After 3 unsatisfying months at an Ivy League university, I made my way back to the Bay Area, where I looked up "Zen" in the phonebook. Soon I was standing on the doorstep of one of the first Korean Zen centers in the United States. I spent 16 years living in Zen and Tibetan Buddhist dharma centers, including 4 years as a Zen monk in Asia. In all, I’ve practiced 7 years of cumulative retreat, including 4 years of solitary retreat in a cabin here in the mountains of Northern California. My practice has been guided by masters of the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. 

As part of my medicine training, I spent 3 years in the Amazon training with traditional healers along with a 15 year long  apprenticeship in the western approach to medicine work. I am trained in Hakomi mindfulness-based somatic psychology, Acupressure Massage, and Hypnotherapy. I am a teacher in the Hollow Bamboo School of Meditation and have also been given permission to teach meditation by Zen Master Dae Bong Su Nim.

My many paths combine naturally with a love of nature, writing, music, language, and travel to distant lands and cultures of many kinds. For me, the work of healing and spiritual guidance is a remembering, an awakening, and—first and always—a path of the heart. 

In 2005, I founded Two Rivers Sangha, a Buddhist 501c3 church dedicated to the intersection of the Buddhist path and earth wisdom traditions. 

I currently live in the wilds of West Marin in the San Francisco Bay Area.