As a post-Hiroshima, post-Nazi Holocaust Jewish-American, I was inspired by the challenges articulated by Oppenheimer and Einstein. In unleashing the energy of the atomic bomb, nuclear science made future warfare unendurable for the victors as well as the vanquished. Oppenheimer wrote, "The existential dimensions of the atomic bomb extended and deepened our understanding of the common sources of power for evil and power for good. This is seed we take with us, traveling to a land we cannot see, to plant in new soil."

Echoing this sentiment is Einstein’s (1946) famous quotation, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Emerging into adulthood, I traveled (both metaphorically and literally) towards this land of changed thinking. Can humanity possess the knowledge to unleash explosions to incinerate entire cities and the wisdom to resolve conflicts non-violently?

Alchemy’s central metaphor had always been a two pronged quest: to transform the inner nature of humanity and the external nature of matter. Transforming lead-into-gold encompassed these dual meanings. Nuclear science solved one side of the riddle. Without the other, we risk driving humanity extinct. What I sought was the other part of the alchemical quest: to transformation the human heart. Guided by William Irwin Thompson, I understood that, "The avatars of the New Age… will not be the solitary male, but the male and female together."

In the first decade after receiving my Masters in Business Administration from Boston University, I pursued two complementary careers: one as a business owner and the second as a peace activist.

I was a co-founder of Pequod Associates, Inc. an energy engineering company. Fortuitously, one of our early contracts was to provide strategic planning services to the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the fourth lineal successor to J. Robert Oppenheimer. I made several trips to the Laboratory and wrote two strategic planning documents: one presented a rationale for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Stars Wars) and the other was a long-term global assessment which envisioned the United States military controlling Persian Gulf oil fields by 2000.

Working directly with Dr. Donald M. Kerr and members of his senior management team, I felt firsthand the terrifying trajectory of an organizational system charged with manufacturing evermore destructive weapons of mass annihilation within an institutional culture that strictly prohibited consideration of Oppenheimer and Einstein’s cautionary warnings.

In my parallel career, I was a founding member of the City of Cambridge Peace Commission, and Co-Director of the Boston chapter of Children of War. I spent extensive time in the two places that epitomized the power of evil in the minds of many Jewish Americans: Germany and Palestine. In Germany, I joined a massive civil disobedience action at a U.S. Army base opposing deployment of nuclear missiles. At this event I was literally carried away by German police in the middle of the night. In Palestine, I walked the length of the Occupied West Bank, joining the former chaplain for the Enola Gay (the plane that dropped the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima) Father George Zabelka, who had walked 5,000 miles from Seattle to reach Bethlehem on Christmas morning 1983. Later, I led and organized German-American teenage peace exchanges, which included visits to Dachau and US Army bases in Germany, and 100-mile Peace Walks across Massachusetts.

KK and I married in 1987. After Anna was born in 1990, we withdrew from our external activities in the peace movement to concentrate on being parents. Rosie was born in 1995.

By 1996, Pequod had grown to three offices and 50 employees. We were the leading providers of commercial and industrial energy and water conservation services in the United States, under contract to various agencies of the federal government, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and numerous utilities and corporations. Equitable Resources, Inc. (EQT.N), an integrated natural gas company headquartered in Pittsburgh acquired the company. The proceeds from my stock sale enabled me to obtain a Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook University and transition to be a Systemic Family Constellation facilitator.

Three decades of work with conflict resolution and violence prevention convinced me that there was an important tool missing from the peacemakers’ toolkit. Education, dialogue, emotional literacy, spiritual practices, and cognitive awareness are often found lacking when they are most needed. I encountered Family Constellations in 2000 because I was looking for them. Inspired by Oppenheimer’s and Thompson's call for to explores the edges of experience, I knew a way to resolve the heart of darkness must exist or be created.

On my travels to Germany and Palestine, I experienced a series of serendipities and synchronicities that shook and finally shattered my belief that everything can be adequately explained in mechanistic, materialist, positivist terms. After a particularly improbable encounter on a rain-swept street in Jerusalem, I ceased invoking half-feigned disbelief at my talents for uncanny perception and awareness.

These mystical experiences did not lead me to embrace a mystical creed. Rather, my stance towards countless such experiences has always been to be open to spontaneity and skeptical of explanations.

I learned to use Constellations as a powerful tool to integrate objective and subjective aspects of human knowledge. Whether conflict is between ethnic groups, lovers, or aspects of the Self, my aim is uncover and resolve unconscious feelings and impulses that are alive below the surface of awareness.