugene Gendlin, whose "Felt Sense" is now integral to what I do.
~ Years in the Sufi Order, including being authorized to initiate and give practices. I saw the need for cultivating psychological ~ and emotional competence as well as spiritual attunement.
~ Building a 7 figure business. This was a major personal growth experience that also set me off in new directions of inquiry after I sold it.
~ A self-designed degree in Sustainable Culture
~ A large amount of bodywork performed on me. Early events resulted in a misaligned body. My continuing "hobby" of finding new and better ways to improve my physical alignment could become a new system if I had the time to create it, as I've made some quite useful finds. Fascia work is very impressive. One move did more for me than thousands of dollars invested in other practitioners.
~ Studying Nonviolent Communication for years. The concept of innate needs, the implicit drive for wholeness, the importance of interpersonal interaction (also very present in the more recent Interpersonal Neurobiology of Dan Siegal) and learning more about the range of human feelings have all been lasting gains. My understanding of anger is certainly influenced by Marshall Rosenberg.
~ 10 years of learning and using EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), including becoming a certified practitioner. The power of meridian stimulation to change emotional and mental states is now evidence-based and very impressive. It did a lot for me.
~ Study and meditation in two schools of Tibetan Buddhism, including Mahamudra study.
~ Reaching a dead end in my own exploration. This forced me to ask deeper questions about why counterproductive patterns become established, and they why they are so hard to change, even when a person really wants them to change. This questioning led to a breakthrough insight that became the core of NeuroMastery®
~ Since 2010, developing and using NeuroMastery®. This is my synthesis and higher-order integration of what I've learned from previous experience as well as constantly trying things on myself.
Additional foundational influences on NeuroMastery® include
~ Primarily learned from Bruce Lipton, the conceptsof implicit and explicit learning, that 95% of our processing is unconscious, and that our cellular health is so strongly shaped by our emotional reactions.
~ From Dawson Church his findings on how meridian stimulation lowers cortisol levels, and information about the Harvard studies showing that meridian stimulation calms the amygdala.
~ Evolutionary psychology, which I've long used to help me understand humans
~ My own concept of settings, which emerged from my questioning after reaching my dead end.
~ Neuroscience, very notably memory reconsolidation as learned from Bruce Eckert's publications.
I want to acknowledge Dorothea Hover-Kramer for leading me to Dr. Eckert's work.
Since 2009 I have presented small group programs on a monthly basis. I also facilitate an ongoing weekly group, as well as seeing individual clients, and work on myself extensively.
All this has resulted in the creation of very specific tools and methods that dissolve or neutralize established but underperforming mental/emotional patterns. I see these patterns as neural networks that continue operating beyond (often far beyond) their point of usefulness.
Current Activities
My current focus and most public offering is NeuroMastery® Meditation. This is the ultimate distillation and simplification of NeuroMastery®. The practice provides tangible results for beginners in mere minutes. These are lasting changes that build on themselves. Their positive influence ripples out throughout a person's life.
While very accessible and immediately useful, the practice has nearly limitless applications, subtle aspects, and potential. For instance, it has both Negativa and Positiva aspects. Negativa is deconstructing non-useful neural networks. This opens the space for Positiva, the deliberate cultivation of enthusiasm, joy, and any other expansive aspect of life.
Richie Davidson, a major researcher in the neuroscience of meditation, and Founder and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds says his funders ask "Is it scalable?" NeuroMastery® Meditation is scalable. I see it as a tool with the potential to change innumerable lives in very positive ways.
That it can be learned in half an hour (most of which is about why it works) and that this can happen online, makes it available to anyone with the internet, immediately.
Beyond that, I offer live, online practice sessions where people can have support, ask questions, share results, develop a sense of community, and learn the finer points from experience as it arises in practice.
The training is free and the live sessions are by donation, which makes them open to all who can access them. 10% of donations goes to nonprofits helping people in dire need.
More about NeuroMastery:
Some sayings I find helpful:
It's all neural networks.
This is obviously an overgeneralization but I push it as far as it will go, which is surprisingly far.
This is a neural network and I know how to change neural networks.
Useful when caught up in a reaction pattern to create distance and access skill-based learning.
They're my neural networks and I'll do whatever I want with them.
My favorite: It takes a certain 'attitude' to go after well-established patterns.
Fundamental concepts:
Basic Wholeness: I assume we all have what I call Basic Wholeness as our deep nature. This is closely aligned with what is taught in Buddhism.
Everything other than that is constructed and layered on top and can be deconstructed.
Levels of growth:
From observation, using NeuroMastery® over time takes people through stages of:
1) Putting out fires
2) Equanimity
3) Authenticity
4) Realization (
Problems as Solutions
It is often the case that what we experienced as problems started out as solutions, usually arrived at unconsciously.
When the neural networks embodying these 'solutions' are neutralized, the nervous system can reintegrate at a higher level.
For instance, a woman in her 70s came to me with a fear of heights. We identified a scene in her early 20s in which she had an impulse to kill herself (after some awful experiences) by throwing herself down a shaft. Her fear of heights was actually a protection her system had created to prevent that from happening. This protection pattern continued running long after it was no longer needed. With that understanding, we deconstructed her fear and it was gone in two sessions.
Schedule a call and we'll connect.
I"m available for
Private sessions
Podcast interviews
Workshops both remote and in-person
I can add a transformational element to events, in time-frames of 1 hour on up.
I offer the following workshops:
Get Over Your Ex Now
Silence the Critical Voice Within
Get Over A Fear
NeuroMastery® Meditation Retreats