A Life Shaped by My Practices

My work has been shaped by many kinds of practice: contemplative practices, legal practice, conflict resolution practices, and the daily practice of writing.

My exploration of meditation and mindfulness began more than forty years ago, when I first encountered Zen in a zendo on the Loyola University campus in New Orleans. That early experience opened a lifelong inquiry into presence, attention, and the ways contemplative practices can shape how we live and how we show up.

Over time, that inquiry widened. I studied East Asian history and became increasingly interested in the history of Buddhism and the development of its many schools and traditions. I explored Zen in the Zendo at Loyola through the lineage of the Japanese lay master Yamada Roshi and Sanbo Zen tradition. I went on after graduation from college to explore the teachings of the Vietnamese monk and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village tradition. Later, I explored Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and other forms of secular mindfulness. In the last decade, I have focused more on Tibetan Buddhist practices through teachers such as Susan Piver and Ralph De La Rosa.

This long exploration over 40 years and across multiple traditions now informs my writing, teaching, and book clubs. I am especially interested in helping people understand the broad landscape behind the words mindfulness and meditation - not as vague wellness terms, but as practices rooted in particular histories, lineages, questions, and ways of being. My work draws from Buddhist, and secular mindfulness traditions while remaining grounded in ordinary life.

I have also been practicing law since 1997. My legal career has not followed a traditional courtroom path. Instead, I have worked across international business, administrative law, agribusiness and food systems, food safety, food labeling, regulatory and corporate compliance, and executive leadership. I have served not only as legal counsel, but also in business and operational leadership roles, including as chief operating officer of a tech-enabled regulatory compliance firm.

That breadth of experience informs the way I approach legal and professional life today. I understand the realities of organizations, institutions, systems, and the people trying to do good work inside them. My current legal practice focuses especially on food safety, food labeling, regulatory compliance, and practical counsel for businesses navigating complex requirements and real-world decisions.

In recent years, I have also expanded my work in Alternative Dispute Resolution, including mediation, arbitration, and conflict coaching. This work reflects my belief that conflict is not only a legal or procedural event. It is also a human experience. My approach to conflict resolution is grounded in clarity, steadiness, ethical presence, and the capacity to stay engaged without becoming reactive or hardened.

In addition to my legal and ADR work, I teach continuing education and professional development programs for lawyers, mediators, arbitrators, social workers, and other helping professionals. My talks and trainings focus on mindfulness, professionalism, ethical presence, conflict, self-compassion, nervous system awareness, and practical ways to remain steady in high-demand work.

Writing has become one of my core daily practices. What began as reflection has grown into a larger body of work now taking shape as the At the Tables of Life series. The series explores how mindfulness, contemplative practice, discernment, embodied awareness, and lived experience can help us meet the many “tables” of our lives: family tables, work tables, conflict tables, grief tables, decision-making tables, and the quieter inner tables where we return to ourselves.

My forthcoming foundational book, At the Tables of Life, presents my Presence, Reflection, Letting Go framework. This framework offers a practical way to work with the residue of stress, conflict, responsibility, grief, transition, and ordinary life. It is not a method for escaping the messiness of life, not a productivity hack, not a shortcut to becoming “Zen,” or a tool for so called increasing tolerance for stress. Rather, it is a way of being in life with presence, more steadiness, and more compassion - for yourself and for all those in your life.

I am also developing companion field guides for lawyers, conflict resolution professionals, social workers, and others whose work requires sustained presence, relational skill, and ethical clarity. These guides offer profession-specific, secular applications of the Presence, Reflection, Letting Go framework for use in the real conditions of demanding work.

The Throughline

What connects all of my work is a commitment to less reactive, more present, more reflective and more compassionate ways of being in the world, all in the sure knowledge that I can have multiple practices and carry the message of awakening throughout all of those practices.

Whether I am advising a client, serving as a neutral, teaching a room of professionals, writing a book, guiding meditation, leading a hike, or teaching contemplative reflection practices, my work begins from the same understanding: awakening is not separate from ordinary life, and people need practices that help them meet the lives they are actually living.

That does not require perfection or performance. It does require practice.

• Practice that helps us return to presence with reality as it is when we are overwhelmed.

• Practice that helps us reflect and discern with honesty and depth.

• Practice that helps us release the emotional residue of life and let go of what no longer needs to govern us.

• Practice that helps us return, again and again, to presence, attention, integrity, and care.

Across all of my practices - meditation, law, conflict resolution, meditation, teaching, and writing - my work returns to one central question:

How do we practice in ways that help us live more fully, respond more wisely, and remain more compassionate in the middle of life as it actually is?