The Analytical Mind, Awakening, Ancient Forces, and the Return to People

On Sundays, I sit beneath a small purple tent at the farmers market in Carmel Valley. People come with questions about relationships, work, family, difficult decisions—or simply with the feeling that life no longer brings them the joy it once did. They sit down across from me, I lay out the runes, and together we look at what is really going on.

This simple encounter draws on my whole life: an engineering education and systems analysis, more than ten thousand hours of serious meditation, profound spiritual experiences, years of inner and psychological work, and the gradual unfolding of an ability that has been with me since childhood.

The Analytical Mind

By nature, I am an analyst. I have always had the ability to see a system as a whole, hold many factors at once, and notice the connections between them.

That way of seeing led me to study engineering and later become a systems analyst. My work was to enter complex systems, understand their internal architecture, see exactly where something was breaking down, and determine what needed to change. It gave professional form to a way of thinking that came naturally to me and taught me to hold enormous amounts of information in view without losing sight of the system as a whole.

That capacity has stayed with me. Today, I apply it not to technology but to a far more complex system: a human life. The ability to hold many factors at once, see hidden connections, and find the point where change can truly begin is one of the foundations of my work now.

It was at Time Inc., in 1998, that I met my first spiritual teacher. He was a vice president of information technology, a highly successful professional, and someone who had been deeply engaged in spiritual practice for many years. Through him, I began to look beneath the surface of life and ask a very different kind of question.

Awakening and Human Wholeness

I began meditating long before meditation became part of mainstream wellness culture. For me, it was never primarily about health or lifestyle. It opened the door to a much deeper investigation of consciousness.

I went through classical meditation training: first Zen, then Vipassana, and later direct inquiry into consciousness. I spent long periods in deep retreat, directly investigating the nature of mind, identity, and consciousness.

Those retreats also reconnected me with experiences from much earlier in my life.

Some of my earliest experiences, from infancy through about the age of five, involved states of perception I had no way to understand or name. In the earliest one, when I was about a year old, I experienced myself not as the baby lying in the crib, but as an unbounded awareness in which the body and everything around it appeared. There were several other experiences of this kind during those early years.

During those retreats, I experienced profound states of consciousness—states commonly described as awakening or enlightenment. In one of them, the same experience returned. This time, I was able to recognize it consciously as it was happening: I experienced myself as awareness itself rather than as the person within it. At that moment, the forgotten childhood experiences returned with remarkable clarity, and I understood that they had all been expressions of the same fundamental experience.

Recognizing this continuity made one thing clear: this perception did not begin with spiritual training or anything I later learned. It was present before I had language or beliefs about it. After the age of five, this way of perceiving closed down almost completely, and for many years I lived without conscious access to it. Its return was gradual, unfolding through meditation, inner work, and life experience.

Later, I wrote about some of these experiences in my book Buddha on a Bull: A Practical Approach to Enlightenment.

Over time, I saw one thing more and more clearly: what I am at the deepest level does not change. Forms change. The body changes. Character, circumstances, and roles in life change. But the presence through which all of it is lived remains the same. Once this is recognized, it becomes difficult to see yourself—or anyone else—in quite the same way again.

These experiences changed more than my understanding of consciousness. They changed the way I see another person.

When someone sits across from me in a difficult situation, I see more than their confusion, conflict, or pain. I see the whole person and the life in which this particular problem has arisen. We can go very deeply into the situation itself without losing sight of the larger context.

I can hold different sides of a situation at once—contradictory facts, feelings, motives, and consequences—and stay with those contradictions without rushing to reduce them to one convenient explanation. Often, that is when what had been hidden begins to come into view. Sometimes it becomes clear fairly quickly where movement can begin. At other times, simply no longer forcing the situation toward an immediate solution allows it to start untangling on its own.

After many years of my own practice, I began working with people. For more than fifteen years, I worked with people going through spiritual awakening, deep inner crises, and major life transformations. These were not theoretical conversations about consciousness. I worked with real human stories—relationships, fears, losses, inner conflicts, and those moments when an old way of living no longer worked.

Over those years, I held countless one-on-one conversations and sessions, worked with people from different countries, wrote and taught, and created hundreds of articles for Complete Humanity. Gradually, my interest moved beyond spiritual awakening alone toward the whole human being—toward the ways consciousness, psychology, relationships, family patterns, and real-life circumstances weave together.

When the Runes Entered My Life

Runic Diagnostics turned out to be the missing piece I needed in order to see the deeper motives within a situation right away.

I do not work only with runes, but they have become one of my primary tools. Sometimes it feels as though they are what I had been waiting for all my life.

Long before Runic Diagnostics, I had been learning to observe energetic processes directly. Living close to nature, I spent a great deal of time observing fire, water, earth, and air—watching how these forces joined, interacted, and expressed themselves in the material world.

When the runes appeared in my life, I began observing them in the same way. They entered my life with tremendous force. For a while, it felt like a hurricane. Every day I walked in the mountains, observing how these forces manifested in my body, psyche, and life circumstances, and writing down what I was beginning to understand.

Later, I discovered that almost everything I had been learning to see through runic energies in my own life became useful in my work with other people.

Those observations became notes, and gradually the notes grew into a book, Walking the Runes: My Life with Ancient Forces.

By that time, however, my many years of work as a spiritual teacher and guide had already come to an end. I explored different tools and directions, but none of them felt like my path. Work on the rune book came to a halt. I withdrew almost completely from public life.

One evening, before going to bed, I turned to the Divine for direction. I wanted to know what I was meant to do next and how I could still be useful in this life. That same night, I had a lucid dream that felt more like a real encounter than an ordinary dream. In it, I was told:

“You will be doing Runic Diagnostics.”

Things began moving almost immediately. A series of events soon led me back to the Rune master I had worked with on the book—events that were hard for me to dismiss as coincidence. This time, however, I needed a master to help me understand how Runic Diagnostics worked. That began ninety days of intensive daily work.

After that dream, everything changed. The runes became not only forces I observed, but also a diagnostic instrument. Through the signs I draw, I receive specific information about a person’s situation. I do not enter a special state or experience any particular sensation in order for this to happen. The information simply comes through the symbols, and I have tested its accuracy many times in practice.

At first, I applied Runic Diagnostics to my own life. Then I worked with people I knew, and later with clients. I was not simply studying a system. I was constantly testing it in real situations and learning to distinguish living information from my own interpretations.

By then, the runes had become integrated with everything that had come before. Analytical thinking, the ability to sustain attention, psychological understanding, and the capacity to see broader patterns—all of it came into the work with them.

That book is now nearly finished and will be published in 2027.

For me, the runes are ancient living forces. Through them, I see what is operating beneath the visible surface of a situation: inner contradictions, blocked movement, possibilities that have not yet been realized, and the deeper pattern organizing events that may look chaotic from the outside.

The analytical mind gives this work precision. Spiritual experience helps me perceive the whole person. The runes reveal the forces operating within the situation, and direct conversation brings all of it back into the concrete reality of that person’s life.

Together, this allows me to work with very complex situations without oversimplifying them or losing sight of the whole picture.

Returning to People

I first offered Runic Diagnostics publicly at a festival in Southern California. I arrived with a folding table and chair and had no idea whether anyone would come up to me at all.

People stood in line for three days.

That experience gradually grew into my purple tent at the farmers market.

People who come to me privately usually already know what they are looking for and can afford this kind of work. The market is different. There, I meet all kinds of people. Some later come to me for a private session. Some cannot afford one. Some come specifically to see me. Others are simply walking by with vegetables, coffee, or a dog—and suddenly stop. Anyone can come over and sit down.

There is something very ancient in this. Spiritual teachers did not always live only in monasteries or apart from ordinary life. Some sat right where life was happening: among merchants, travelers, craftspeople, and families. If someone was seeking, they could walk up.

In old Zen images, the path does not end with awakening on a mountain. The final stage is a return to ordinary human life. After the searching and the realizations, a person comes back to the people with open hands.

My purple tent is that kind of place.

My whole path comes together there: systems analyst, meditator, writer, spiritual guide, and a woman who learned to work with ancient forces.

When someone sits across from me, we may begin with one specific question. But I never forget that this question is only one part of a much larger life—and that the person is always more than the problem they came to solve.

That is where our work begins.