I began contemplative practice in the early 1990s in Minneapolis, as a way to work with difficulty focusing attention. That opened a life-long interest in meditation training and practice, a continued exploration of existing mindfulness approaches, as well as ongoing study of research about potential outcomes for a variety of challenges encountered in daily life.
My career has been primarily in IT-related areas for Fortune 500 companies, moving from Excel Energy, IBM, and Assurant, and eventually bringing me to UnitedHealth in 2006. My work during that time was process automation, strategic planning, business analysis, and eventually leading teams responsible for service governance and user experience for new multi-million dollar technologies. During that time, I became a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher through the program at UMass’ Center for Mindfulness (CFM), and started two podcasts to share the contemplative journey with others, The Secular Buddhist and Present Moment: Mindfulness Practice and Science.
In 2015 I changed careers to become the first full-time mindfulness teacher hired at UnitedHealth for a team called Moment Health. One year later, another opportunity arose to lead the development of live-online programming and community development at UMass CFM, where I received my formal MBSR training, so in 2016 my wife and I moved from Minnesota to Massachusetts, where we live today. I returned as a remote worker to UnitedHealth in April of 2019, teaching live online mindfulness and burnout prevention within UHG, UHC, Optum, AbleTo, and various internal companies.
I’ve continued to be a science communicator for mindfulness, completed MBSR Teacher certification, and have ongoing training and supervision in this lively and complex discipline. I currently teach several accessible courses including Mindfulness Foundations, Burnout Prevention & Remediation, Mindful Communication, Working With The Inner Critic, Building Self-Compassion, and various other group-specific programs, along with MBSR. I teach and supervise MBSR teachers with the Institute for Mindfulness-Based Approaches (IMA) and through Mindfulness Voyage, am a peer-reviewer for the science journal Mindfulness, and am honored to have joined The Mindfulness Network’s Board of Trustees.