1) The Christian faith I was raised in and eventually returned to. My parents were professionals committed to child welfare and early childhood education. They taught me that there is a God who calls on us all to love one another and serve one another regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality or beliefs.

2) Scientific empiricism which has informed my long career in nursing (and which gave me some struggles in my youth reconciling religion and science), and which through psychology and neuroscience is discovering how mindfulness meditation works.

3) The wisdom of the Twelve Steps as taught and practiced in recovery fellowships.

As a teenager in the 1960’s I was introduced to meditation and I’ve practiced on and off since then.

As a professional nurse with a career spanning more than forty years I have followed the scientific literature about mindfulness from it’s first adaptation from the ancient traditions into secular language by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 when he founded Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) through the development in the 2000’s of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and now in the 2020’s of many more adaptations of mindfulness as treatment for multiple physical mental illnesses as well as for problems of living in a stressful world.

As a retiree I have chosen teaching mindfulness as my “encore career”, and although I hope to earn a supplemental income my primary motivation is to fulfill a calling to help others.