A PERSONAL JOURNEY: MINE & YOURS

            Today, I am healthier, more energetic, successful, fulfilled, and happier than I've ever been. Getting to this level of well being didn't occur overnight. It took a long time to find, learn, release, and integrate wholeness. A big part of this was finding my Self through SelfQuesting™, but proper exercise and diet, and essential oils, were (and still are) also a big part of that journey. I never guessed as a young boy growing up in Minnesota, adventuring in the woods along the Minnesota River bottom, the expanded quest I'd be drawn to once out of high school. Or how lonely it would be at times, traveling down the less-traveled, unlit paths.


Greg- never been more healthy

            My journey into personal betterment through nutrition, essential oils, and inner work began several decades ago when much less was known than is now, and even less was being said about it. The one thing that excited me about changing my diet and ways, and that slowly propelled me to learn and experience more, was that I cared enough about myself to do it. I'm going to say that again because it's important, "I cared enough about myself to want to be better and have a better life."

Take a moment to just sit quietly and be aware of this question, "Do I care enough about myself to search for that something more that I somehow know is there?" If, like many others, your spirit, mind, hope, and Self has been buried and you've given up, maybe quietly without ever really having started to search (or even being aware of it!), then just know that it only takes your caring enough for yourself to ignite the action that will begin to create positive change. And when you do it for yourself, you do it for others, so don't use others as an excuse not to do for yourself. If one truly takes care of them self first, then and only then will they be empowered and in a position to properly care for and love others.

When considering what life-path to take, learn to adventure with your heart the less-traveled roads. Searching under the well-lit, artificial lights of what you were reasonably taught is not likely to bring you to happiness and fulfillment, but will more likely bring you to silently suffer what Emerson and Thoreau called the "a life of quiet desperation."

The Long Road Home

I was in my early teens in the mid 1960's when I had a life-changing experience, an epiphany. I saw the TV show host Jack LaLanne take a large glass bowl and enthusiastically (he does everything that way!) place in it all we eat in a day: juice, eggs, cereal, toast, coffee, sandwiches, mayonnaise, soda, catsup, milk, cake, pie, steak, mashed potatoes, ice cream, more coffee, etc.  Jack even threw in the cigarettes that were so much more popular then (thankfully that's changed!), just to drive home his point. And then he then stirred it all up, and the camera panned in for a close-up. Well... it was a mess! Jack then said, "is it any wonder you don't feel well and have no energy, when you do this to yourself?!"

Well, I got the point... big time! Jack changed my life that day. And set me on a journey in search of better health (and a better life) through nutrition and exercise. He sparked my hope for a good life "through a better me." Thanks Jack! It's a joy to see he's approaching 100 and just as full of life as ever! What a beautiful and truly enlightened person! Soon after that I began to change my diet and studied martial arts, slowly pushing the envelope of what I knew about myself.

            Since those early teen years, the path of my journey has wandered through many trials and pitfalls. I suppose just as the path of all honest seekers winds - if they're true to themselves and open enough to risk facing the unknown - what the poet Robert Frost called "The Road Less Traveled," the only true path to self-fulfillment. I've learned that if you're following your heart - "your bliss" as Joseph Campbell called it - then it's all the more fulfilling, when with persistence you finally begin to manifest the results of your quest into the unknown.

Greg on raw foods

            Over the years my travels ranged widely, from being a counselor-guard in a maximum security psychiatric hospital, where among other things I assisted in developing and running one of the first sex-offender treatment programs in the country, to truck-driving and construction work to finance a college degree. My schooling ranged from undergrad degrees in psychology and pre-medicine, to later return to study physics, math, and computer engineering, receiving several awards including an internship at Argonne Labs, where I assisted in computer-modeling the mechanical, electrical, and thermal behavior of a super-conducting magnet used to contain the toroidal field of a nuclear fusion reactor. I worked on the Space Shuttle program at Rockwell International in Los Angeles (in the facility where the Space Shuttle was built). And in the 1980's, long before the Internet was popular, I wrote computer code, and designed and tested network protocols, for high-security computer networks with companies like Unisys, Ascom-Timeplex, IBM, CitiCorp-TTI, Intel, etc. After years of exploration, I got back to clinical psychology and at the end of my studies synchronously fell into what became the SelfQuesting Approach™ to wholing states of consciousness. This integrated what I learned from peek experiences of Self and a study of philosophy and religion with clinical psychology practice, to shape a higher order paradigm and approach to whole being.

Synchronous Encounters

Behind this confusing mix of left-and-right-brained activity and exploring, I now realize I was developing - schooling in graduate psychology toward my PhD, drawing together previous studies of ancient wisdom and the new "postmodern" sciences like Chaos Theory and quantum physics - gaining the experience and broad metaphysics to understand and link ancient wisdom with postmodern science in a practical way. And I was exploring and healing myself in psychotherapy, too.

In all this, I was gradually growing and integrating what I gained from two visionary experiences I had at 19 and 21 - peak experiences of cosmic self-awareness and unified Self triggered by an adventurous heart daring to seek the Ground of Being (Eckhardt). The understanding and integration of these heightened experiences of Self was necessary for a fulfilled life. But I hadn't been able to integrate the knowing and sense of reality gained from these experiences into my clinical practice as a psychotherapist, which left it dis-empowered and lacking. I didn't understand then that my worldview needed a shift, to encompass a new consciousness-based paradigm even though it was right in front of me all the time (thus the true meaning of the word esoteric "open secret").

            In 1979 a chance encounter introduced me to a comprehensive cosmology in the Tree of Life, which introduced the idea that consciousness was the directing, driving force in the universe, not the physical as modern science held. This was the metaphysics I needed to understand the two peak encounters with reality I had had as a young adult! The Mystical Kabbalah based on this worldview gave me a theoretical framework with which to understand these peak experiences of Self experienced a decade earlier. Here I also was introduced to the power of essential oils to create wholeness and expand the Self. But it was another 15 years before I was grounded and ready to take on practical, modern, consciousness-based applications, or to bring them together into my own consciousness-based approach to facilitating whole being.

            In 1994 I met several practitioners exploring consciousness and the unconscious. One offered a method of Jungian active imagination that sought to connect with unconscious elements. Others offered a method of connecting with fragments of self-awareness lost to the unconscious. Both processes aimed to access unconscious elements and create wholeness of self-awareness. Experiences with these people and their methods offered a missing link, and gave focus and energy to my professional and personal development. Integrating what I had learned from my two peak experiences, a prolonged study of ancient wisdom and postmodern science culminating in my PhD dissertation, and the book that followed "Freud's Innuendo and Jamshid's Cup: the Postmodern Search for Self in the Shadow of the Newtonian World", and my practice in psychotherapy and clinical psychology, along with these postmodern approaches to the unconscious, led to the birthing of the SelfQuesting Approach™ to wholing states of consciousness.

Going Raw

            About the time I was exposed to the cosmology of the Tree of Life, I was also introduced to cleansing and the raw-food diet, which gave me another push on the journey to whole being. After decades of physical decline, I was suffering from listlessness and pains too numerous to mention, which included back pain and a limp from a car accident that a host of doctors and therapists at the University of Minnesota Hospitals hadn't helped in well over a year. The first week on raw foods (fruits and vegetables) at a Natural Hygiene clinic southeast of San Antonio, Texas, run by Ralph Cinque, cleared up ALL OF THESE PROBLEMS, including an ulcer that was first diagnosed when I was ten (yep, ten years old, an ulcer!)! The buzzards of petrochemical, heavy-metal, and other toxicity had come home to roost.

Taking a side trip through the high-protein, Atkins diets, etc. that then was thought necessary to clear up the heavy-metal poisoning that was diagnosed (from which we ALL suffer to a greater extent than currently known or appreciated), eventually I came back to raw food. But this time people like David Wolfe and Gabriel Cousens, MD were teaching and offering rawfoods in a more developed and hybridized manner than I had been exposed to in Natural Hygiene. The expanded variety of foods, super foods, and broader practice made the diet more enjoyable, along with my evolved ability to appreciate it from a greater wholeness of Self, and thus be less haunted by my undiscovered, fear-based self and its symptoms of dis-ease.

There also were the Young Living Essential Oils™ products, like Chelex and Juva Cleanse (that effectively chelate heavy metals) and a host of other fine essential-oil products to cleanse and provide nutrition, like Ningxia Red (an uncooked, whole-food, mix of wolfberry, pomegranate, blueberry, and oils that is astounding in its affect in nourishing and cleansing the body over time) and Sulfurzyme (great for reducing inflammatory pain like bursitis, arthritis, tendonitis, etc., and generally supporting the body/mind and reducing aches, pains, and listlessness (the best way to take MSM because the wolfberry in it makes the sulfur many times more bioavailable).

And of course there were the essential oils. They really are the boon of humankind, about which we are still in babyland in terms of their power to effect positive change in the body/mind/energy/spirit (all four levels of our being) and support wholeness. Nothing in the material, or in the realm of subtle energy, compares with a truly pure, properly grown and handled, essential oil - not herbs or other plants oils come from, not mechanical or electro-magnetic devices, not even rawfoods, and certainly not the toxic prescription drugs which form the crux of the huge, cash-cow disaster called modern medicine. I wish I had had knowledge of essential oils much earlier on in my suffering and elimination of heavy metals and petrochemicals, more recently zeolites show much much promise for detoxification.

When essential oils are combined synergistically with the other tools mentioned in this website a well-rounded program to support whole being is created that is truly amazing in its results. One that can only be finalized within a process that enters the system at the deep causal level of consciousness to truly "free the spirit" (conscious being, Self) and create wholeness and well being - like the SelfQuesting Approach™ to wholing states of consciousness.

A Suggestion

            For those lost and alone, who have no hint of a path, I offer a suggestion. Get yourself a pet. I'm not talking about a small bowl of goldfish, but some being that's connected with its real needs and can express them, and that you can have a relationship with - a being that needs you. Like children, animals are good at being in touch with what's real (provided they haven't had it tramatized out of them). So adopt an animal from the local animal shelter and develop a relationship based on its need (and your enjoyment in providing for it). Then see what comes up for you that gets in the way of you accepting and loving it. Your stressful life, your resentment, anger, unmet needs - it'll all come up. Just like when cleansing and detoxifying. These are the times to connect with a SelfQuesting™ facilitator, to find the missing fragments of your Self that are calling through these blocks to accepting and connecting with that simple beautiful being (reflecting your inability to accept your own being).

And then, when you've mastered the pet thing and can love and get something from that, create a relationship with a significant other human. I'm talking about a real relationship where there's both independence and interdependence (yeah -scary, huh?). Get into a relationship that is something more than for just sex, money, power, control, because you think you ought to, because everyone else is, because you're alone or sad, because you've always had one, or because that person can advance your career or take you where you want to go. That kind of petty prostitution needs to end, along with any pretentious so-called "spiritual" or "religious" dogma, and any action that serves to control. Fragmentation loves the illusion of control (power), and holds a strong sense of spiritual absence and hopelessness. Both the drive to control and the spiritual crisis of fragmentation are layered and laced with reason and intellect, and this requires the end of head-trips.

To do this you'll have to quiet the trapped consciousness that drives the dogma, compulsions, meaninglessness, and need for control that serve to act out and cover pain and fear. In ceasing to chase and worship the external this way, and in facing that internal awareness that unconsciously compels you outwardly, you can become (as the wise Buddhist said), less like the dog that chases after every bone thrown, and more like the lion that goes for the thrower. In this way you become your own master, conscious and free. Rather than an unwitting slave to your unconscious.

Nostalgia and Joy

I now think back through the decades to Jack LaLanne's TV show and that big glass bowl disgustingly filled with the Standard American Diet (SAD), and the long, winding path traveled with others since. I am so grateful for how far I've come questing and journeying to Self and a joyous whole being. And it's accelerating, getting better all the time!

For those who want assistance, I enjoy sharing my knowledge and experience. More importantly, I enjoy assisting others to walk and find their own unique path. Facilitating another's SelfQuesting™ is wonderful, meaningful work, from which there's no retiring, no strain or drain, and ever-increasing value and growth. Once ones Self-awareness is united in wholeness, then ones life path synchronously unfolds before them, to materialize necessary modalities and needs with ease. Reflecting wholeness of conscious being, life flows outside with ease, "with the Tao." One synchronously comes to possess a natural, royal, godly array that "even Solomon in all his glory" did not possess.

Life should be a path of continuously expanding light, energy, happiness, love, and wisdom right up to the moment that we move on. Not the slow, progressive decline into hopelessness, running from love and personal power, and grudging acceptance of confusion, disease, and death that many people experience. That is not life, but a long slow death, and it isn't necessary! "Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you." Exercise (and exorcize) your spirit by beginning and continuing your quest for wholeness and well being.

If you care enough about yourself (and others [they go hand in hand]), you'll prioritize and embark now on your journey in search of whole being. I'm available with a lifetime of learning and experience, and an arsenal of wellness tools and SelfQuesting™ offering what I now realize I've come here to do - to share and assist others on their journey in the way they want and need.

Call, and let's get to know one another. I believe I can greatly facilitate, ease, and expand your journey to a meaningful and happy life. I believe the personal and professional experience (everything I do involves all of me as a person) I can bring to bear with the SelfQuesting Approach™ to your life's issues (which we all share in common to some extent) will transform you and your life. I believe you'll clearly see and experience positive transformation in a practical and profound way in your very first SelfQuesting™ session.