About Ishtar

My meditation practice began in earnest as a teenager in 1999 when I learned a variety of breathing, concentration, and energy meditations. From an early age I was interested in mystical and esoteric subjects. As a very young child I remember enjoying the experience of floating in a field of Silence that seemed to permeate everything. When I first learned the concept of "I", it seemed to apply just as much to the people and things around me. however they were certainly not on the front burner of my life- so I thought! Everything of my life changed due to a 1997 car accident in which my beloved mother passed away and I was profoundly transformed. The accident produced a singular moment of awakening (what I later learned was an NDE). Turning to my left to talk to my mother, I saw what seemed to be my death in the form of a speeding Lincoln Towncar only feet away.

Immediately after calmly thinking "shit" and "I really thought this one was going for more than 13 years" my whole short life proceeded to flash before my eyes.

During this process, I was completely tuned into a wholly objective aspect of my Consciousness. Each and every experience of my life was seen in perfect detail, along with a thorough knowledge of every time I had a made a choice from fear, limitation, or conditioning. As I experienced those moments, they were completely forgiven, replaced instead with a sense of wholeness and love. All of my fears and tensions vanished in a sudden instant, and a sublime peace washed over me. Everything was luminous, and I had the deeply felt sense of being one and the same with the underlying Wholeness of all things. I was everything and nothing and completely at peace. To my surprise, this experience of the sublime inner peace lasted for the next several months even as I experienced all of the various thoughts and emotions of intense grief. Feeling somewhat unfamiliar and self conscious of this strangely juxtaposed sense of inner peace and joy, I decided to keep most of it to myself in order to nurture and explore in silence. As the peace faded out of my experience, it was replaced again with the expected miasma of countless thoughts, fears, and suffering. Finding my way back to that experience of boundless consciousness slowly, but surely became the principle desire of my heart.

By age 17, after a few years that were both sublimely mystical and idiotic, I had decided to become something of a monk within my own home. I began a rigorous program that consisted of waking at 3 AM, taking a cold shower, meditating for 3 hours, going to school, meditating during my lunch break, returning home to take an afternoon meditation walk, complete my homework assignments, eating a sparse dinner of raw fruit and vegetables (my diet then was essentially a raw food vegan diet), and capping the day with, predictably, more meditation! This lasted throughout all of my final year of high school. My meditations deepened with my introduction to Yogananda’s wonderful Autobiography of a Yogi. My meditations were regularly characterized by a portion of the same peace that had clothed me after my mother’s death and the severe demeanor that had often accompanied my teenage ascetism was melted away by a new found warmth in my heart. In my final week of school I was invited by my soon to be brother in law to travel to Minneapolis to learn a meditation technique called the Ishayas’ Ascension. Uncharacteristically breaking from the rather rigid adherence to my meditation schedule, I found myself enthusiastically acquiescing.

This proved an auspicious decision as immediately upon learning the techniques of Ascension, my mind was rather quickly and effortlessly brought to deeper levels of consciousness than I had yet experienced, while my body settled down for profound and healing rest.

Within three months I was living in a meditation community centered on the practice and a year and a half after that I began a 7 month intensive teacher training program that included 6 months of around 12-14 hours of meditation per day. I lived in the main meditation center and satellite centers in Hong Kong, Finland, Switzerland, and Michigan between 2002 and 2008 from which I ended up teaching a few hundred people meditation. These years spent training under the guidance of senior Teachers brought about tremendous inner transformation. In 2008, I left the cozy confines of the community to attend University where after a long break I recommenced teaching meditation. While in the beginning of my journey, I felt like an individual who would sometimes experience a vast Presence, now the context has changed into living life as a vast Presence that also gets to experience life through an individualized mind and body. Currently based in Portland, Oregon, I teach courses in North America, East Asia (especially Japan and Hong Kong) and anywhere else I'm called or invited. I am also available to work with people remotely via skype or zoom. In addition to meditation teaching, I also work as an intuitive astrologer, informed by the Evolutionary School of Astrology. That work can be found at Awakened Light Astrology.