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Gary's Impressions

Gary is a medical doctor who has worked in Community Health Centers in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties for most of his career. He has spent decades weaving together nature awareness, spirituality, indigenous healing traditions and social justice. Sebastopol, CA

What drew you to EOA?

EOA was part of my process to shift away from the day-to-day grind of my medical practice. I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about being a doctor. I’ve always wanted to have a larger impact, to move away from treating one person at a time in order to help more people. So, when I signed up for EOA, I was trying to figure out the next step. I’ve been involved in activism stuff for a long time, and particularly interested in climate change. We are in a current situation, like the Mayans were, where we are watching the systems we’ve created collapse around us. I know from activism work that it’s hard to get people to listen and to awaken. Part of participating in EOA was to get guidance on how to make best use of the time I have left.

What is unique about EOA?

Simultaneous to my EOA journey, I went through the Game Changer Intensive with the Pachamama Alliance. Pachamama gives a similar framing as EOA around the new story/new physics that Brian Swimme and others speaks about. Whereas Pachamama takes people through an intellectual journey that eventually directs people into action steps, EOA is designed to bring about more of an internal transformation, one that is needed to live and really embody a new way of being. Kerry and EOA really helped me get that human consciousness unfolds with the workings of the universe and that we have some choice in this. We don’t just have to fight. There is another way to work with it. I’m a very frontline, pragmatic kind of guy. I like action, I’m a fighter and often feel like, “let’s go change the world.” EOA seemed privileged and woo woo to me at first. But I realize there’s a deeper, more essential shift that happened.

How would you explain the shift that happened through the journey?

When I did EOA, I expected a lightbulb to go off. But what has happened through the process is a deeper tectonic shift, where I’m slowly getting a little more aligned with the unfolding of the universe. It’s less about gaining a skill or going through a singular healing than living my life from a different place. That’s what really sunk in for me: that it’s not about fixing something, but about listening to a different guidance, to opening my perceptual field, to connecting. I’m now listening to a different voice, one that often takes me where I wouldn’t necessarily go on my own. It doesn’t always take me where I “want” to go, but my ego is less involved now. I am working in a clinic that’s in bad shape. I was brought in to help the medical director and it’s been a challenging situation, with all sorts of people, including the director, transitioning in and out. Before, I would have gone into “I gotta save it” or “I’m outta here” mode. Now I’m interim medical director and am not attached as much as I would have been in the past. I’m following a deeper voice. I check in and it’s very clear what the next thing is.

That piece - the listening - is not just airy fairy. It’s actually impacting my work in the world on a nitty gritty level. I’m in there listening to the voice and the guidance and making that happen in the world. The weird thing is that others say to me, “you’re so important” and “how are you doing this?” but it’s really not ‘me’. We can all do this if we pay attention. We don’t need to practice for tens of years (as I did) to drop into the guidance, to listen.