About Interspirituality

WHo I am...

I work as a Project Manager/Systems Analyst for a large Human Services non-profit in Philadelphia with over 25 years of experience, and am a community organizer who is active in various secular and religious organizations and an advocate for interfaith dialogue among local and national faith communities.  Trained as a Spiritual Director (1999) with the Guild for Spiritual Guidance, I consult with individuals and organizations on ways to integrate Spirituality with Social Justice.  My passions include Big History, Cosmology, Vedanta, Torah, Yoga and Nature (and the Delaware River in New Jersey where I live).  Having recently completed both the Deep Time Course “Applying a Deep Time Cosmology” and the first module of the DTJN Leadership Series, I’m excited to continue pursuing a new understanding of the four deep time principles: Context, Embeddedness, Interiority and Action. 

 

My Background

My formal training is in Computer Science from Kansas State University, and I’ve worked largely in corporate technology positions up until I reached my 30’s – at that point a kind of spiritual hunger became intense, and I sought out the guidance of a person trained as a Spiritual Director. We met over an 8 year period, and through that process I was able to better understand what was motivating this spiritual hunger and inner quest. During this period of time, I was able to sort out that I felt “de-motivated” working in traditional corporate cultures (e.g. the Aerospace Industry, Insurance industry, Pharmaceuticals, Retail and Consulting as part of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Family).  Also, I felt a shift occur in my interests moving from the realm of technology into a study of Consciousness.  There was no obvious career path which I could chart into this new vocational calling. Rather, it was my engagement with allurement, a process which had began many years earlier when I left my home in Manhattan, KS to pursue a vision that had occurred to me while working with a not-for-profit company focusing on teaching biofeedback and autonomic controls.   

Over many years, this shift in my focus from technology to consciousness has led me to leave the arena of “for-profit” corporations and eventually work with a variety of “not-for profit” agencies (known as 501C3 firms which strive to serve the public good here in the US) helping them apply technology to better fulfill their service-oriented missions (educational, community-based homeless sheltering agencies, Employment and Behavioral Health agencies, etc.).  As a way of navigating this change in my focus, back around 1991, I began working with a Spiritual Director here in New Jersey where I have lived for over 25 years.  In 1999, I also began a formal program of study with the Guild for Spiritual Guidance program, a Spiritual Direction training program founded by Henri Nouwen, Walter Wink, Morton Kelsey and others, and sought out the guidance and teachings of a Monastic monk within the South Asia Indian Community, the Bharat Sevashram Sangha in NJ, which I’ve maintained for the past 20 years.  Back in 2001 after graduating from Guild program, I led an initiative on Interfaith Spirituality within the Vincentian Catholic Community in Plainsboro, NJ for two years bringing together faith leaders from across multiple traditions to explore commonalities in faith practices and spirituality.  Today, I am still in touch with many of those same faith leaders and continue to explore ways that spirituality and technology can be applied to our everyday lives to bring hope and renewal to our communities.

 

Core Values

I follow the core spiritual teachings of Judaism – In this period of time (Rosh Hashanah 5782), we are asked to spend the following year by letting our lands, the Earth rest (Shmita- rest/release). This year I feel led to learn from the Earth, and to do my best to live out values from all the world’s religious traditions and our greater Cosmos.  Throughout my life I have been exposed to teachings from Torah, the New Testament, Vedic Tradition, Islam, “A Course in Miracles”, Native Indigenous teachings and more.  A core belief I hold is that this life brings us all an opportunity for spiritual growth and discovery, and with that opportunity comes a response (a task) in uncovering our unique offering to the world.  For the past 25 years, I have been committed to exploring various faith traditions alongside the New Cosmology in an effort to better understand my own spiritual journey and Global consciousness.