In early June of 1971, I was wandering the streets of Ashland, Oregon, a lost soul, floating in a sea of confusion. I was suffering the painful consequences of naïveté on my first "adult" foray out into the world, feeling sorry for myself, trying to pick up the pieces of a broken dream, and move on. I happened to see a flyer on a bulletin board advertising the services of a man named Sunny Blue Boy, who spoke the Star Tongue, and promised to help me put my life in order. I was intrigued, and perhaps somewhat desperate, so I called him up, gave him my birth information, and arranged an appointment.
I explained at the outset that I didn't have any money, but that maybe I could trade something he might be interested in. Sunny Blue Boy didn't seem the least disturbed by my revelation. Here was obviously a man who had found something that excited him, and that he wanted to share. I settled back for an experience that I could not foresee ahead of time would become a turning point in my life. For the next five hours, Sunny Blue Boy proceeded to tell me more about myself than I could ever have imagined my best friend, let alone a complete stranger, would be able to tell. I was absolutely fascinated. I simply had to know how he could possibly know what he knew.
Thus began for me a 30+ year study of astrology, and the journey that has lead me to the foundation of The Astropoetic School. Since that fateful day, I have had the pleasure to read the birthcharts of hundreds of incredible people from all walks of life, and from all around the world. I have also studied my own chart in great depth, and still marvel each time I return to it, just how much new information it is capable of revealing. Rarely have I ever applied astrological insight to a situation, whether my own or someone else's, that it has not borne the gift of clarity, affirmation, and empowerment.
My Spiritual Quest
Throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, in addition to my ongoing work with traditional astrology, I also studied and explored many other spiritual disciplines, each in their own way proving a valuable adjunct to the foundation upon which The School is currently built. From 1972-1977, I lived in several ashrams, studying with Yogi Bhajan and many of his protégés, practicing and teaching kundalini yoga and meditation. From 1977-1980, I continued my study of kundalini yoga, albeit from the radically different perspective presented by Swami Muktananda. In the 80s, I studied Sufi practices with students of Pir Vilayat Khan, and Cherokee medicine work, as taught by Dyani Ywahoo. Along the way, incidental exposure to rolfing, rebirthing, Eriksonian hypnotherapy, shamanic journeywork, the eclectic approach to dreamwork espoused by Stephen Kaplan Williams, several varieties of psychotherapy, the sweat lodge and vision quest, astrocartography as taught by Ariel Guttman and medical astrology as taught by Ingrid Naiman rounded out my education. I obtained a Master’s degree in Marriage, Family and Child counseling in 1975, and from 1987-2000, worked intensively with ceremonial shaman/psychotherapist Dick Prosapio, presenting a wide variety of workshops at an annual three-day wilderness retreat called the Long Dance.
In 1990, at the height of my career as an international mail-order astrologer, I began to feel the psychic burden that comes with dipping into the unconscious on behalf other people. I felt the intuitive channels becoming clogged, and I knew it was time to take a break. These sentiments were, of course, echoed in my own birthchart, and so I decided to do something else for awhile. I turned my attention to environmental issues, and literally brought my energies and my attention from the cosmos to ground zero. From 1990-1993, I established and ran the Rainforest Information Center, the fundraising and educational foundation for a series of cutting edge projects in the Ecuadorian rainforests initiated by a friend of mine named Ali Sharif. It was a powerful learning experience, enlightening and humbling at the same time.
As my involvement in the Rainforest Information Center was ending, I got a letter from an old friend. In the letter, she described a recent period of crisis, and concluded by saying, "...and I would have sought your guidance, but I didn't think you were doing astrology anymore." I felt a twinge of regret that I had not been there for her the way I might have been, and then decided that it was time to return to my lifelong passion.
Seeing Through The Eye of the Centaur
This time around, however, I vowed that I wanted to do it differently. I remembered my sense of burnout at being responsible for providing guidance to other people, and decided that what I really wanted to be doing was teaching other people how to speak the language of astrology for themselves. In the midst of a new age, in which readers of all persuasions and ideological stripes could be found in nearly every small village or town, or just a 1-900 number away, I wanted to promote self-reliance in the quest for personal truth. The old adage, "Catch a fish for someone, and you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime," came to mind, and I began to conceive the idea for a correspondence course – the precursor to The Astropoetic School –that I called The Eye of the Centaur.
The name of this correspondence course referred to the visionary capacity of the mythological mentor, Chiron, who was able to look deeply into the souls under his tutelage, initiate them onto the spiritual journey they had taken birth to pursue, and draw forth their highest potential - whether that be to heal, to perform some heroic feat, or to assume a position of enlightened leadership within the community. With Chiron tightly conjunct both the Sun and Ascendant of my birthchart, I saw my role, in designing this correspondence course, to be of the same lineage. Though the name has changed in the evolution of the course into The School, this is still the mytho-astrological foundation for the vision fueling this venture.
From 1993-2001, I worked intensively and intimately as an astrological mentor to a limited number of students from around the world. Throughout this period, I generated nearly 600 lessons - each one created specifically for an individual student, with no two lessons exactly alike. In 1998, I began organizing the material generated through the personal lessons into a more structured and more accessible format that will allow participation by a greater number of students, and provide a foundation upon which the vision that is Eye of the Centaur could move to the next level – now encompassed by The School.
Both the course and The School are a perpetual work in progress and a distillation of all that I am learning as I teach. Everything presented in the course and by The School has evolved through my response to the real life issues, concerns, and challenges faced by individual students, and reflects the cumulative wisdom harvested in our joint quest for answers. Throughout this process, each student has been my teacher, taking me into territory not previously explored, and much new material, unavailable anywhere else, has been generated.
Through The Seven Gates of Soul to The Astropoetic School
In 2001, I felt compelled to take a sabbatical in order to write a book encompassing all that I had learned in my 8 years of teaching The Eye of the Centaur. As I got into this project, however, I found myself researching a much broader philosophical history of ideas about the soul, and exploring the ways in which this history has impacted our collective image of ourselves and the current practice of astrology. The end result –
The Seven Gates of Soul: Reclaiming the Poetry of Everyday Life
– presents this history and lays a broad philosophical foundation for the transmutation of astrology into astropoetics. My original vision – of spelling out the practice of astropoetics in practical detail will continue through a series of books I intend to publish over the next decade or so.
Meanwhile, upon completion of The Seven Gates in the fall of 2004, I felt a pull back to resume teaching, and began to conceive of the expanded idea for The Astropoetic School of Soul-Discovery presented to you here. The School builds upon the foundation established with The Eye of the Centaur and is gradually evolving to encompass all that I have learned in the writing of The Seven Gates and continue to learn as I write additional books and teach.
