In 1998 I attended my first Network for a New Culture Summer Camp.  It was an experiment in Intimacy and Community, and I had no idea of how it would move my life into a completely different direction. 

It was there that I got to spend about a week with Joseph Chilton Pearce, Bruce Lipton and Patch Adams (pre-movie). What I learned from that experience as a whole helped me to synthesize the answer to what had become my life's question: "How can Healers learn to keep their hearts open and do their work when most everything in the healing professions is geared towards the reinforcement of maintaining a distance between them and the people they work with?"

I spent years assimilating what I learned in those two weeks (OK, I'm slow!).

Another huge world opened up for me, that of  intentional community. What we once called "communes" have evolved into incredibly eclectic approaches to living sustainably -- in connection with each other AND our environment. A wonderful resource to learn about what you can do TODAY to foster community is the Intentional Communities.web site.

At that Summer Camp I ended up painting a bookcase with a guy who reminded me so much of Bob Newhardt, I had to giggle. His name was Geoph Kozeny and for me and literally thousands of others throughout the world, he was the Johnny Appleseed of the movement!

Geoph spent the last years of his life documenting many communities across North America. As a resource and a tremendously thought-provoking work you can't do better than picking up his Masterwork DVD, "Visions of Utopia" 

Geoph's influence prompted me to drop my job as Executive Manager of a $2 Million/year business that sold tooth-bleaching materials to dentists and shortly thereafter hop up to the Cascadia Bioregion to join  Lost Valley Educational Center, in Oregon, where I lived and worked for five years. This community is today a 24 year-old experiment in sustainable living, and a center for permaculture design and teaching for the region.

While there, I became steeped in assisting with their monthly, personal growth workshop, Naka-Ima, progressing to be one of the first in their Kipuka (Mastery) program. I went on to have extensive experience in "The Practice" and "The Expansion" two courses offered by Jamie Campbell and Deborah Riverbend (the originators of Naka-Ima) who took Naka-Ima's concepts and supercharged them as agents of healing.

The HeART of the Healer, which is essentially the synthesis of my lifetime in the healing arts, owes its development to that fertile time in my life and those highly potent influences.

That workshop then became my teacher. I committed to put myself through the same grief I asked of my students: to stretch myself in the art of self-expression, which has lead me to my extensive writings in the healing arts, music and photography.