BIOGRAPHY

I grew up in the west of England, attended university in London and traveled to Asia in 1974, where I studied concentrative and contemplative meditation. I was ordained as a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition and lived for eight years with Tibetan teachers and others in North and South India, Nepal, Sri-Lanka and Switzerland, receiving instruction from masters of both the northern and the southern schools of Buddhism. My primary training was in the Tibetan method of tsen-nyi (dialectics) under the venerable Geshé Rabten, who was asked by the Dalai Lama to leave his mountain retreat and teach Westerners. I was subsequently a founding member of Geshé's Centre d’Hautes Études Tibetaines in Mont-Pélérin, Switzerland, now Rabten Choeling, where I served for a while as a translator and instructor.

Eventually, I discovered that I had to communicate with other Westerners in terms of our own culture, and arrived at a turning point. It seemed self-evident that the core insight of Buddhist training requires no study of language, scripture or philosophy, nor belief in any more than the possibility of change, but this belief set me sadly and increasingly apart.

I left the traditional Asian setting of Buddhism and moved to Montreal, where I took on a solitary, unnerving mission to measure what I'd learned against the realities of everyday life. I practiced print communications, typography, graphic design and technical writing. Over the next twenty years I authored, co-authored, illustrated and designed dozens of books on information technology and health science. At the same time, I persisted in my search for a voice to express my own unorthodox experiences. In 1995 I started writing The Novice, a memoir of my time with the Tibetans. It's been a long gestation, but will be published in the Spring of 2009. In the meantime, a meditation handbook entitled It Begins with Silence is being launched in the Fall of 2008.

I live and work in Hudson, Québec, where I founded and am director of Kudo.ca Communications Inc., Quiet Mind Books and Quiet Mind Seminars. After thirty years of preparation I've finally returned to my true calling and have been directing workshops in mindful reflection in the Montreal area since 2003, also delivering seminars at health centres and in the workplace. under the title, The Art of Mindful Reflection.

2007

1979