“Who am I,†“What am I supposed to do?†“What do I really want to do?†I ruminated on such questions – and many more – throughout my childhood and adolescence, and it eventually drove me into the world of photography, a world that was hidden but safe. Similar questions haunted me college where I again found solace in art. I graduated UCSC with a degree in aesthetic studies, studied with the Bauhaus master potter Marguerite Wildenhain at her Pond Farm studio, and had my work represented in nearly every major craft gallery in California, but I could not make a living as a potter.
The old questions returned, and I immersed myself in the healing arts: studying psychoanalytic theory and transpersonal psychology and always, always, writing about the journey. Words became my art and craft: first as a reviewer of academic books, then as a developmental editor for a New York publishing house, and ultimately the co-author of 14 books and a dozen published papers in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and human consciousness – all driven the question “Who Am I?†and more specifically, “What does my brain really want me to do?â€
I am on the Executive MBA Faculty at Loyola Marymount University where I teach mindfulness, communication, and NeuroLeadership, and I teach “Spirituality and the Brain†at Holmes Institute.
But I am constantly pulled back into the world of art. My current project is called “The Artist Behind the Mask,†and my goal is to complete 100 assemblages of “faces†constructed from found objects in nature – a neuroaesthetic journey into the world of anti-conceptualism, tinged with a playful hint of Dada.