How I became a Metaphysical Practitioner
One of my earliest readings from a professional astrologer was at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1997. At the time, I was mid-career as a retail manager, working 60-80 hours a week, raising a family, and trying to understand the practical, material world of science, jobs, things, and status that defined my physical being in contrast to the invisible, inner worlds of magic, religion, metaphysics, and spirituality. That first reading, delivered with sensitivity, empathy, and openness to my concerns and rationalist paradigms offered glimpses into a way of integrating two seemingly opposite ways of looking at life.
Fast forward 20 years to the summer of 2017. Still working in management, I used my free time for writing and studies in esoteric and metaphysical practices, struggling to resolve what looked like an irreconcilable conflict between the rational world my body lived in and the deeper reality my head and heart were seeking. For my birthday, my wife gifted me with a reading from a Vedic Astrologer. The profound message from that experience was that I had entered a period where I would experience far more than two ways of seeing the world, but that I would gain the certain knowledge from it that there was only one reality and that one of the gifts of human consciousness was the ability to see that reality from multiple perspectives. It was a life-altering insight. I began to understand that what modern physics had been saying—energy and matter are interchangeable, indestructible, and eternal—offered a means of reconciliation between the life of the body and mind (matter) and the energetic force behind it (call it soul, spirit, atman, consciousness). There was no conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of the body. There was simply more than one way to view it. The trap was the illusion that there was a separation between energy and matter.
Extending that idea to all of life, it didn’t take long to realize that meditation, yoga, astrology, and most intuitive practices that didn’t lend themselves to quantitative scientific examination were nonetheless present and appeared to precede the incarnation of matter into energetic forms. Human consciousness, as both physicists and mystics have written, is the lens through which the awake and aware universe is able to experience life as an individual. All of the traditional and non-traditional or metaphysical practices in their original forms were individuals seeking a path back to that place of whole consciousness.
This was all interesting, but it didn’t really help me meet any job performance goals or help my children get better grades or the thousand and one other concerns of life in the “real world.” But it put me on a path, one that took me deep into studies of the Vedic Science of Light, also called Jyotish or Vedic Astrology. I had some background in Western (Hellenic) astrology, but it never quite hit the mark when it came to the details of mundane existence. Through deeper, formalized studies of Ayurvedic Astrology, attending conferences, and through studying my own charts as well as hundreds of others, I came to see that Planets, Signs, and Houses, when viewed through a 5,000 year-old practice that began at the foot of the Himalayas long before the Persian, Egyptian, or Greek Civilizations emerged, had evolved and developed as a means of seeing forces of subtle energy in relation to matter that could serve as a highly accurate and effective mapping tool for empowering individual lives.
I completed Dr. David Frawley’s 300-hour course through the American Vedic Institute and began doing readings for clients in 2020. Having seen approximately 200 clients in the past 20 months and sharing, discussing, and strategizing over how the information in their individual charts can better equip them for making choices that align with the strengths and challenges found therein, and having them echo many of my own feelings of relief, empowerment, and comprehension of the usefulness and power of the practice, I am seeking a way to work with more individuals and groups seeking to live richer, more empowered, less stress-filled lives.
American Vedic Astrology 