A graduate of Harvard University, I studied the effect of brain wave states on stress reduction, healing, creativity and accelerated learning.
I have been facilitating consciousness-expanding work since 1986, when I began offering Gateway Experience weekends using The Monroe Institute (TMI) Hemi-Sync brain entrainment technology, and in 1987 began offering workshops in creativity, stress management and communications for the US Office of Personnel Management in Boston, and then began designing and offering my own workshops. In 1989 I moved with my family to VA to work at TMI as a trainer of week-long workshops and later as a program director, until I left in 1992.
In 1994 I started working at the Institute for Living in Blacksburg VA and offering a wider array of workshops and musical events, including Awakening the Soul’s Voice in 1996. That year, I also started offering individual transformational (what I then called “healing facilitation”) sessions in Roanoke. I joined the board of Lifestream Center in Roanoke in 1998 and began offering workshops and sessions there. I also joined a Dances of Universal Peace (aka Sufi Dancing) group.
In 1999 I moved back to New England to be closer to my children after my divorce, and ended up working in education and non-profit management for a number of years.
I got deeply involved in community activism that sprung up around efforts to stop the Iraq War, as well as in conversations about alternative economics and currencies. Around that time I recorded a song with Granny D (based on her rap lyrics) called The Cultural War for the Planet. I even applied to be a contestant on Mark Cuban’s show The Benefactor, in hopes of funding a futurist documentary series. I think it was my statement that I did not believe in winning at all costs that disqualified me. Oh well, nothing ventured, right?
Along the way I’ve participated in numerous projects, including a brief stint with Neale Donald Walsch’s Heartlight Education initiative. Most of these projects have been big-picture visionary. Many of these did not get off the ground, or at least not in the form they were originally conceived. But each one gave me further experience, and inspiration to continue.
In 2005, I founded the Monadnock Institute for Community Advancement and Sustainability (MICAS, continuing now as the Monadnock Sustainability Network), which allowed me to explore my passion for advancing social change. It also showed me how long that change takes.
During this time I started two radio shows on our local college station, attempting to join my social and spiritual passions together. I got to interview a number of prominent authors and activists in the sustainability arena.
Later, I taught nonviolent communication to families with children and also in men’s prisons, which gave me some of the most sublime experiences ever.
My most recent post was as Executive Director of the NH Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Over the years I have continued to offer individuals sessions as well as new workshops from time to time, such as “New Year’s Revolutions,” “Dreamweavers,” “Sacred Circle, Sacred Voice” and “Freeing the Authentic Voice.” A few years ago, I was inspired to start writing about beauty, love and truth (aka beauty-truth-goodness), finding the exploration to offer vast possibilities for engaging others in a trans-religious discussion of morality and meaning. There is much that continues to percolate through me from these explorations, which I will be sharing in the times ahead.
I am also a musician. I have facilitated sound circles with drumming and singing. I have written songs and performed a kind of “universal kirtan” with consciousness-raising music from a variety of spiritual traditions. I plan to share this music with my online community in the months and years ahead.
I have studied healing and sound healing with internationally recognized experts, including Sandra Ingerman, Jonathan Goldman, Sarah Benson, John Beaulieu, Molly Scott, Stephen Schatz, Richard Bartlett, Brent Baum, and others. Among my other key influences in the field of consciousness development are: Jean Houston, Alan Watts, Arnold Mindell, Marshall Rosenberg, Paramahansa Yogananda, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Robert Monroe, Byron Katie, Carolyn Myss, Peter Russell, Russell Targ, Charles Tart, Pema Chodron, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Lama Surya Das, Michael Talbot, Marianne Williamson, Neale Donald Walsch, The 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, Oscar Ichazo, Terrence McKenna, Ram Dass, Ken Wilber and Integral Philosophy, Robert Fritz, Robert Moss, James Hillman, Carl Jung, Jordan Peterson, Jane Roberts, B. Robert Wallace, Robert Beck and Spiral Dynamics, Buckminster Fuller, Wilhelm Reich, Nikola Tesla, Black Elk, Rumi, Roberto Assagioli, Molly Young Brown, Vivian King, Alex Grey, Richard Bartlett, Werner Erhard, Richard Tarnas, Graham Hancock (and many many others). I have also been influenced by mystical traditions north, east, south, and west, particularly: Sufism, Esoteric Christianity, Gnosticism and indigenous traditions.
May we all rise together.
John-Michael Dumais
Keene NH USA