Writing is my greatest passion. I’ve had four books published since 2009 The path wasn't a smooth one. It took me nearly a decade to get the first one published, and more than 300 rejections. (That’s not a typo.)

For me, there’s a great passion to tell the untold stories that drive us, the things that push us to grow and question our world and ourselves. I remain deeply fascinated by the mysterious beauty of being in this world.

I have a deep knowledge of a few esoteric fields of study — integral theory and (adult) developmental psychology are the two ones I’m most involved with, but I’m also a big follower of thinkers inside of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Yet I’m no arm-chair philosopher or disembodied thinker, but more of a double-fisted intellectual who’s a recognized SiFu (師傅) in Northern Kung Fu and runs a small school here in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado.

My first book (The Mysterious Divination of Tea Leaves) was written over about a dozen years, in odd corners of days and in the free time I could salvage.

For my second book (A Heart Blown Open), I sold my house in Philly and lived off the money while I wrote. I spent 18 furious months writing, editing, and preparing the manuscript. It ended up winning a few awards and has had its movie rights optioned, so that’s a bet that might still pay off.

For my third book (The Heart of Zen), I raised private capital from the Zen community to fund the writing of the book, with the book's sales paying back the investors. That one was a breezy nine months in the making.

For my last work, Only Everything, I ran a successful, $30K Kickstarter campaign in 2013 to raise seed money and interest on the project, but it took me five years to live through enough of the story to create the book I did. It’s not a happy book, but it is, I believe, a beautiful one.  

In addition to books, I’ve also collaborated with teachers such as Ken Wilber, David Deida, Reggie Ray, Debra Silverman, Amy Ippoliti, Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi, Kim Barta, Terri O’Fallon, and Doshin Roshi, among others.