I’m a spiritual coach with private clients and workshops, and an author. I was none of that until about ten years ago. How did I get here? A few things stick out:
In 2006, I happened into a wise man named Bob Birnbaum. He had been taught by some remarkable people: Fritz Perls (the father of Gestalt therapy), Carl Rogers (the father of humanist psychology), Osho (aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the guru), and Hameed Ali (aka A.H. Almaas, the co-creator of the Diamond Approach, a modern spiritual path.)
Bob turned me on to a book by Eckhart Tolle, which introduced me to a neo-Buddhist viewpoint, and especially got me to notice how much suffering my mind inflicted on me.
Around the same time, a chance encounter with the spiritual master Adyashanti persuaded me that there was more to the world than I thought. Pretty soon, Bob and I were diving into my identities. After an intense six-month engagement, I woke up to a life with very little strategy, very little anxiety, and a great appreciation for absurdity.
Next I joined one of Hameed Ali's Diamond Heart groups, moving along its progressive path to self-realization. Diamond Heart brought me structured inquiry, a community, and a superb method for the continued removal of identities and integration with true nature.
I continued to sit with Adyashanti from time to time, and took a year-long class in Buddhist meditation at the nearby Spirit Rock retreat center.
That was my "stop believing my story" period. It was followed by a year or two of "burning down the house." Learning to live without strategy had been interesting a few years earlier; learning to live without beliefs was much weirder and harder. Now that I had shed a lot of my belief systems, what did I want or need?
Death became an abiding interest. I felt intense grief with the death of Bob Birnbaum in 2012. When the grief subsided, I noticed how little I knew about death. Montaigne says: "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave." I volunteered at hospice, read books about death, helped people at end of life collect their memoirs, prepared my aging dog for end of life, and got my biggest lessons from spending time with my dying father.
So that was my succession of experiences:
♦ Not believing my story
♦ Burning down the house
♦ Getting over my fear of death.
I authored Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You and Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic.
I live in Northern California with my remarkable and beautiful partner, Anne Lamott. Her path is Jesus.