Jeff

Math had a grip on me early, providing two things my young boy loved: affirmation and rule-following. The grip tightened as I grew up playing games, studying engineering, teaching physics, and leading math, technology, and business in the school district. Life became (mostly) a numbers game, with periods of analysis paralysis and a disconnect from intuition or even emotion.

After I met Professor George Gadanidis, math and I both softened. George championed math's creativity and other human qualities. As a district-level math coordinator, I helped teachers use progressive and prosocial teaching approaches. My analytical side loosened as I began to protest the top-heavy math curriculum, and rampant innumeracy in high school graduates (even amongst those who take advanced courses). I supported cross-curricular numeracy to reduce the harm math causes.

My most transformative learning experience as a math educator was First Steps in Mathematics. This program and research illuminated (for the first time) how humans progress through developmental phases of numeracy understanding, rather than the traditional approach of students moving through grades of math curriculum by memorizing steps they later forget. If students are given the right learning to understand deeply, they make exponentially more effective progress.

As I moved away from math leadership into other areas, the non-analytical sides had space to flourish. Today, I still love a good spreadsheet, but math is now one tool in my life, not the only tool. I am grateful for my capacity to make sense of the world quantitatively. Math therapy is all about sense-making, not rote learning.  

I was a Halloween-candy-sorting kind of person, but my experiences of healing, mindfulness, and spirituality have been so intertwined that they become a fuzzy whole. The terms healing, mindfulness and spirituality can also be fuzzy, so I offer some definitions:

• Healing is becoming healthier beyond the baseline to thrive in multiple domains of well-being.

• Mindfulness is described in detail by Shinzen Young here.

• Spirituality is described in my book, from research interviews, as experiences of transcendence, union, and peace.

Despite having Italian, Swiss, Scottish, and German ancestry, I was strangely and drawn to all things eastern as a child. I read Siddhartha at a young age (thanks to my parents well-stocked bookshelf), taught myself to play go, and practiced origami. In university I acquired (and sometimes even read) books like Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and the Three Pillars of Zen, while deepening my appreciation for the meditative aspects of go. As a young graduate, I enrolled in martial arts for 13 years, where some breathwork and meditation were taught along with a lot of kihon, kata, and kumite. But it wasn't until a work colleague asked me to join her for weekly meditation class in my midlife crisis that I began a snowball-rolling-downhill accumulation of meditation, yoga, breathwork, therapy, healing modalities, and spiritual groups.

When I booked my first therapy session ever I felt some shame as there was nobody in my world who had spoken of therapy in any way. However, after the very first session I wanted more and more--more caring, more authenticity. I eventually worked with several therapists and social workers, often in cycles of a season or two, with time in-between for personal implementation and growth. However, my most powerful and "breakthrough" healing events usually came in the context of other somatic experiences such as cranial sacral therapy, massage/shiatsu, myofacial release, and physiotherapy (thank you Karen Barnes, Jennifer Song, Christine Grant, and Wendy Redfearn). 

As I felt the benefits personally of various practices, I launched mindfulness-based wellness programs for students and staff in my school district (based on Mindful Schools and Search Inside Yourself training). Meanwhile, I was personally deepening my breath (thank you Ardith Dean, Jennie Akse-Kelly, and Jacqui Tracy), meditation (thank you Mangala Anshumati, Rick Hanson, Kadampa Centre, Unified Mindfulness, and Shinzen Young), sexuality (thank you Sarah Byrden), yoga (thank you Modo and Be), dancing (thank you Ecstatic Dance Burlington) and whole being realization (thank you Trillium Awakening). 

While peak experiences fade, they each left me with some shift or integration that persisted long term. While leading a staff mindfulness session, I experienced for the very first time a quieting of the mind that is now permanently available. After a particularly heart-opening group session, I felt an oceanic gratitude that reframed everyday gratitude practice as obsolete: how can there be a lifting into gratitude if we are already swimming in it? It was in a yoga class that I first experienced an intense, heart-awakening, experience of union and transcendence that left me utterly transformed. For two miraculous weeks I felt a deep flow in which life and love merged. My sense of self diminished to almost nothing, and it became absolutely clear to me at that time that we are (all of us together) alive with love--alove. Alove for me means state of absolute openness, joy and flow: a unity with all life and nature. These benefits of clear mindedness, intuition, alleviating suffering, tilting the spiral of mental activity upward, and deep serenity have been such blessings in my life.