About

This is an attempt to paint the whole picture. This isn’t a demo reel of the best, curated scenes. It’s the candid and (hopefully) semi-coherent story of how I came to be the being you might have encountered or will encounter.

I was born in Colorado but only lived there for a few months. I spent the formative years of my childhood in Georgia, where I fondly remember playing outside with friends, climbing Magnolia trees, swimming in Lake Sinclair, and camping in the forests of middle Georgia.  My first friends were turtles, saved from their perilous path to ruin attempting to cross a road. I also found a small kitten under a bush on a walk one day, and watching its flitting ears, decided to name him “Quickear.”

I was raised in a very diverse and kinetic environment, always engaged in various sports, learning piano, and playing video games. My brother and I practiced Kumon math on a daily basis leading up to middle school which gave us both some ease with the subject. Though the sciences, particularly biology, had a strong pull on my early intellect.

In high school English class, I had my first encounter with the mysteries of human consciousness that set into motion a lifelong exploration of this realm. I read about an association between a cryptic Borges short story, Sect of the Phoenix, and its allusion to the ritualistic use of tryptamines. This intriguing association inspired me to pursue an undergraduate degree in Neuroscience and pre-Med.

An awakening afforded by a psychedelic experience in the latter years of college catalyzed a fundamental shift in my psyche from an explicit knowing about the mind to knowing the mind. The resulting synthesis highlighted how the desires of the conscious mind, the embodied experience, the experiences of one’s past, and the apparent reality were a phenomenon of cause & effect. I began to recognize the limited understanding of mechanistic, diagnosis-based medicine and its heavy reliance on pharmacological and surgical intervention, and became disenchanted with my previous decision to pursue its allopathic path. An inquiry had seeded itself and started to grow in search of the deeper roots of “dis-ease” and true, holistic well-being.

I was introduced to tantric yoga during my final year of college, and with it came my first encounter with community. There was a rapid upending of previous superficial values, which made space for the seeds of an entirely new reality to take root. My first major attempt to free myself from the reins of familial and cultural conditioning culminated with attendance at Burning Man 2008, an adventure made possible with the support of the Atlanta Burn community.

That year I was also introduced to vegetarianism by my friend Katie. She helped me appreciate how delicious the diet could be – though my own repertoire was minimal. My knowledge of vege/lactotarian cooking would greatly expand in massage school where my friend Myrth, a lifelong vegetarian, opened my eyes, taste buds, and cooking skills to a multitude of recipes. My first encounter with the vegan “movement” occurred during this time when I picked up a flyer at a local food-centric event. The images in the flyer were difficult to witness, and I think, in retrospect, partly repressed — but fortunately they stuck. An enlightening conversation with an orthodox Rabbi in Los Angeles helped me understand why “the lymph of animal,” namely dairy, was so damaging. I would later discover the nightmarish conditions for cows created by the dairy industry, which further solidified my misgivings about dairy consumption. It was only a few more years before I gave up dairy, fish, and eggs entirely in the name of practicing ahimsa (non-harm). This decision had profound and unexpected effects; it allowed me to go deeper into my yoga practice, it dramatically enhanced my perception while diminishing my anxiety, and ultimately allowed for subtler observations and discernments about the world and my place in it.

The ongoing pursuit of tantric yoga and hands-on inquiry into psychedelics led to a fascination with the energetic, psychic, and psychological aspects of the relationship between humans and the natural world, the outer/inner synonymy of experience and what’s possible with greater intimacy. I endeavored to explore the latent capacity for ecstasy as means of personal and collective evolution.

I trained and practiced as a massage therapist and simultaneously picked up a practice of hatha yoga, also upon the gentle guidance of Myrth. The yoga practice grew in frequency and intensity over the years, motivating tme to embark on a yoga teacher training course for behavioral health professionals led by Kristine Kaoverii Weber. My love for yoga and self-study gradually led to the practice of meditation. Supported by a teacher and mentor Michael Johnson, I began practicing once weekly with a group while trying to get my feet under me with a daily practice. A 40-day meditation challenge led by Will & Lisa Hamilton was ultimately the magic ingredient that helped me to make meditation a daily ritual. A retreat four months later with Douglas Veenhof grounded and deepened my practice for the first year while I built the stamina to sit a 10-day Goenka course. Shortly after returning from the 10-day course, Michael offered to teach me Ashtanga, which stuck as my primary yoga practice to this day. I continue to meditate daily, going on eight years now and have sat a number of retreats. Over the years I’ve been grateful to retreat with Phyllis Hicks, Cathy Darnell, Michael & Stephanie Johnson, Vincent & Emily Horn (Buddhist Geeks), John Orr, Ronya Banks, Tara Brach, Jonathan Faust, Anam Thubten Rinpoche & Luisa Montero-Diaz, Rupert Marques and Kerstin Deibert.

During my spiritual development living in Asheville, I was aware of the need for technically skilled individuals in the local community of health, food, and tourism-centered professionals. As an avid computer user for the majority of my life, and having picked up HTML over the course of a summer in high school, I decided it would be wise to improve my technical skills to better serve the community. A web designer friend of mine, Jared, offered to take me on as an apprentice to learn web design with WordPress, HTML & CSS in exchange for yoga therapy and nutritional counseling. This mutually beneficial arrangement allowed me to learn the rudimentary skills to take on simple web design tasks. It took a number of years of trial and error, millions of google searches, hundreds of online tutorials, multiple iterations on my personal website, and developing personal websites for friends’ businesses before I fully gained proficiency with the new skill.

Soon, I was able to put my training into practice, both volunteering to support data entry for a yoga studio, while also managing another. These positions allowed me to broaden and build up my technical acuity for data management, business administrative tasks, rudimentary data analysis and presentation, and formula development in Google Sheets. Alongside the growth of these new professional interests, I had been considering a return to academia for a graduate degree. With the encouragement, and vicarious grad school destined momentum of my friend, Lia, I found myself at the local community college studying statistics to acquire a pre-requisite for a grad program. I had set an intention to attend the Master’s in Health Data Analytics program at Northeastern in Boston. We moved to Boston together and began our respective courses of study, she in Philosophy, and me testing the waters with a one-year graduate certificate in Data Analytics. I did well in the program, and was able to advance into the Master’s program in Health Data Analytics. I graduated in December 2019 and have been providing Data Science consulting services while working on a number of personal projects and R packages (See the github & Rpubs links below), all the while maintaining my commitment to personal growth, spiritual investigation, and the teachings of compassion and mindfulness intrinsic in yoga and meditation,

The Quantified Self movement centers around using technology to track various aspects of one’s daily life, including physical activity, sleep patterns, diet, and even mood. By collecting this personal data, individuals can identify patterns, trends, and correlations that might otherwise go unnoticed. This data-driven approach allows for a deeper understanding of how specific behaviors and choices impact overall well-being, providing valuable insights for personal growth and self-improvement. As a quantified self enthusiast and practitioner I’ve found the feedback self-tracking can provide for behavioral pattern recognition to be indispensable to my personal growth. With the intention to publicize more of my data over time I’ve developed a small R Shiny Application called Quantified Self for visualizing records from the mobile wellness app Insight Timer. The Shiny app is pre-loaded with a record of my meditation practice beginning in 2013 if you want to see an example of how quantified self can shed a light on patterns that unfold in our lives across time.

I fully accept that life is a process of change and transformation – spiritual, psychological and intellectual growth are consistent endeavors. Humor, wisdom, imagination, compassion, ethics, adventure and awe are all qualities I aspire to.

I enjoy systems of understanding personality, relationships, propensities and life paths. Systems such as sidereal & vedic astrology, Destiny cards, Meyers-briggs etc I find fun to explore when getting to know new people.

My interests at present tend to be concentrated in a couple of areas:

Yoga:

I’ve been doing yoga since 2009 and teaching since 2011 with an RYT500 in 2019. My home practice is Ashtanga. I’m versed in yoga philosophy and enjoy discussing it.

Meditation:

I’ve been practicing daily since 2013 and have used Insight Timer to track progress over the years. If you use Insight timer you can find me by searching “Stephen in Milledgeville.” My practice is a modified practice similar to that expounded by SN Goenka that combines open awareness, focused attention, jhana and loving kindness techniques. I have a concurrent love for Buddhist and Taoist philosophy.

Veganism:

I transitioned to lacto/ovotarian during my early twenties and went vegan in 2013 to live with a sense of harmony and compassion for all beings. Vegan nutrition is an area to which I’ve devoted a great deal of time and research and I greatly enjoy dialoguing and sharing information on the topic.

Gardening:

I’ve recently taken up gardening and find a lot of fulfillment in working with my hands in the dirt and thinking about the interactions of elements that support life.

Reading:

My Shelf on bookwyrm.social

Data Analytics:

I continue to find uses for R in my everyday life. Shiny dashboards, browser automation, reports & posters, automated trading algorithms, data extraction, cleaning and formatting, APIs.

Web & graphic design:

I serve as a webmaster for Dhamma Patapa and continue to maintain a professional capacity as a web designer. I am proficient with Adobe #Photoshop, and can find my way around Illustrator pretty well. WordPress is my CMS of choice.

Music:

Coming Soon

Media:

Comedy, documentaries, podcasts and music fill my free time. I’m a fan of Alex & Allyson Grey and the visionary art movement. 

A Manifesting Generator 4/1

Personality Type	Energy	Mind	Nature	Tactics	Identity	Test taken
Assertive Architect (INTJ-A)	56% Introverted	58% Intuitive	54% Thinking	78% Judging	76% Assertive	May 27, 2018
Assertive Advocate (INFJ-A)	75% Introverted	52% Intuitive	53% Feeling	65% Judging	63% Assertive	May 13, 2022
Assertive Advocate (INFJ-A)	61% Introverted	60% Intuitive	58% Feeling	56% Judging	60% Assertive	Apr 17, 2025

The 5w4