I have spent nearly half a century studying how transformative body practices can enhance personal and social change, and how they can impair it. I came to these practices out of a study of philosophy, which luminously articulates the disastrous social and personal results of the mind/body split enbedded in mainstream thinking and institution-building. I have tried to find methods for healing these splits in the academic world of writing, pedagogy, and research; in the personal realm of self-cultivation; and in the larger world of social change. At the deepest level, I look to these practices as a source of a spirituality grounded in the flesh of human yearning.

My work has been centered at CIIS where I retired in 2026 as professor emeritus; and at Esalen Institute where I have organized many conferences as part of their Center for Theory and Research programs and also as part of the governance structure.