Interdisciplinary Background

Art, contemplative inquiry, teaching, and experiential learning

My work has developed across fields that are often separated professionally but have remained deeply interrelated in my own life. Contemplative inquiry has been continuous throughout my adult life, alongside artistic work, international teaching, curriculum development, integrative wellbeing practice, and, more recently, sustained research into human-AI interaction.

Beneath these different forms of work has been a persistent inquiry into perception, consciousness, identity, embodiment, creativity, and the ways human beings learn to observe and understand their own minds. I have approached those inquiries through direct contemplative study and self-inquiry. I created experiential art that placed people within immersive environments and invited shifts in perception through physical materials, sound, light, movement, and space. I also spent years designing and teaching classes, workshops, immersions, retreats, trainings, and private sessions.

That history now informs my work in contemplative and embodied AI literacy. As synthetic language systems become increasingly integrated into contemporary culture, I explore how people can develop greater awareness of both the systems they interact with and their own cognition during those interactions.

Contemplative Study and Self-Inquiry

My contemplative education began long before I pursued formal certifications or taught professionally. Over several decades I studied meditation, Kriya Yoga, pranayama, self-inquiry, yoga philosophy, and other contemplative traditions through sustained personal study, immersive periods of direct instruction, formal training, initiations, and long-term relationships with teachers.

These traditions gave me different ways of examining questions that have remained central throughout my life: How is thought observed? How does the sense of self arise and change? How do perception, attention, body, mind, and inner life influence one another? How can philosophical knowledge become something a person investigates directly rather than simply accepts as an abstract system of ideas?

Years of study, self-inquiry, and teaching cultivated my ability to witness thought as it develops, recognize recurring patterns of mind, and engage deeply with contemplative models of consciousness, perception, identity, and the experience of self. They also developed my ability to communicate subtle material in ways that students could investigate for themselves and integrate into their own practice, worldview, and understanding of self and reality.

Formative Teachers at the Intersection of Art and Contemplative Inquiry

During my years in Tucson, two teachers were especially important to the convergence of contemplative inquiry, philosophy, and art in my work. Their teachings were distinct, but both contributed profoundly to the way I began integrating the study of mind and consciousness with immersive art-making.

Master Eveli Sabatie 

Eveli Sabatie was my teacher in Tibetan Buddhist meditation during the period in which I created Cycles of Regeneration. Her guidance was integral to my development as a contemplative practitioner, artist, and evolution as a teacher. Through my study with her, my meditation practice deepened the interrelated inquiry into perception, consciousness, and the observation of mind. 

Dennis L. Jones (1943–2019) 

Dennis Jones was my sculpture professor and mentor during the same period. His mentorship extended far beyond sculpture into philosophy, consciousness, and the study of mind. He encouraged the integration of contemplative and meditative practice directly into the process of art-making, an approach that became foundational to the immersive environments I was developing. 

Selected Teachers and Immersive Study

Guruji BNS Iyengar, Mysore, India

BNS Iyengar was another significant teacher in my contemplative development. During periods of direct study with him in Mysore, I deepened my understanding of mudras, kriyas, pranayama, and Vedantic philosophy. His teaching contributed to a more refined understanding of the relationships among breath, attention, embodied discipline, and ontological inquiry.

Additional Teachers and Periods of Immersive Study

My contemplative education also included periods of intensive study with teachers in India and Nepal whose instruction deepened different aspects of meditation, yoga philosophy, pranayama, mantra, subtle-body traditions, and contemplative practice.

Pandit Raj Kumar Vajpayee, Varanasi, India

Intensive study in Vedic asana, advanced pranayama, mantra, meditation, ritual, and subtle-body traditions.

Bhagavan Shri Shanmukha Anantha Natha and Shri Ma Kristina Baird, South India

Intensive study in traditional Tantra, Vedic philosophy, asana, and pranayama.

Swami Sagar Shrestha, Pokhara, Nepal

Immersive study in meditation and Reiki, including initiations and including Reiki initiations and sustained direct study.

Yogi Harish Chandra, Rishikesh, India

Formal teacher training and study during an important period of my development as an educator.

Art as Contemplative and Experiential Inquiry

My contemplative study developed alongside my work as a sculptor and installation artist. Over time, meditation and philosophical inquiry became increasingly integrated into the way I approached art-making. I became interested in creating environments that people could physically enter, where sound, light, material, movement, darkness, and spatial relationships could alter the conditions through which the work was encountered.

Installations such as Cycles of Regeneration, In the Moment, and The Middle Path explored different relationships among perception, embodiment, contemplation, and environment. Rather than asking the viewer to stand outside the work, these installations placed participants within them.

Continuity into the Present

The questions running through this earlier work continue in a different technological context. Since 2023, my research has focused increasingly on sustained human interaction with generative AI and on the ways cognition, authorship, creativity, judgment, and self-observation can change during extended dialogue with language models.

My current work in contemplative and embodied AI literacy grows from this longer trajectory. I am interested in learning environments that help people understand synthetic systems while becoming more attentive to their own cognition, embodied responses, creative origins, and responsibility for the ideas they develop.