About
I am an author, composer and a psychotherapist. On this site you’ll find explorations of many subjects which emanate from these disciplines. You’ll also find further information here about my new book, The Next Ten Minutes: 51 Absurdly Simple Ways to Seize the Moment, including posts which expand on some of the exercises in the book. In addition, I’ll be blogging about mindfulness, music, masculinity and many other subjects. Because my intention is to be purposeful and deliberate, thoughtful and articulate, you won’t find find new posts here every five minutes, or even every day. But my hope is that what you do find here will be worth the time it takes to read…and possibly that it will even bear re-reading. The themes will be wide-ranging, but the common thread will be an effort to approach our everyday experience with an attitude of mindful acceptance.
A little bit about me. As a musician and a composer my roots are in jazz piano, although these days I work electronically out of my home studio, composing music for a variety of projects including independent films, dance performances, and audiobooks. You can find a number of my pieces here on the site. As a writer, I received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona in 1989, where I started writing my first novel, Baptism for the Dead, about the dissolution of a Mormon family in Utah. That’s where I was born (raised Mormon, though I’ve long since parted ways with the church), and where I lived until I left to attend Swarthmore College. I spent a decade on the East coast before I moved back West to Tucson to get my MFA. After that I spent a cold winter on Cape Cod at the Fine Arts Work Center where I finished my novel and met my wife, Susanna Sonnenberg, who is the author of the memoir Her Last Death. Together we moved from Provincetown to Missoula, Montana, where we live today with our two beautiful sons.
I received my doctorate in Counseling from the University of Montana in 1999 and my psychotherapy practice has been significantly shaped by the extensive post-graduate training that I’ve received since then in attachment theory and attachment-focused psychotherapy. I’ve been fortunate to receive extended trainings from masterful clinicians like Dan Hughes (author of Attachment-Focused Parenting), Julie Larrieu (of the Tulane Institute for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health) and from the Circle of Security Project in Spokane, Washington. This focus on attachment led me inexorably into an exploration of neuroscience, which then merged with my pre-existing interest in mindfulness practices. I also specialize in trauma and I spent several life-transforming weeks as a volunteer mental health worker with the Red Cross south of New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina. (For an account of that experience, check out my YouTube page.) Another passion of mine is working with issues of masculinity and gender-role socialization. These days I maintain a small private practice, working primarily with men, in which I strive for an approach which integrates the themes of attachment, mindfulness, trauma and authentic masculinity. In addition, I teach graduate counseling classes in Ethics and Diagnosis at the University of Montana.
In 2010, after a two-year search for an explanation to a set of mysterious and increasingly debilitating physical symptoms, I was diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease. I’ve written about (and will continue to write about) this experience extensively on my blog. (Unfortunately, the cognitive effects of Lyme Disease themselves have slowed my ability to write as often as I would like.) As I struggle to make sense of my new life with a chronic illness, I’ve made an effort to bring all of my past work and experience with emotional regulation and mindfulness into the effort. It’s an on-going struggle, but I find that there’s a natural intersection between mindfulness and chronic illness, which I’ve written about here. Through this experience I’ve been fighting for greater awareness of Lyme Disease and associated tick-borne illnesses. The controversies surrounding Chronic Lyme are paralyzing the efforts of lyme-literate physicians to develop a better understanding of, and more effective treatment for this complex and debilitating disease. If you would like to learn more about Lyme Disease, I recommend starting here.
I am a strong advocate of what might be called “casual mindfulness.” I firmly believe that even mindfulness practices that are done poorly and without much commitment can be beneficial. As a corollary, I also believe that extremely brief excursions into mindful awareness have positive effects. What would happen, for instance, if you were to close your eyes right now and focus your attention fully on your breath as you inhaled once, then exhaled? Just one breath. I encourage you to try it. I believe that those fifteen or so seconds would produce an observable, positive and potentially sustainable shift in your state of mind. It seems to me that inflexible ideas about mindfulness practices (we need training, we need hours of silence, we need extraordinary discipline, etc.), too often get in the way of our taking advantage of the simple and natural opportunities for greater mindfulness that are available to us all the time. The truth is, as I just demonstrated, it’s possible to maintain a sort of meditation practice that exists entirely in between sentences while you are reading. Further, it’s possible to transform the activities of our everyday lives into mindfulness exercises. It’s even possible to engage in bad habits mindfully. These concepts form the foundation for my book, which contains a set of exercises using utterly mundane and even absurd activities as vehicles for shifting our state of mind into a fuller awareness of the present moment. It’s truly possible. And it doesn’t have to take any longer than the next ten minutes.
You can learn more about me at Simon & Schuster’s Author Revealed page.