my biospiritual journey

Years ago I applied to a training program for spiritual directors, and part of the process was writing a ‘spiritual autobiography.’ As I reflect on my past now, with more perspective, I see the journey as a creative collaboration between my past, my temperament, and the ways reality leads us to greater selflessness, warmth of heart, and clarity of understanding. I've edited it to make it less specific to the time it was written, but beyond those changes it is pretty much the essay I submitted prior to entering the program.

My spiritual quest grew out of a traumatic childhood. The adversity of my earliest years set the stage for unwise choices during young adulthood and serious mental and physical health problems in middle age. Although at times I suffered greatly, many of my most important lessons arose directly from traumas, setbacks, and illnesses. The challenges forced me to seek connection with a higher principle, which I often simply call Life (though I am comfortable calling it God, Presence, or any similar term for the Source of creativity, love, unity, peace, and mystery).

My parents had a violent relationship and divorced when I was four. My mother suffered with depression and was repeatedly hospitalized for shock treatments, then committed suicide when I was six. After our mom’s death, my older sister and I moved in with our father and his new wife (his mistress prior to the divorce), who had sociopathic traits and treated us with calculated cruelty. My sister, the one family member who consistently supported me, suffered a psychotic break after about four years in my stepmother’s home. Sadly, she never seemed as supportive afterward. My father, mother, stepmother, and sister all suffered from substance abuse. By adolescence I had developed serious addictions of my own and was performing poorly in school.

Luckily, we had settled in a nice area of Southern California, close to beaches and coastal mountains where I found refuge from the mistreatment at home. My father—a professor of fluid dynamics—encouraged my curiosity about these natural surroundings. I also enjoyed a month each year with my grandfather on his farm. He loved tending the land and taught me a lot about plants and animals. In high school I went on many camping trips, drawn to the vastness of nights outdoors.

In the summer before my senior high school year, I hiked the 211 mile John Muir Trail by myself. Backpacking for weeks alone in the High Sierras increased my self-confidence and solidified my love of nature. My days among the granite mountains raised me to physical, psychological, and spiritual peaks. I made a decision to devote myself to studying life (at this point I wouldn’t have capitalized the word), and upon returning home I worked to improve my grades.

College deepened my curiosity about natural history; I took courses in all areas of biology, but especially ecology. The living world struck me as amazing and mysterious, even as I memorized the mechanistic interpretations taught in my classes. In logical terms, I saw no need for explicit spirituality, but my relationship with nature had a devotional quality.

In the late 1970’s technical approaches to biology carried more prestige than ecological ones. Lacking confidence in my yearning to study nature, I opted for the greater status of a biophysics graduate program, where I used electrical engineering methods to mathematically model the information processing performed by networks of nerve cells. My choice of neuroscience had been fueled by fascination with the brain and consciousness. However, my research involved recording signals from earthworm neurons; this was tedious, lonely work. It also felt disconnected both from the big questions that had drawn me to the field, and from the richness of nature.

I had recently broken up with a girl I’d lived with since high school. Already feeling unhappy, I suffered another major blow when my grandfather died. Off-track from my original passion for the natural world—and reeling from major losses—I grew increasingly depressed. 

I was referred to a psychologist with a fine reputation, but unfortunately he was a New Yorker who did not understand a Californian’s desire to study the outdoors. Seeing a biology student with excellent grades, he encouraged me to apply to medical school. Although I’d never had much interest in becoming a physician, I followed my therapist’s advice.

I wasn’t well-suited to medicine. My traumatic past left me prone to dissociation, and I sometimes made careless mistakes that harmed patients. But looking back, I see that clinical training set me solidly on the spiritual path.

For one thing, medical school prompted me to join Alcoholics Anonymous. Although my drug use had diminished since high school, my alcohol use had increased. I knew it wouldn’t be ethical to work as a physician unless I were abstinent, so I started attending 12-step meetings. Having been raised without religion, I found AA’s spirituality challenging. I understood that a belief in God would be helpful, but whenever I visited churches, I felt out of place. Fortunately, I moved to New York for my internship and took an apartment just blocks from the 15th St Quaker Meeting house. It was across the street from the park nearest to where I lived, so I saw it often when I went there to experience some greenery while studying. My maternal ancestry was Quaker, so I was intrigued. The first time I attended a meeting for worship, I felt some kinship. I appreciated the silence, the lack of hierarchy, and the emphasis on social justice. Quakerism has been central in my life ever since.

Medical school helped me discover that nature’s mystery isn’t confined to beautiful landscapes, but is equally active in the human body. Human biology intrigued me almost as much as ecology, and I began to see parallels between what goes on in the body and in the natural world. It was a privilege to witness births, surgeries, and deaths. The first time I watched an infant being born, the labor and delivery suite seemed to fill with golden light; I felt such powerful emotion, it was hard to keep from weeping. I felt something equally moving during my first night on call as a medical intern, when an AIDS patient died in my presence. He looked up at my worried face with a blissful expression and said, “I know the answer that everyone seeks!” and then lost consciousness, permanently. During that moment laden with tragedy and release, there was such stillness it seemed as if the world stopped spinning.

My Quaker involvement helped me frame such experiences in mystical terms, rather than reverting to biomedicine's reflexive skepticism. I used my time in silent meetings to deeply contemplate scientific truths and human trials until they began to merge into wholeness, a divine work of art. I wasn’t too concerned about Life’s meaning (by now the word begged capitalization), but I deeply admired its beauty.

Another flood of wonder struck me the first time I looked into a human eye with ophthalmic instruments. On the spot, I decided to specialize in eye surgery. Although ophthalmology demanded extreme attention to detail, which was hard for me, serendipity guided me to a subspecialty that matched my temperament: operating on eyelids to remove cancers and then reconstruct the tissues to restore proper function and form. This line of work was more forgiving than intra-ocular surgery, and it involved an esthetic aspect that I appreciated.

In the year 2000, after practicing only six years at Kaiser, I began experiencing significant neck pain while operating. My neck issues were partly the result of early trauma. My stepmother used strangulation to frighten and subdue me. And as an adolescent I'd once been thrust headfirst into the sand while bodysurfing. My doctors saw evidence of old injury and said my work as a surgeon was causing deterioration. After many consultations, I left me surgical career.

My depression, which had never fully resolved after its onset in graduate school, soon worsened. I ended up in a psychiatric hospital, where I felt what seemed like demons and attempted suicide as an inpatient. Having survived, I felt angered by the shadowy forces that wanted to destroy me. A resolve arose inside me to get out of the hospital and fight against them. I left the ward with renewed commitment to Life.

Over the next few days, my mood escalated until I found myself in a state of awestruck bliss. Visions of God, the Big Bang, and gentle, floating souls appeared in my consciousness as wave after wave of religious ecstasy broke over me for several days. Again and again I felt immersed in all-pervasive love, a profound sense of peace, and the seamless flow of Creation that interconnects all beings. At one point I lost the ability to speak or understand language, and for the first time in my life appreciated the mysterious power of nonverbal awareness. All these experiences were deeply moving and transformative, but they made me question my sanity, while my agitated behavior alarmed my wife. We presented to the local emergency room, where I was diagnosed with psychosis secondary to mania, which was itself due to Bipolar Disorder. That was the medical interpretation, which I didn't dispute, but I was also sure something more mysterious was going on. I agreed to a second psychiatric hospitalization. 

For more than a decade my Quaker worship had focused on viewing biology through a mystical lens. Thus it seemed natural during the course of my religious epiphanies to find compatibility between medical and mystical frameworks. Beyond that, in one of my visions an angel had appeared before me and assigned a mission: I was to heal the rift between science and religion. Although in the hospital one knowledgeable counselor cautioned me about ego inflation, I did not (or could not) heed her warning. I found this hard advice to follow as wave after wave of realization broke over me. 

Fortunately, my wife experienced a striking coincidence that led her to seek guidance and help me get back on course. Understandably, she was quite concerned about me, in particular because I was convinced I’d met Jesus on the psychiatric ward. I seemed to have lost my normally cautious nature and was talking nonstop about my newfound Christian faith. She saw this as an unhealthy break and worried I had simply lost my mind. Soon after I returned home from the hospital, she was walking up Market Street in San Francisco when a street preacher called to her as she passed. He reached into his valise to retrieve a sheet of paper, which he handed to her. On it were the words “Saint Andrew, First Follower of Christ.” This alone would have been remarkable, but the document also named Saint Andrew’s day: November 30th, which happens to be my birthday.

My wife interpreted this event as verification that, however unbalanced, my altered state was the result of God reaching out to me. Having been raised in the Catholic Church, she took me to our local parish. At the time three priests were living on-site, and during subsequent months all of them worked with me. They took my spiritual experiences seriously but also taught me that Christianity calls the devout toward humility, not self-glorification.

Having found such valuable support, I worked my way through the Rites of Catholic Initiation for Adults (RCIA) and converted to Roman Catholicism, taking ‘Andrew’ as my confirmation name. I worshiped in that tradition with zeal for five years and with a bit less energy for another five. In the early phase, I attended mass twice a week and helped out with youth religious education. I went on two eight-day silent Ignatian retreats and spent a year in spiritual direction with a young Jesuit. I also remained committed to the Religious Society of Friends. On most Sundays, my wife and I attended both a Catholic Mass and a Quaker Meeting for Worship.

By 2005, all three of the liberal parish Fathers had departed; our local church was now led by a priest who railed against reproductive rights and homosexuality during his homilies. Listening to his hostile, judgmental tone, my wife suffered flashbacks to traumatic experiences she’d endured during Catholic education. We stopped going to mass at that parish and gradually drifted away from Catholicism. 

Still grappling with serious depression, I began seeing a new psychiatrist. This doctor did not believe I was as irreversibly mentally ill as I’d been told ever since my hospitalizations. She believed my intense moods were the result of childhood trauma, and she felt convinced I could improve more by ramping up my spiritual life than by continuing on the mind-numbing regimen of psychiatric drugs I'd taken ever since discharge from the hospitals. With her help, I tapered off most of the medications, a process that took five years.

As I was working on freeing myself from pharmaceuticals, a Brahma Kumaris retreat center opened within walking distance of my home. Heeding my psychiatrist’s advice about concentrating on spiritual development, I started attending the center’s events and retreats and began receiving guidance from one of the Sisters. The Brahma Kumaris philosophy seemed similar to Catholicism’s, in that both share the conviction that God is directly accessible. However, the all female leadership seemed much more open-hearted than the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Influenced both by Catholicism and the Brahma Kumaris, I worked on building a personal relationship with God. This wasn’t easy for me at first, but using my Quaker sense that a divine light shines within each person, I gradually established a relationship with that inner heart of Life.

As my spiritual maturity increased, I began to feel the urge to write about my progress. I launched a blog to explore the relationship between spirituality and mental health. I was writing to sort out my own feelings, but my essays seemed to help others who had endured harsh childhoods and were trying to find their way.

Soon after starting the blog, I decided to learn how to perform acupuncture. Having found the deep, meditative relaxation needles induce helpful for my depression, I wanted to use the technique to support others suffering from mood disorders. In order to reconcile this foreign healing paradigm with my biomedical training, I read a lot about Taoism and Chinese philosophy. This led to a broader exploration of Eastern mystical and meditative traditions. I'd practiced techniques from Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) classes for a decade, but up to that point I hadn't explored Buddhism, which informs them.   finally made my first trip to Spirit Rock, a local center for Insight Meditation. I became a regular participant at dharma talks, began volunteering, and started attending residential retreats.

I closed my struggling acupuncture practice in 2012, when I became unable to work due to an internal hemorrhage that led to several weeks of hospitalization followed by a month during which I was fed intravenously at home. The illness confronted me with my own mortality, which led me to redouble my spiritual efforts. As I reached out to everyone around me who seemed wise, fate guided me to the director of Oakland’s Niroga Institute, who invited me to teach anatomy and physiology in a training program for yoga teachers. Explaining human biology in a spiritually friendly environment reinvigorated my appreciation of biology’s power to teach us about Life. I began to incorporate more body awareness into my spiritual practice, doing my best to remain mindful of my physiology while moving through yoga poses or simply meditating.

I also completed a yoga teacher training myself. I taught yoga for a few months at a homeless shelter and at a drop-in center for the chronically mentally ill, but eventually decided to focus on personal practice while offering biology instruction to aspiring yoga teachers and yoga therapists. I taught at the Yoga institute for six years, until they quit offering teacher trainings. My lectures relied heavily on visually inspiring slide presentations, which I put together with a loving care. Without conscious planning on my part, I found a way to heed the call of my visions from 2000: my teaching was merging science with spirituality. 

As I gained stability and opened to joy, people with traumatic backgrounds and mental health issues—in AA and elsewhere—began to seek out my perspective and support. As I learned that my life experiences could assist others, my past history began to seem less like a curse and more like a gift. At this stage, although I felt a call to service, I doubted my ability to offer effective help.

After all, I was still finding my way. In addition to my involvement with the Brahma Kumaris center, Spirit Rock, and Niroga, I went on vision fasts in the high desert, participated in Holotropic Breathwork retrreats, was treated by a spiritually-informed somatic therapist, and started writing mystical poetry. I also worked with an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) practitioner who helped me meet my changing mental states with less resistance and more acceptance. As always, my spirituality revolved around my love of biology, but now I began to feel Life vibrating on all sides—in every person, animal, plant, and tract of ground. I started to wonder about the relationship between matter and consciousness, while during meditation retreats vast opening experiences seemed to dissolve all distinctions between the two. Such visions and insights provided rich new material for my writing.

I underwent a major abdominal operation to deal with the vascular problem that had caused my hemorrhage two years earlier. In preparing for the procedure, I asked a local priest to hear my confession on Ash Wednesday, the day before my surgery. During my years of worship within the Catholic Church, I had confessed several times to having harmed patients through inattention and overconfidence, but on this occasion I felt the full, terrible weight of remorse. I also learned the healing power of absolution; mistakes that had burdened me for decades seemed forgiven.

Because of a failed epidural catheter, I awoke from anesthesia—after a four hour operation and a 12-inch incision through my belly—without any pain control. The postoperative experience was so intense, it felt like a shamanic journey; I had no choice but to surrender to the harrowing ordeal. Ever since, I’ve found it relatively easy to accept my circumstances, even when they involve discomfort and loss. What’s more, questions about consciousness and the nature of reality no longer seem so important. Our task seems simply to quit resisting and yield to beauty.

Having moved beyond my old writing topics, I launched this website to illuminate the healing power of Life with straightforward facts about human biology. The fact that fifty million synapses are packed into a volume of brain tissue the size of a grain of salt strikes me as deeply profound; how can we not feel admiration and devotion toward Life?

Although powerful times in nature continued to inspire mystical awareness, I began to focus more on keeping my heart open as Life unfolds, moment-by-moment, no matter where I was. As this capacity to abide in direct experience deepened, I asked a local non-dual teacher to help me explore its subtleties. And after a few years with him, I spent another few years with a new somatic therapist. Both of them helped me resolve deep feelings of unworthiness and unlovability.

My love for the earth and all beings upon it (including myself!) has grown warm and consistent. Given my long history of mood afflictions, medical problems, and professional setbacks, I find such steady, sweet affection both refreshing and startling. As predicted by the psychiatrist who saved me from overmedication, spiritual growth freed from post-traumatic suffering. This application is inspired but what seems like a renewed but matured  call to help others.

Since biology has been so central to my recovery, it will no doubt influence how I practice spiritual direction. Yet I am well aware my approach isn’t for everyone. In fact, it will be interesting to discover how different people follow their own unique leadings. Learning to offer support through openhearted inquiry seems like a natural step on my lifelong journey toward the heart of Life.