Many years ago I was eating a less than ideal vegetarian diet, living in a cold climate, and working a particularly stressful job that resulted in the weakening of my digestive strength and the loss of energy that came with that. I still live in a cold climate. I was grateful for the conventional health care that I was provided. Yet my blood work and physical examinations came back normal and I was not interested in trying any pharmaceutical solutions. For a few years I persisted in this state of digestive difficulties and a reduction of energy.
Upon seriously inquiring into the traditional systems of health it became quickly apparent that my diet and lifestyle were at the source of the problems I was facing. I purchased many books on health, especially on Ayurveda, and I was very fortunate to come across Todd Caldecott’s Ayurveda: The Divine Science of Life. The quality of this author’s work exceeded all that I had encountered prior. I eventually met Todd and sought out his services as a herbalist. All it took was eating properly and living an appropriate lifestyle to make massive changes to my health. The herbs I took had no discernible side-effects as they gently pushed me in the right direction.
It’s been a decade now that I’ve been seriously pursuing a deeper understanding of the traditional systems of health and lifestyle. I found the eclectic and physiomedical systems of health the easiest to start with. However, years of studying Advaita Vedanta and Jnana Yoga prepared me well to begin my journey into Ayurveda, which remains my primary modality. I find Traditional Chinese Medicine to be very valuable as well but also harder to approach. Nutrition and diet were necessary to understand since people do not get better if they are not eating good foods in the right measure. I’m a believer in learning as many different ways of viewing things as possible and comparing the similarities and differences between the approaches. In this vein I also study mainstream medicine and try and stay on top of relevant research.
My degree is in psychology and I was drawn to transpersonal psychology in particular, a holistic and cross-cultural form of psychology that allows for both the academic and the direct exploration of consciousness. Transpersonal psychology recognizes the importance of the inward journey and self-discovery in its various forms. The traditional systems of health and lifestyle also do not eschew the mind and the spiritual and thus allow for an integral approach.
In my role as the Executive Director of the David Bohm Society I’ve been fortunate to deeply inquire into thought, both as an academic subject and as the observation of thought’s movements in day to day life as a meditation. Bohm was a very unique scientist whose insight into the activity of thought is unparalleled for a Western mind. His primary proposals were that sustained attention to the process of thought was the necessary starting point to address our collective incoherence and the inaction of thought was the prerequisite for the deep functioning of intelligence. Bohm spent decades in dialogue with Jiddu Krishnamurti, a spiritual figure who who spent his life speaking on the dangers of thought and knowledge and the essential need for direct perception and the inactivity of thought to liberate intelligence.
Credentials:
B.A. Psychology, University of Alberta, 2004
Inside Ayurveda, Dogwood School of Botanical Medicine, 2017