I have always been a deep thinker and lover of beauty, Nature, and life. I grew up on the East Coast and felt plagued and distressed at the material consumer culture into which I was born, feeling deeply the insubstantiality of the foundations that people seemed to be building their lives on, void of a deeper spiritual purpose and integration of cosmology. In my late teens, while developing my skills in realism and the beginnings of my abstract style, I had a spiritual awakening that radically shifted my awareness into a place of intuitional investigation that allowed me to begin the long and difficult process many of us uptake in our adult lives to piece together what I understood to be real, and deconstruct and ‘unprogram’ myself from what I knew to not be real.
Lifestyle choices became central to my healing process; and suddenly understanding a lot of what were hidden from view in the material world I lived in, I began an extensive process of healing my body via healthy food and nontoxic products and substances. This work was also paralleled in my thinking and in my relationships, where I uprooted many self destructive patterns and built upon my philosophy and ethics through living and practicing them.
The meaning I have sought was first built within my internal world, and then paralleled in my outer life when I moved out West, and began to integrate the healthy lifestyle shifts I had begun after my spiritual awakening. It was not until I came out here that I began to find more people on similar journeys, and relax into a more natural way of life. I do believe our spirituality can be a directive force for health in our lives; not through dogma or adherence to rules, but rather in a way of the body, heart, and mind working together to form a life of personal integrity. This often arises simply by being a part of a natural life; the animals, the plants, the wild around us demonstrate harmony that we too can be a part of. Often natural action is all that is needed for healing. The use of the mind, the balancing of the emotions, and the respect and love being focalized in relationships are essentially human endeavors. My life has largely become natural; I do what I can to be present and loving to the world around me, and the world does this for me. It’s very simple, though can be quite a process to get back to in this Modern age!
