So I kind of grew up in what was nontraditional, if you will. And so I joke because I see that Won Buddhism as the Jehovah’s Witnesses of Buddhism.

I was raised Roman Catholic and my grandfather was a fourth degree Knight of Columbus. So, I was very intrenched with a fixed Idea of what God was and was not. As well as a lot of dogma and beliefs that I wasn’t even sure were real, that the people telling me weren’t eve sure were real either. I always suffered because I was trying to force myself to believe in a God or higher power.

So both of my parents are actually time practitioners, they both met lama for the first time in 1994, if I remember correctly. And I myself met my root lama first in 1996, so only a year after I was born.

I encountered spiritual practice through reading BKS Iyengar’s Light on Yoga when I was 18 and immediately trying a number of the forbidden pranayama techniques that he described in the back of the book, because of course this is what you do when you’re 18.

Nothing seemed to fit, however, until I began to be introduced to Buddhism. At first it was Insight Meditation, and then I moved to a town where the only Buddhist community was a Tibetan Buddhist Center.

Joking in 1980 as I introduced myself to the workshop leader of a weeklong seminar entitled “Owning your Religious Past”, I described myself as a Zen-Baptist. It was an attempt at the time to show off my witty nature to the attractive teacher. She and I remain married.

I am not sure exactly when I first became aware of the dharma path, but my first brush with it was through reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Beyond the Self a translation of the Sutra on the Middle Way. At the time I had been in recovery for about 10 years and had a sustain spiritual practice of self-reflection and service, but I had never been exposed to the truth of Dependent Origination.

I walked into Against the Stream Nashville Meditation Center in January 2012,  shortly after coming out of rehab for alcohol dependence.   It was suggested that meditation could be helpful in further recovery.  I remember in one of the first talks Dave Smith mentioned that, sitting was just sitting.  Whether you were in traffic, the motor vehicle department or sitting comfortably on your  own couch that the experience of sitting was all the same.  

I was first exposed to dharma when I was in high school/college. It was recommended by my therapist to check out a group call Dharma Punx and thought that meditation would be a good way to help with depression/anxiety. I initially didn’t like it but when I came back from college, I thought I would give it another try.