Life Story

Raised in turns by a perfectionist academic athiest grandmother, a bohemian art student turned systems analyst mother, and a hippie clairvoyant yogi aunt, my young worldview was constantly in flux. Then in 1979, at age 16, I first met my investment banker turned buddhist monk father, who gave me a copy of Suzuki-Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The simplicity of Zen offered an empirical alternative to the rigidity of academia and the fuzziness of newage mysticism, and I began practicing on my own.

The next year I was invited to satsang at a nearby Vedanta Monastery – while tripping hard on LSD, natch. Tears running down my face, soaking in the shaktipat, my mind stopped. Unable to process words during the Q&A, I left and walked through the mist on their trail of shrines, ending up at the Hopi Medicine Wheel on the ridge. There I encountered a triple rainbow and had a glimpse behind the veil, eventually landing on my back, feeling the earth rotate beneath the stars. Late that evening, Swami Buddhananda found me kneeling on the monastery steps. He took me in, gave me tea, and heard what I could describe of the experience. He said, “I felt you opening during the talk. You’ve had a powerful awakening, but psychedelics are a shortcut with many pitfalls. Your life’s mission now is to find your way there honestly. The path of meditation and self-inquiry is longer and harder, but more certain.”

This wake-up call launched me on a lifelong journey of intellectual study and spiritual practices, beginning with work-study at Tassajara in 1982, then living at the SF Zen Center in ‘84, followed by weekly Vipassana with Jack Kornfield while Spirit Rock Center was being envisioned and built (my father was project manager). While simultaneously working as a computer tech, studying early computer graphics with Pixar alumni, prototyping the first real-time PC video digitizer, and then co-founding a startup to create live video synthesizer software for it. All in only four wild years, a series of fortuitous events that could no way have been rationally planned. Synchronicity was in charge. Those were my happy-go-lucky hippie days… and yes, I lived in the Haight-Ashbury and played guitar in a psychedelic jam band.

In 1990, considering a merger of our business with a friendly competitor (which required a move to Topeka Kansas of all places), I asked my teacher Gangaji for her perspective. She laughed, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to serve as a secret agent for spirit in the corporate world.” The echo of Buddhananda’s statement ten years before was not lost on me, and I went for it. Giving away all my collected spiritual trappings – altarpieces, books, crystals and instruments – I joined what I later came to call a “fundamentalist atheist computer cult.” A core definition of ‘cult’ being giving up one’s former life and living in faith of reward in the hereafter - or, in our case, vague exit strategies driven by idealistic visions of democratizing television technology. Which we did, making a ton of money, winning an Emmy, and gaining hands-on experience in how the media sausage is made.

Sadly, though, transplanted into that arid intellectual environment, my budding spiritual life withered for most of the ‘90s. (Sorry, Gangaji, I let you down. Unless maybe you were joking?) Also, being a brutally bullied neuro-divergent queer kid in the ‘70’s had left layers of traumatic complexity in my personality, including internalized homophobia and asexual sublimation masked by a masculine imprint. Hyper-focused entrepreneurial workaholism leavened with spiritual bypassing didn’t make for a happy life. To make a long story short, a series of great successes capped by the dotcom crash and 9/11 wasn’t enough to break those patterns. That took another decade building back only to lose it all again – but more on that later.

During the Naughties, my bohemian upbringing rebooted serendipity as a parallel process. I found myself at the Harbin School of Shiatsu and Massage, where I became certified in Swedish/Esalen massage, Zen Shiatsu, and Watsu (aquatic shiatsu). And at Harbin’s weekly Unconditional Dances and biannual dance festivals, I finally learned to let my freak flag fly, and met my future life partner Elaine. Then, while helping the school build its first website in the summer of 2003, one of the board members handed me the Burning Man Survival Guide. “Get your stuff together, there’s a bunk for you in my RV. We leave next week.”

Art for its own sake! And massive art at that, on the ultimate blank canvas. Over the next three years I joined a wild venn diagram of Bay Area creative communities, and wound up designing and building, of all things, a full-scale gothic cathedral. Collaboration itself is the highest art, and say what you will about Burning Man, it is a real playground for mastering improvisation. Later, I joined the Black Rock Rangers, riding the edge of that chaos as mediators and first responders. Our key motto is “First, Do Nothing” – yes, we have training and emergency radios, but simply showing up fully present is the most valuable service one can offer in a crisis.

During those years, my somatic therapist Coquelicot Gilland was also helping me learn to navigate my neglected emotional landscape. One day, using a push-hands technique, we unleashed my long-bottled rage at the corporate machine, and I almost bowled her over. Thrilled, she said, “No no no, don’t hold back – let me get Jim!” Her husband, who did dangerous tree removal with hardcore junkies, knew just what I needed. We ended up shoulder-to-shoulder pushing like linebackers. A queer nerd having been mercilessly fag-bashed, leaning straight into that kind of jock energy? Jim even asked later if I would like to work with him tree-cutting! To say a major block shifted is a massive understatement. It was the beginning of a long friendship and mentorship, only deepened by the experience of gripping his hand as he nearly crushed it, consciously choosing not to fight for another breath.

All that time I was still wearing the golden handcuffs, having joined prior partners in yet another successful startup. Then, blindsided in 2013 by a sociopathic CEO’s power grab, suddenly all my sweat equity was tied up in an investor lawsuit that could take years to resolve. Corporate codependency is a powerful force, hooking directly into one’s core identity structures, and the death of that identity can lead to a dark night of the soul. But a very strange thing happened, looking down the barrel of my own gun, and choosing not to pull the trigger. Words to describe that experience only came later – something like, “Okay, so I’ve decided not to die. Now what? Who am I without all that bullshit?” Every answer to those questions evoked a gut feeling of wrongness, or at best incompleteness. But being in the mystery felt exactly right, even if painful or confusing. So, walking away from everything yet again, stripping life to the bone, I recommitted myself to deepening practice, and healing through somatic work.

More synchronicities... a friend invited me to live in his renovated East Bay warehouse, where we built large art pieces. Clients began calling via word of mouth, and before long I had a busy practice doing specialized LED lighting design and engineering. With a little effort and a lot of joyfully hard work, I found a unique niche creating dynamic sculptural illumination for architectural and civic art installations. In the years since I’ve been blessed to work with some of the best artists and fabricators in the field.

Also in 2014, presenting interactive artworks at an early Transformative Tech conference, I met Jeffrey Martin, an odd sort of semi-academic anti-guru offering an empirical approach to curating one's own spiritual practices. After completing the Finders Course, I served as a facilitator and mentor to new students, and became an active member of the Perfectly Okay community, a global experiment in open-source peer-to-peer awakening. Among other practices, I have since been deepening into Non-Dual Shaiva Tantra practices via The Recognition Sutras.

This last decade has been quite a ride – living simply, finally fully embracing my non-binary gender-fluid nature, settling in with my life-partner Elaine, moving to San Diego to help my sister and aging mother, and healing from a heart attack. While gently but systematically unwinding my own layers of conditioning, observing closely when old triggers evoke stories in myself or others. And bringing the mind along for the ride, keeping it on board by studying diverse perspectives into this magnificent, mysterious adventure.

I look forward to sharing the journey with you!