The 1980s

Keep in mind that my planets are mainly on the Western side of the chart, three in the seventh house, meaning that I am very influenced by a few significant individuals whose paths cross mine. You might say that the time in Hawaii was largely influenced by Morrnah Simeona, a kahuna, and Nechung Rinpoche, a Tibetan teacher, as well as a handful of astrologers: Ivy Jacobson, Ruth Hale Oliver, and to a lesser extent Isabel Hickey whose birthday was the same as mine. In addition, there was my work with Dr. Nathalie D. Tucker.

This pattern of influences has continued throughout my life so the Santa Fe years were strongly influenced by Dr. Shrikrishna Kashyap and to a lesser extent other Ayurvedic teachers like Drs. Smita and Pankaj Naram and Dr. Vasant Lad. Being in Santa Fe afforded the opportunity to take many seminars on Tibetan medicine, alternative healing in general, and different spiritual approaches to truth. H.H. The Dalai Lama visited Santa Fe and Ammachi began coming once a year. Life in Santa Fe was endlessly stimulating and interesting.

	With the Ayurvedic study of the elements, my own work started to ground around 1980 and then took a quantum leap around 1983 when I began publishing a series of astrology textbooks and developing the material for Kitchen Doctor. This was an enormously productive and creative time.

My first book, still unpublished, was called Shadows on the Soul. It is about the continuity of consciousness through birth, death, the afterlife, and rebirth. It was based on insights attained through music therapy and many of my questions since childhood were finally being answered. It was my first opus to be written on a computer!

In the 80s, I also wrote five books on astrology:

The books are out of print. I was, however, prolific. By the end of the decade, I had written hundreds and hundreds of articles, recorded dozens of different lectures, given a number of master's classes, spoken at most of the major astrological conferences, and begun the long struggle of finding an appropriate interface between psychology and spirituality.

On top of this, I had my own little apothecary shop, one that continued to grow until I now have my own line of herbs, produced under the label of Sacred Medicine Sanctuary.

The 1990s

	For all intents and purposes, the 90s could be called my cancer decade. To the best of my knowledge, I have not myself had cancer, but I spent the 90s researching an alternative approach to treatment of cancer, developing a major web site for patients and another for practitioners, and working on some deep metaphysical issues that became a lecture, Fate: Destiny or Karma?

The 90s also included the opening of a clinic on St. Francis Drive in Santa Fe, It was called Sky Mountain Clinic and it opened more or less when the AIDS epidemic was new and troubling. Most of the patients I saw were suffering from AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis or some other intractable condition that had not responded to conventional treatment. The patients represented a broad spectrum of humanity from young mothers to highly creative people in the arts, from very conservative people from the Bible Belt to authors of books on New Age subjects, and from the very poor and nearly indigent to the fabulously wealthy, including a few movie stars and CEOs. I offered these people the benefits of my astrological insights as well as suggestions on diet and herbs. Some also were offered music therapy. At the end of the decade, I published a book on botanical cancer treatments that spanned the era from Hildegard of Bingen to Native American treatments to Harry Hoxsey and Dr. Frederic Mohs.

The 90s were complex in many ways. I lost a very dear friend and went through an extremely long and deep dark night of the soul. I began to confront the schisms we have between psychology and spirituality and to develop approaches that would heal the deepest parts of the psyche. Once again, my psychic sensitivity took hold. I became clairaudient and began to channel. In the early days of this work, the accent was extremely difficult, an Indian accent usually but sometimes other voices came through, one from another Planet. I started to see in detail what has happened on this Planet since its colonization by waves of immigration from other parts of the Universe. I also began to see what I understood would be the next spiral of the Copernican Revolution.

Once again, I was way out of step with those around me and I got into some very deep clashes with editors of journals who were taking liberties with my material. I stopped writing for the astrological journals. There was another conflict with the elite of UAC who decided to censor my presentations in Monterey. I told them I would then cancel. They prevailed on me to come but to accept the censorship. I made rather a big fuss about the short-sightedness of censorship, insisting that throughout history, censorship had always been a disaster. That was nearly my last astrological convention. I did speak at the first two Astro 2000 Conferences in Denver, but I refused to endorse Noel Tyl's book on medical astrology . . . and for all intents and purposes, I would have disappeared just as did my mentor Ivy Jacobson except for the technological transformation of our world.

The Internet

Andrew Weil was rocketed to stardom when his book Spontaneous Healing came out in 1996. He was on the cover of Time Magazine and his web site was getting a million hits a day. He mentioned bloodroot in his book and gave out my personal email on his web site. I was deluged. Though I had had a computer for over a decade, I didn't really know what a web site or search engine were. I used the computer for calculating horoscopes, for writing books, and for email, but I had yet to discover the Internet. In 1997, I started a little web site called cancersalves.com to answer the most commonly asked questions that were arising as a result of the link on Dr. Weil's site. By the end of the year, I started astroheal.com. Today, I have 45 sites with several thousand pages online. This site was started in 2002 and this is the third major revision. Moreover, this is truly a version upgrade since the site did not previously include digital downloads.

 

Continued: the 2000 and Beyond