The founder of Toci, the Toltec Center of Creative Intent, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering communities that support authenticity, awareness, and awakening. She apprenticed with Vicki Noble, co-creatress of The Motherpeace Tarot, and don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements, and she continues to teach with the Ruiz family. HeatherAsh is the author of The Four Elements of Change, Sacred Time Management, The Pixie Solution, and The Toltec Tarot. As a doctoral student at Wisdom University she is delighted to offer Wisdom University women a bridge for connecting ancient and modern learning modalities and teachings.
B.A., Ohio State University | M.A., Princeton Theological Seminary | Analytic Training, Institute of Religion and Health | DMin, Andover Newton Theological School, 1986
The Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress serves as a Canon at Grace Cathedral. In 1996 she created Veriditas, a non-profit dedicated to introduce people the healing, meditative powers of the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a twelfth century mystical tool symbolic of the Path of Life that is re-introducing the walking meditation back into the Christian tradition. She travels worldwide offering workshops and lectures on the labyrinth and on Hildegard of Bingen. She offers a yearly program in Chartres, France, called Walking a Sacred Path that nurtures spiritual maturity. In addition to her ordination as an Episcopal priest she is a spiritual director and licensed MFT psychotherapist in the State of California. She is the author of Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth.
Ph.D., Open International University for Complementary Medicines | M.S., Yale University | M.A., University of Pennsylvania
Ordained as an Interfaith minister in 1988, Dr. Diane Berke is a recognized pioneer and leader in Interfaith ministry education. She is the co-founder and spiritual director of One Spirit Learning Alliance and One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, and a psychotherapist and spiritual counselor in private practice for almost 30 years, She is also a diplomat of the American Psychotherapy Association and a workshop leader on spiritual development throughout the United States and England. Diane is the author of two books on the spiritual path, Love Always Answers and The Gentle Smile, and four spiritual reference manuals, Developing and Deepening Your Spiritual Practice: An Interspiritual Perspective; Interfaith Minister’s Training and Reference Manual; Understanding Ourselves and Others: Basic Psychological Concepts for Ministers; and Forgiveness as a Path of Awakening. She is currently completing work on All Things Are Lessons: Essential Teachings of A Course in Miracles.
Ph.D. Harvard Medical School | Post-Doctoral Studies, Harvard Medical School | Recipient of Medical Foundation Fellowship | Post-Doc Fellowship in Psychoneuroimmunology
Joan Borysenko is a distinguished pioneer in integrative medicine and a world-renowned expert in the mind/body connection. Her work has been foundational in an international health-care revolution that recognizes the role of meaning, and the spiritual dimensions of life, as an integral part of health and healing. After graduating magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1967, Dr. Borysenko earned her doctorate in Medical Sciences from the Harvard Medical School, where she completed post-doctoral training in cancer cell biology. She later returned to Harvard Medical School to complete a second postdoctoral fellowship, this time in the new field of behavioral medicine. Under the tutelage of Herbert Benson, M.D., who first identified the relaxation response and brought meditation into medicine, she was awarded a Medical Foundation Fellowship and completed her third post-doctoral fellowship in psychoneuroimmunology.
Bruce Chilton
Ph.D., Cambridge University | M.Div., General Theological Seminary, NY | CB.A., Bard College
Dr. Bruce Chilton is a scholar of early Christianity and Judaism. He wrote the first critical commentary on the Aramaic version of Isaiah (The Isaiah Targum), as well as academic studies that analyze Jesus in his Judaic context (A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible, The Temple of Jesus; and Pure Kingdom). Dr. Chilton has taught in Europe at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Münster, and in the United States at Yale University (as the first Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament) and Bard College. Currently, he is Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard, and also directs the Institute of Advanced Theology there, as well as being chaplain of the college. Throughout his career, Dr. Chilton has been active in the pastoral ministry of the Anglican Church, and is Rector of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Barrytown, New York. His most recent books are Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography; Redeeming Time: The Wisdom of Ancient Jewish; Christian Festal Calendars; Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography; Mary Magdalene: A Biography; and Abraham’s Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
M.A., University of New Mexico | B.F.A., University of Hawaii | Lithography Printer Certificate, Tamarind Institute
Kaleo Ching is a professional studio artist, certified acupressurist, T′ai Chi practitioner (25 years), author, and teacher integrating artistic creativity and spirituality. He teaches the healing process of Chi Gung, T′ai Chi and creativity at various universities in the Bay Area, as well as at national and international conferences. Kaleo has exhibited his art extensively nationally. His private bodywork practice integrates lomilomi massage, acupressure and guided imagery. Kaleo and his wife, Elise, are the co-authors of two books, Faces of Your Soul: Rituals in Art, Maskmaking, and Guided Imagery with Ancestors, Spirit Guides, and Totem Animals and Chi and Creativity: Vital Energy and Your Inner Artist. For examples of masks made by the Wisdom School students with Kaleo, click here or view YouTube Video.
B.A. Psychology, Stanford University, 1968 | M.S.W. Psychiatric Social Work, University of California, Berkeley, 1970 | Interfaith Minister, Metaphysical Interfaith Church, 1998
Karuna Erickson is a psychotherapist and a yoga teacher, practicing in both fields for over 35 years. The focus of her work is the integration of body, mind, heart, and spirit. She is the director of the Heart Yoga Center, a registered yoga teacher training school with Yoga Alliance, and has trained yoga teachers for over 20 years. She teaches yoga internationally, interweaving Sufi poetry and Buddhist practices of mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation, and draws upon her profession as a psychotherapist in her yoga teaching to explore the union of body and mind. She has taught many workshops, classes and retreats with Andrew Harvey in which the peace of yoga is combined with the passion of mysticism. Karuna and Andrew are presently co-authoring a book entitled: Direct Path Yoga: the Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism. She has lived in the mountains of British Columbia for over 35 years, and her teaching is inspired by her love of the peace and beauty of the mountains. She teaches Direct Path Yoga, The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism, The Divine Feminine, Yoga and Meditation, Ecstatic Yoga, Remembering the Beloved, Communication Skills, Stress Management, and Exploring Relationships. Karuna is a Registered Counselor, Canadian Counseling Association and Registered Yoga Teacher (advanced), Yoga Alliance, and D. Min. student Wisdom University (since 2001).
Author of 28 books including “Original Blessing,” “The Reinvention of Work,” “Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet,” “One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths,” “A Spirituality Named Compassion” and his most recent “A New Reformation!.” He was a member of the Dominican Order for 34 years. He holds a doctorate (received summa cum laude) in the History and Theology of Spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris. Seeking to establish a pedagogy that was friendly to learning spirituality, he established an Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality that operated for seven years at Mundelein College in Chicago and twelve years at Holy Names College in Oakland. For ten of those years at Holy Names College, Cardinal Ratzinger, as chief Inquisitor and head of the Congregation of Doctrine and Faith (called the Office of the Holy Inquisition until 1965), tried to shut the program down. Ratzinger silenced Fox for one year in 1988 and forced him to step down as director. Three years later he expelled Fox from the Order and then had the program terminated at Holy Names College. Rather than disband his amazing and ecumenical faculty, Fox started his own University called University of Creation Spirituality nine years ago in Oakland, California. Fox was President and a member of the Board of Directors for nine years. He is currently lecturing, teaching and writing and is President of the non-profit that he created in 1984, Friends of Creation Spirituality. The principle objections from the Congregation of the Faith to Fox’s work were that he is a “feminist theologian;” that he calls God “Mother” (Fox has proven the medieval mystical tradition did exactly that); that he prefers “original blessing” to “original sin;” that he calls God “child”; that he associates too closely with Native Americans and people of the wikka tradition; that he does not condemn homosexuals; that he has replaced the naming of the spiritual journey as Purgation, Illumination and Union with the four paths of Creation Spirituality: The Via Positiva (joy, delight and awe); the Via Negativa (darkness, silence, suffering, letting go and letting be); the Via Creativa (creativity); and the Via Transformativa (justice, compassion, interdependence). Matthew Fox has been renewing the ancient tradition of Creation Spirituality that was named for him by his mentor, the late Father Marie Dominic Chenu, o.p., in his studies in Paris. This tradition is feminist, welcoming of the arts and artists, wisdom centered, prophetic and caring about eco-justice and social justice and gender justice issues. Fox’s effort to reawaken the West to its own mystical tradition has included revivifying awareness of Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart and the mysticism of Thomas Aquinas as well as interacting with contemporary scientists who are also mystics. Fox is a well received lecturer who has spoken at many professional and community gatherings on many continents and in many countries around the world. Fox’s books have received numerous awards and he is recipient of the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award of which other recipients have included the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa and Rosa Parks. He has led a renewal of liturgical forms with “The Cosmic Mass” that mixes dance, techno and live music, dj, vj, rap and contemporary art forms with the western liturgical tradition. Fox believes that by “reinventing work, education and worship we can bring about a non-violent revolution on our planet” and has committed himself to this vision for many years.
Dr. Gilbert has a multi-faceted background in both spiritual and scientific studies. He is a former U.S. Marine Corps Instructor in Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Warfare Survival; since leaving the service in 1985 he has conducted independent research into the Geometric basis of modern science and new technologies. Dr. Gilbert is also a Rosicrucian with more than 20 years of experience in Sacred Geometry and its hidden uses by the world’s great spiritual traditions. His non-sectarian approach is inclusive of individuals from all spiritual traditions. Dr. Gilbert holds a Ph.D. in International Studies and is a published academic author in that field, contributing to the first academic textbook in the new field of Transformational Politics. In 1997 Dr. Gilbert began for the first time to teach publicly the results of his two decades of intensive research. Today he teaches both publicly and privately in Asheville, NC. Dr. Gilbert also offers a small number of his VESICA series of special seminars throughout the United States every year. He is currently completing his first book 7 Keys to Creation: Sacred Geometry and the Patterns of Life.
Probably one of the best known contemporary poets in recent history. He was born in 1926 in Newark, NJ and recieved his B.A. from Columbia University in 1948. Like many other artists, Ginsberg held a variety of odd jobs before becoming an established writer. His employment history includes work on various cargo ships, a spot welder, a dishwasher and he also worked as a night porter in Denver. He has partcipated in numerous poetry readings, including the famous Six Gallery event that occured in San Francisco. In 1954, San Francisco painter Robert LaVigne introduced his model and companion, Peter Orlovsky to Ginsberg. Soon after this first meeting, Orlovsky and Ginsberg became lovers and moved in together, defining their relationship as a marriage. Despite periods of separation, this arrangement remained intact until Ginsberg’s death in April 1997. Ginsberg was the recipient of numerous honors and awards during his lifetime including: the Woodbury Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Award for Poetry, NEA grants and a Lifetime Ahievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In addition to the almost epic poem Howl, Ginsberg has authored numerous books, too voluminous to mention here. Many of his writings were interpreted as contrevertial and even obscene. The reading of Howl resulted in the arrest of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights Books, on obscenity charges. The authorities objected to Ginsberg’s openess concerning his homosexuality as well as the graphic sexual language. Many of his other writings deal with subjects such as narcotics and the experiences on has while under their influence. However, many other prominent writers, including Jack Keroauc, William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth, realized Ginsbergs importance. Ginsberg was greatly influenced by Keroauc’s spontaneous and carefree style and often worked in a “stream of consciousness” manner until he completed a work. Ginsberg also once, influenced by Williams, arranged some of his poems “according to how you’d break it up if you actually to talk it out” and the latter was greatly impressed by the feat. Like many of the writers of his period, Ginsberg had a desire to attain the mystical. The metaphysical poets of the nineteenth century, including William Blake, were perhaps his greatest influence. It was the desire to expand the mind and reach the spiritual that inspired Ginsberg to experment with substances such as marijuana and Benzedrine. He claimed that many of his writings, including Howl were written while he was under the influence of drugs. Ginsberg’s theme of politics was once described by Rexroth as “an almost perfect fulfillment of the long, Whitman, Populist, social revolutionary tradition in American poetry”. Many of his writings contain a war motiff: subjects such as the Nazi gas chambers and Viet Nam are the topic of many of his poems. Ginsberg is perhaps one of the most respected and revered Beat writer’s. His work is definitely worth a glance even if the writers of this period are of little interest to certain readers. After his recent death, City Lights had a celebration of his work which included the playing of some of his taped readings. Ginsberg’s writing has been compared to Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman and has been said to contain “that old gnostic tradition”.
B.A., Oxford University, 1972
Andrew Harvey was born in South India where he lived until the age of nine, a period he credits with shaping his vision of the inner unity of all religions. He left India to attend private school in England, and entered Oxford University in 1970 to study history on a scholarship. At the age of 21, he became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Fellow of All Souls College, England’s highest academic honor. In 1977, Harvey became disillusioned with life at Oxford and returned to India to begin his spiritual search. He has since lived in London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco, and has continued to study a variety of religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Harvey has written and edited over 30 books. Honors he has received include the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Mind Body Spirit Award (both for Mary’s Vineyard: Daily Readings, Meditations, and Revelations), and the Christmas Humphries Award for A Journey In Ladakh. Among Harvey’s other well-known titles are: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, edited with Patrick Gaffney and Sogyal Rinpoche; Dialogues with a Modern Mystic; The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi; Hidden Journey; The Essential Gay Mystics; and Son of Man. Andrew has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The California Institute of Integral Studies, and the University of Creation Spirituality as well as numerous spiritual centers throughout the United States. He was the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary The Making of a Modern Mystic and also appears in Rumi Turning Ecstatic and The Consciousness of the Christ: Reclaiming Jesus for a new Humanity.
M.A. in psychology, Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, 1990
Ph.D. (hon.) in literature from Selçuk University, Konya, Turkey, 1996
Kabir Helminski is a Shaikh of the Mevlevi Order and is the Co-Director of the Threshold Society, a non-profit educational foundation that has developed programs that provide a structure for practice and study within Sufism and spiritual psychology. He has translated many volumes of Sufi literature, including the works of Rumi, and is the author of two books on Sufism: Living Presence and The Knowing Heart. From 1980 until 1999, he was the director of Threshold Books, one of the foremost publishers of Sufi literature. Between 1994 and 2000 he toured with the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, bringing the spiritual culture of the Mevlevis to more than 100,000 people. His books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, and Turkish. For more than twenty years Kabir’s focus has been developing and sharing a contemporary approach to Islamic concepts and practice both within the Islamic community and outside of it. In 2001, he was the first Muslim to deliver the prestigious Wit Lectures on spirituality at Harvard Divinity School, which will be published as a book by The Paulist Press. Living with his family in Santa Cruz, Kabir now focuses on Sufi music, writing, teaching, and developing a program of spiritual education with an international team of scholars.
Richard Henry
MA, Prince’s School of Traditional Arts | MSc, University of Wales | BA Hons, Unversity of Birmingham
Richard Henry is an artist and teacher with particular interest in the contemplative aspects of pattern. He has a background in philosophy and cognitive psychology and studied for two years under Keith Critchlow, one of the world’s leading authorities on geometry in sacred and traditional art. Richard has subsequently lectured widely on this subject and has devised and taught practical portfolio courses in geometric design for the British Museum in London’s World Arts and Artifacts programme. He has undertaken field studies in Morocco, Egypt, Syria and most recently Iran. Richard is the co-editor and illustrator of Miranda Lundy’s Sacred Number (Wooden Books 2005), a book about the history and symbolism of number and has participated in a number of exhibitions exploring links between geometry and art. Richard is a visiting lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, a sessional lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London and an associate lecturer at the Open University in London.
B.FA, Art Institute of Chicago | M.FA, Art Institute of Chicago
Jennifer Hereth has taught painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 17 years. She is currently head of the Painting Department at the College of DuPage and Visiting Lecturer at Dominican University in Chicago. Jennifer has had several museum exhibitions in this hemisphere. She received a three-year Kellogg Foundation Grant for studies between North and South America during which time she did several public art projects in Brazil. In 1999 she was named one of “100 Women in Chicago Making a Difference”. In 2000 Jennifer won the outstanding volunteer award from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless for a program where her painting students illustrated the poems of homeless poets and gifted 200 paintings to the poets in this shelter project. She teaches Tapates: Central American Earth Mosaics and Altaring Your Life with the Black Madonna.
Born in Helsinki, Finland, and was educated there and in the U.S. (senior year in high school on an exchange scholarship). In his early twenties, he left Finland to live and work as a writer and translator, first in Germany and Austria, then in London, where he was employed by the BBC’s European Services in their Finnish Program from 1958 to 1967. Translations into Finnish from that time include Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and John Lennon’s In His Own Write. For the last thirty years, Hollo has lived in the United States, teaching creative writing and literary translation at numerous colleges and universities, including SUNY Buffalo, The University of Iowa, and The University of Colorado. He has read his work, lectured, and conducted workshops at many universities and colleges, art museums and galleries, literary conferences, coffeehouses, and living rooms. He is now Associate Professor in the Graduate Writing and Poetics Department at The Naropa Institute, a Buddhist-inspired nonsectarian liberal arts college in Boulder, Colorado, where he and his wife, the painter Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, make their home. Hollo has published more than thirty-five books and chapbooks of his poetry, most recently Corvus (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995) and AHOE (Erie CO: Smokeproof Press, 1997). He has also translated many contemporary Finnish poets, among them Paavo Haavikko (Selected Poems 1949 – 1988, Manchester UK: Carcanet Press, 1991) and Pentti Saarikoski (Trilogy: the last three books, Los Angeles CA: Sun & Moon, 1998), as well as fiction, plays, and poetry (by a.o. Brecht, Paul Klee, Genet, Blok, Louis Malle) from the German, French, Swedish, and Finnish. Hollo’s honors and awards include the New York State Creative Artists’ Public Service Award (1976), a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Poet’s Fellowship (1979), the P.E.N./American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for Poetry in Translation (1981), the American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for Poetry in Translation (1989), Fund for Poetry Awards for Contributions to Contemporary Poetry (1989, 1991), The Finnish Government Prize for Translation of Finnish Literature (1996), and a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry 1995-1996 (1996).
Ph.D., Union Graduate School |B.A., Barnard College
Dr. Jean Houston, a scholar, philosopher and researcher in human capacities, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time, and has long been regarded as one of the principal founders of the human potential movement. Together with her husband, Dr. Robert Masters, Dr. Houston founded the Foundation for Mind Research in 1968. She is also founder and principal teacher of the Mystery School, a program of cross-cultural, mythic and spiritual studies, dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the new physics, psychology, anthropology, myth and the many dimensions of human potential. The Mystery School is now in its third decade. A powerful and dynamic speaker, Jean is also founder of the International Institute of Social Artistry™. She has also worked extensively with 40 different cultures, helping them to maintain and strengthen their own uniqueness as they become part of the global community. Dr. Houston has recently formed the Jean Houston Foundation as an independent non-profit leadership training organization that designs and delivers innovative and catalytic leadership training globally, assisting in creating positive change at the local and global level, and working together with the UN, the Institute of Cultural Affairs, and other organizations. She is a prolific writer and author of 19 published books, including A Passion for the Possible, Search for the Beloved Life Force, The Possible Human, Public Like a Frog, A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story, The Passion of Isis and Osiris, and Jump Time.
Raymond Moody
M.D., Medical College of George |Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Virginia |M.A. Philosophy, University of Virginia |B.A. with Honors in Philosophy, University of Virginia
Dr. Ray is the best selling author of 11 books including Life After Life which has sold over 13 million copies world wide and Reunions, a bestseller, as well as numerous articles in academic and professional literature. Dr. Moody continues to capture enormous public interest and generate controversy with his ground breaking work on the near-death experience and what happens when we die. Dr. Moody is the leading authority on the near-death experience—a phrase he coined in the late seventies. Dr. Moody’s research into the phenomenon of near-death experience had its start in the 1960s. He received his M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia, 1976; Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia, 1969; M.A. in philosophy from the University of Virginia, 1967; and B.A. with Honors in philosophy from the University of Virginia, 1966. Dr. Moody trains Hospice workers, clergy, psychologists, nurses, doctors and other medical professionals in all aspects of his work. Dr. Moody also works as a practitioner of philosophic counseling. He consults on a private individual basis in person, by phone, or at the bedside of the dying. Dr. Moody has appeared three times on Oprah, as well as on hundreds of other local and nationally syndicated programs such as, MSNBC: Grief Recovery, NBC Today, ABC’s Turning Point, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael Show, Geraldo, and The Joan Rivers Show.
B.A. Journalism, 1974 | M.A., Theology, 1979 | Ph.D. Energy Medicine, 1996 http://www.myss.com/
Caroline Myss began her career as a medical intuitive in 1984 when she met C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., a Harvard trained neurosurgeon, who had an interest in the science of medical intuition. They began a colleagueship that continues to this day. During their early years together, Norm helped Caroline to develop her skills by having her conduct health readings on his patients. During Norm’s interview with a patient in his office in Springfield, MO., he would phone Caroline for her assessment of the patient’s health. The only information Caroline requires is the name and age of a patient and his/her permission. From that data, Caroline is able to profile the physical/psychological/emotional/and family history of the patient. Through this research, Caroline developed the field of Energy Anatomy, a science that partners specific emotional/ psychological/ physical/spiritual stress patterns with the specific diseases that they create or influence. This research proved so accurate that it became the subject matter of a book co-written by Caroline and Norm: The Creation of Health. Eventually this ground-breaking research became standard classroom material for students studying the principles of holistic health, psychological stress patterns, and the alternative methods of healing. In 1996, Caroline compiled her years of research in medical intuition with her work in the field of human consciousness, releasing the book, Anatomy of the Spirit. This book became a New York Times bestseller and has been published in 18 languages. Her next book, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can also became a New York Times bestseller as did her fifth book, Sacred Contracts. In 2003, Caroline founded CMED (Caroline Myss Education), her own educational institute. CMED offers two programs per year, each three sessions long. The first is on Sacred Contracts and the second is on Mysticism, Intuition, and Healing. The Institute draws students from nineteen nations as well as across the United States. In 2004, Caroline released her sixth book, Invisible Acts of Power, which also became a New York Times bestseller. Her new book, Entering the Castle: Spiritual Direction for Dialoging With Your Soul will be released in March, 2007.
In the seventh lunar month of 1951, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche was born into the Tsangsar family as the first-born son of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche whose family has, for many generations, held the now rare Barom Kagyu lineage. At 18 months of age, Chokyi Nyima – Sun of the Dharma – was recognized as the seventh incarnation of the Drikung Kagyu Lama, Gar Drubchen, a Tibetan siddha and spiritual emanation of Nagarjuna, the second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher. Soon after, he was enthroned at his predecessor’s monastery, Drong Gon Tubten Dargye Ling Monastery in Nakchukha, Central Tibet where he resumed his role as Dharma Master to 500 monks. Shortly before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, Chokyi Nyima migrated with his parents and younger brother, Chokling Rinpoche, to Gangtok, Sikkim. During his younger years, he was enrolled at the Young Lamas’ School in Dalhousie, India. At the age of 13, he entered Rumtek, seat of the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, and spent the next eleven years studying the Karma Kagyu, Drikung Kagyu, and Nyingma traditions under the guidance of such eminent masters as H.H. the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and Kyabje Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. His studies included such philosophical treatises as Vasubhandu’s Abhidharma Kosha, the Five Texts of Maitreya, Dharmakirti’s Pramanavartika, Shantideva’s Bodhicarya Avatara, and Chandrakirti’s Madhyamaka Avatara. At a very early age, Tulku Chokyi Nyima achieved the degree of Khenpo. In 1974, Tulku Chokyi Nyima left Rumtek, where he had been personal aide to the 16th Karmapa, and joined his father and younger brother, Chokling Rinpoche, in Boudhanath, Nepal where, at the command of the 16th Karmapa, they established Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery close to the Great Stupa Jarung Khashor. After its completion in 1976, he was instructed by the Karmapa to become its 25-year-old abbot. His Holiness also advised Tulku Chokyi Nyima to turn his efforts towards instructing Western practitioners. To fulfill this directive, Rinpoche honed his English language skills and began to offer weekend teachings to the Western travelers. In 1980, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and his father, Tulku Urgyen, embarked on a tour of Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia where they gave Dzogchen and Mahamudra teachings and empowerments to numerous people. In 1981, Tulku Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche founded the Rangjung Yeshe Institute for Buddhist Studies, and later established the Rangjung Yeshe Publishcations who have produced many transcripts of his teachings and commentaries. Rinpoche has a good command of the English language, and has been instructing a growing number of Western students in meditation practice since 1977. When his busy schedule allows, Rinpoche opens his doors and gives weekend teachings to interested Westerner travelers, and each fall conducts an English-translated Dharma Seminar.
Beatriz is a multi-cultural and trilingual entrepreneur born and raised in Guatemala and educated in the United States. She has had an extremely successful business career in Strategic Planning and Strategic Marketing for the past 16 years, working with several Fortune 200 multinational corporations across many diverse industries and obtaining her MBA from Northwestern’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. At the age of 33 she left Motorola as Vice President of Latin America’s Paging Division to start her own business consulting company, in order to allow time for her spiritual path. During the past 12 years, Beatriz has been immersed in studying many diverse spiritual disciplines as part of her own personal quest to find that “something missing”, finally settling on Energy Medicine and Shamanism within the last 6 to 7 years. She most recently studied at Healing the Light Body, a mystery school. Beatriz has transitioned out of the Corporate Business world and into the arena of Teaching and Healing, delving into her mission and passion by developing Awakening the Soul.
Rolf Osterberg
A seasoned executive in the film and newspaper industries. He has served as President and CEO of Svensk Filmindustri, Scandinavia’s largest film company; President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of the Swedish Newspapers Association; and executive vice president and deputy CEO of the Dagens Nyheter Group, Scandinavia’s largest newspaper company. He was also chairman of the board of over twenty companies and trade associations. He has a law degree from the University of Stockholm, Sweden. He has also attended the Senior Management Program of the Harvard Business School. Österberg lectures and gives seminars around the world on the relationship between humans and businesses organizations in a rapidly changing society. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden and Inverness, California. He is the author of Corporate Renaissance and the Search for Meaning in the Workplace, the latter with Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon.
Khenpo Sherab Ozer Rinpoche
Born in 1966 to a nomadic family, entered Drong Ngur Monastery, in Nakchu, Tibet, in 1985. In 1992, he began eight years of study in India and Nepal at the feet of many learned masters from both the Old and New Schools (Nyingma and Sarma), culminating when he was awarded the title “Khenpo” during the Drikung Kagyu Snake Year Teachings in 2000. During his time in Nepal, he spent two years as a teacher at Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s monastic college and its sister college for foreigners. In 2001, Khenpo Sherab Ozer was invited to the United States by H.E. Garchen Rinpoche. He has been asked by H.H. Chetsang Rinpoche and H.E. Garchen Rinpoche to stay in the West specifically in order to teach the Bodhicaryavatara. In May of 2004, Khenpo Sherab Ozer established the Buddhist center Drikung Namgyal Ling in Tucson, Arizona, where he currently resides. Khenpo Sherab Ozer has devoted his life to serving the Drikung Kagyu lineage. He is known for his crystal-clear, uncompromising presentations of the authentic Dharma and the loving care with which he guides his students. He is an accomplished scholar and a skilled teacher, author, singer, songwriter, and sewer. He maintains an active teaching schedule in America, Europe, and Asia.
Indian Institute of Engineering Technology, Chennai, 1982 – 1983 | College of Technology and Engineering, Chennai, India, 1983 – 1984. | Traditional Education (Indigenous System): Birla Institute of Sanskrit Studies, Karnataka, India Internships in 1994, 1998 and 2000 | Kalai Kaveri Institute of the Arts, Tiruchy, India, 1985 – 1987 | Saccidandanda Ashram, 1984 – 1989
Emin Russill Paul is recognized nationwide as a forerunner in understanding and applying sonic mysticism from the Indian tradition of yoga. Combining years of monastic training in India as a Benedictine monk and yogi under the renowned cross-cultural Benedictine monk, Dom Bede Griffiths, with extensive studies in Sanskrit mantra and Indian music in the great temple cities of South India, Russill Paul offers a comprehensive and contemporary teaching on the role of sacred sound in healing and in spiritual practice. A world-class musician, Russill Paul is the artistic producer of several best-selling yoga chant albums including Nada Yoga and AM & PM Yoga Chants (The Relaxation Company, 2000, 2001); he is also the author of The Yoga of Sound: Tapping the Hidden Power of Music and Chant (New World Library, 2006). He teaches: Journeying with the Chakras, Introduction to The Yoga of Sound, Music as Healing, An Overview of Hinduism, Meditation through Mantra, Elements of Hindu Rituals, and The Art of Contemplative Prayer.
A visionary artist, a performer of mystical poetry, and the creator and publisher of Gateways of the Divine, An Illouminated Manuscript for the Modern Age. Collette is Director of Program and Artistic Development for the New Chartres School.
BA, Yale University | Ph.D., University of Michigan
Paul Ray designed and ran the original survey research that identified the Cultural Creatives during the 1980s. His current research includes surveys on developments beyond left and right in politics, “the New Political Compass,” and theoretical and practical work on the design of a wisdom civilization, working with NGOs, with new political groups and governments, and with green and socially responsible businesses. Formerly, Paul was Executive Vice President of American LIVES, Inc., a market research and opinion polling firm specializing in surveys based on the Lifestyles, Interests, Values, Expectations and Symbols of Americans; Chief of Policy Research on Energy Conservation, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources of the Government of Canada; and Associate Professor of Urban Planning and a Faculty Associate of the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Karen Rivers
M.A., Wisdom University
Karen Rivers is co-founder of the Sophia Foundation of North America, and founder of Chrysalis Productions, a transformational theater company for children and adults. Karen works as an educator, lecturer, educational consultant and writer, offering courses in Choreocosmos and esoteric studies. She ministers the Rosamira Circle, the Sophia Grail Circle, and directs a community choir. With the Sophia Foundation, Karen has co-led pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world including Turkey, Palestine, France, Britain, Italy, and Greece. She is the Director of Wisdom University’s New Chartres School.
Kim is a poet, spoken word artist and guide of self-inquiry and transformation. Whether she is speaking poems or guiding individuals and groups, her work focuses on dissolving patterns of suffering to reveal the “Self within self” as the 15th century poet Lala says. Kim has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. For over twenty-five years, she has led trainings, workshops and retreats in the U.S., Canada, South America and the United Kingdom and has taught on the faculty of the Omega Institute, Wisdom University and the International Pathwork Foundation. In 1983 she began exploring the consciousness-shifting power of the interface between spoken poetry and music. She has offered Poetry Concerts and workshops in collaboration with such musicians as Jami Sieber, Peter Kater, Paul McCandless, David Darling, Chloe Goodchild and Gary Malkin. She has worked – both as a group facilitator and a spoken word artist – in a wide variety of settings including concert halls, conferences, universities, professional trainings, corporations, retreats, hospices and juvenile lock-down facilities. As a facilitator of inner work for groups and individuals, Kim is a Pathwork Helper and a certified practitioner of the Breathwork and the Work of Byron Katie. In addition, her work is inspired by her training in Core Energetic Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Drama Therapy, and Hands-on Healing as well as her personal immersion in the non-dual teachings of Gangaji, Adyashanti and Peter Fenner.
Linda Tucker
MA, Cambridge University | BA Hons., Cape Town University
Linda Tucker is founder the Global White Lion Protection Trust, a South African based non-profit conservation and community development organization, which is dedicated to protecting the White Lions (which are being kept in captivity and hunted as trophies) and the indigenous African culture which holds them sacred. She began her research into the White Lion mysteries after being rescued from lions in the Timbavati region of South Africa in 1991 by a shangaan shaman woman who became her teacher and introduced her to other African lion shamans. It was these elders who informed her that she herself carries the ancient shamanic title: “Keeper of the White Lions.” The conservation and ethos of the White Lion Trust, founded in 2002, integrates science, culture, education and enterprise development to protect the rare endangered White Lion and to help alleviate poverty in surrounding rural communities. This integrated approach is the only way to realize wildlife conservation objectives whilst creating long-term environmental, social and economic sustainability for South Africa’s vast rural poverty nodes. Linda was educated at the universities of Cape Town and Cambridge, where she specialized in Jungian dream psychology and medieval symbolism. She is author of Mystery of the White Lions, Children of the Sun God.
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (1920 – 1996) was widely acknowledged as one of the great meditation masters of modern times. Leaving Tibet in the face of the Chinese invasion in 1959, he settled in the hermitage of Nagi Gompa, on the northern slopes of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Here he lived quietly as a true Dzogchen yogi, visited by a steady stream of scholars, students, and practitioners from around the world. Throughout the course of his life he spent more than 20 years in meditation retreat. Tulku Urgyen was famed for his profound meditative realization and for the concise, lucid and humorous style with which he imparted the essence of the Dzogchen teachings. His method of teaching was ‘instruction through one’s own experience.’ Using few words, this way of teaching points out the nature of mind, revealing a natural simplicity of wakefulness that enables the student to actually touch the heart of the Buddha’s Wisdom Mind. Tulku Urgyen’s startlingly clear teachings have been captured in several books, including Rainbow Painting, Repeating the Words of the Buddha, Vajra Speech, and As It Is. He had many foreign students, and was keenly interested in the expansion of the Dharma to the West. It was his wish for a North American seat that motivated his eldest son, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, to found Gomde in 1998.
D.Min., Ecumenical Theological Seminary, 1992 | M.Div., Equivalency, Ashland Theological Seminary, 1991 | M.B.A., Baldwin Wallace College,
M.S.E., Saint John College of Ohio, 1985 | LPC Licensed Professional Counselor for State of Michigan, 1996 | B.A. Music Education, Notre Dame College, 1975
Carol Vaccariello is the formerly the Co-Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program. She is an ordained minister in the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ and has served as Senior Minister and Bridge Builder in Ohio, Michigan and Texas Congregations. Carol’s emphasis is bridging among western, eastern and indigenous spiritual expressions. She is a practicing facilitator of the Labyrinth, a teacher of the Medicine Wheel, and a builder of Sacred Drums. Carol is a teacher, lecturer, leader of ritual, healer and spiritual guide. She teaches: Immersion in Creation Spirituality.
Anne Waldman is a poet & teacher, and with Allen Ginsberg co-founded of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. She was born April 2, 1945 in Millville, New Jersey. During the late Sixties she ran the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work. She was featured along with Ginsberg in Bob Dylan’s experimental film ‘Renaldo and Clara.’ Waldman is one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat poetry community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive. Over the years,she has worked her magic on audiences throughout the United States and around the world, giving poetry readings in Germany, England, Italy, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, The Netherlands, Bali, India, Nicaragua and Canada. She has also worked and performed with a number of well-known musicians, composers and dancers. More recently, she has collaborated with many visual artists. Her list of publications is voluminous. She has written more than 42 books, most recently Kill or Cure (Penguin Poets) and her book-length poem, Iovis (Coffee House Press). She is now working on Book III of Iovis.Throughout the poem, Waldman is trying to come to terms with her own male energy and impulses. Waldman has been acknowledged as a major–and a mature–voice in American poetry. She delves deeply into the masculine soul and its sources of energy. Her goal: to speak against, about, around and through the all-pervasive forces of Western patriarchy and its many manifestations. Waldman’s goal for her poetry is simple, and yet anything but simple to achieve. She says, in effect, that what she is attempting to do on the page is to give readers not “a refined gist” or “an extrapolation” of feeling, thought and emotion, but an actual “experience” of “a high moment.” In effect, Waldman is attempting to bring to poetry on the page the same kind of immediacy and sense of immersion that she brings to her poetry, in public performance.
Jane Weaver has been an enthusiastic student of mathematics, music, and the connections between these two sciences for nearly all of her life. Following her college and graduate studies in the areas of music, mathematics and general systems theory, and several years of public sector teaching, she served as a faculty member of the music department at Princeton University. Having relocated to Western North Carolina she teaches piano, cello, and violin in her private studio. She also provides instruction in piano pedagogy and the geometry of music. Her Mennonite upbringing and interest in mandalic geometries led her to pursue quilting as an art form. Jane has participated in numerous local and juried national quilt shows, receiving several awards, and has commissioned work hanging in offices and homes. Her conviction that geometry and proportion lie at the heart of all creation inspires an interest in sharing that perception in both written and workshop formats. Jane’s current projects include applications of projective geometry, interpreting and furthering the work of the French radiesthesists, exploring non-quantum geometric theories of nuclear structure, and consulting in application of sacred geometry in architectural design. Jane works with architect Alice Dodson in Sacred and BioGeometric Design.
Richard Tarnas
Ph.D., Saybrook Institute | A.B., Harvard
Richard Tarnas was born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland, of American parents. He grew up in Michigan, where he studied Greek, Latin, and the classics under the Jesuits. In 1968 he entered Harvard, where he studied Western intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology, graduating with an A.B. cum laude in 1972. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, and Stanislav Grof, and later served as director of programs and education. He received his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute in 1976. From 1980 to 1990, he wrote The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought which became a best seller and continues to be a widely used text in universities throughout the world. His most recent book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network in the UK. He is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he currently teaches. He also teaches on the faculty of the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and gives many public lectures and workshops in the U.S. and abroad.
