My Story
Much of my life and career has been dedicated to pursuing holistic healing for myself and others, through building my company, Optimal Health Network. Through that work, I have written dozens of articles based on my 25-plus years of practice, as well as the book Ten Days to Optimal Health: A Guide to Nutritional Therapy and Colon Cleansing.
Simultaneously, I've been on an emotional and spiritual journey that began in 1981 when my thirteen-year-old brother Jay died in a car accident. Jay had been warning us of his death for over a year, calmly and clearly and in great detail. When his tragic death unfolded exactly as he told us it would, we didn't know what to do. My mother retreated from the world, and from me. Any sense of family or community I once had was destroyed. With no space for my grief, I followed a societal pattern of ignoring this tragedy, and it nearly destroyed me.
But through my determination to live and some fateful encounters, I've been able to create a life full of growth and transformation. I recovered from substance addiction, used colon cleansing and dietary change to heal from chronic illness, and found emotional healing tools to face the grief of losing my brother and the fear of my own eventual death. I have studied with spiritual teachers and thought leaders and have learned about the transformative power of refusing to shy away from painful topics.
Decades after Jay died, I followed a deep calling to write his story. For years, I engaged in a regular contemplative writing practice while also tracking down people who could help me remember Jay. I wanted to understand exactly how his death could have happened in the very way he described it.
How did he know he would die? Why was he so at peace with dying? Did he know something about the universe that we don't? The result of my quest is a memoir about healing and human potential, What My Brother Knew, which will be published with She Writes Press on May 27, 2025.
The process of researching and writing my memoir coincided with a period of spiritual exploration and awakening in my life. In 2015, I discovered evolutionary spirituality through the work of Barbara Marx Hubbard, and I instantly fell in love with the framework of conscious evolution as a path of spiritual activism. In 2017, I became a student of Dr. Marc Gafni and, soon after, a board member for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion on which I now serve as Vice-Chair. The Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to CosmoErotic Humanism, a reweaving of the human story. Much of my work with the center has focused on developing and publishing Evolutionary Sensemaking books for the Great Library, a body of work written as a response to the question: "What do we need to give our children so they can prosper and grow into their highest potential—even though we don’t know what kind of challenges they will face in their lives?" I am also the Co-Executive Producer of One Mountain, Many Paths, where I lead regular co-study groups.
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