I have spent much of my professional career teaching in Medical
Schools. Most recently, I held three Associate Professor appointments
at the University of Kentucky Medical School, in Anesthesiology,
Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. While employed there, I organized
and directed the Pain Management Center and was the Director
of Behavioral Medicine. For the past eight years, I have organized
and hosted the Noetic Science groups in Lexington focusing on
the concepts of Quantum theory, consciousness and alternative
healing. I have published some 50 articles and written two books
and a monograph on subjects in the medical, psychological, and
educational fields.
Being on an egoic level, an Enneagram seven,
I would say that my spiritual journey has been one of starting
and stopping, while stumbling toward the Awareness of what
I truly am.
From early childhood, I have had an active
religious interest, due, in part, to the fact that my father
was a minister. A personal, life-changing
event occurred around age 5, that reverberated throughout
my life, and I never quite fit in to traditional religious
practice.
During my 20s and 30s my spiritual life was at best, minimal
and chaotic. Professionally, I was deeply committed to a rational,
social-behavioral model of existence in which neither the unconscious
or the spiritual had any substantial value.
In 1967, an experience
in hypnosis with Milton Erickson resulted in a traumatic
break with what I assumed was real and I entered into a
severe depression. This was the beginning of a three-year odyssey
and a radical change in both my professional and personal life.
My spiritual journey began again during this time through
reading a book entitled, I
AMness by Kent and
Nicholls. The concepts they
presented resonated with my early life experience and the
fundamental and profound change in my personal life. During
that time I went to many workshops and retreats with numerous
spiritual
teachers in different traditions, began a practice of meditation
and had a renewed interest in religion. But, I still felt
that something spiritual was missing.
When I read Eckart Tolle’s
book, The Power of Now, in the
Fall of 1999, I felt that I had found a teaching that was
clear, comprehensive and inclusive which spoke to me with “freshness” and
power. It precipitated another
radical, life-changing process. The result was that I “knew” what
I had always known, and could now integrate
the personal, mystical awareness of Christ-consciousness
and the various Eastern traditions of Advaita, Taoism and Sufism
into the “oneness” of “now” or pure
awareness. Since that time I have been to numerous Tolle retreats
and taken his teacher training program. I have also been
with other spiritual teachers, each one deepening my consciousness
and awareness. The culmination of this was a two-week
retreat in England with Bernie Prior in which the no-self "I
Am" was graced or blessed with the non-experience of this “Oneness” or
God .
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