A Brief Biography

A Brief Biography
Background for Michael's insights emerge from twenty-five years of personal relationships and over one hundred film and video taped interviews with scientists, authors, visionary educators and athletes.

Michael is an author, educator, documentary filmmaker and founder of Touch the Future, a nonprofit learning design center. His book, Magical Parent-Magical Child, the Art of Joyful Parenting, co-authored with Joseph Chilton Pearce, applies research on optimum states to parenting and to education. Michael is developing two additional books; Kids are Not The Problem, a series of essays on parenting the next critical generation and Flowering, a collection of dramatic floral images (see: zfolio.com) and quotes by Krishnamurti.

Inspiration for this work emerged from personal relationships with Pearce, physicist David Bohm, philosopher J. Krishnamurti, and over one hundred scientists, authors and educators. If being in an optimum state is important to professional athletes, imagine what this could mean to parents, childcare providers, educators, coaches and the children they love. Michael writes and speaks internationally on the Next Frontier in Education, The Intelligence of Play, Transcendent Mentoring of This And Future Generations, Media and the Brain, Corporate Exploitation of Children, The Brave New World of Un-Schooling and Home-Schooling, Seven Principles that Transform Adults and Children, The Childlike Mind, Rational Imagination, Raising Children in a Sport-Crazed Culture, and other topics.

Magical Parent – Magical Child With Joseph Chilton Pearce
Magical Parent-Magical Child, the Optimum Learning Relationship is the first book to define parenting, coaching and educating children as developmental, transformative practices for adults. The central theme of the book is the transformation of childhood through the transformation of adults. Our goal is to optimize the adult-child interface by applying the proven strategies that allow top athletes and other specialists to consistently perform at extraordinary levels. If optimum learning, performance and well-being is the goal when relating to tennis balls and hockey pucks, what about you and I? What about our children? Do they, or we, deserve anything less?

We do this by helping adults rediscover the "playful" and "childlike" genius of their own innate intelligence, as they guide, learn from and mentor children, which awakens and develops in adults new capacities and possibilities. Infusing the adult-child relationship with this fresh creative energy and attention transforms the adult which results in a radically different learning environment for children. Changing the adult changes the environment we call childhood. This transforms the child, which cycles back and transforms the adult. We call this playful, reciprocal-dynamic, the Optimum Learning Relationship.

The book develops this theme by exploring and applying the psychology of optimum experience to parenting, childcare, education and coaching. Research shows that the "state" athletes call the Zone, what researchers and professionals call Flow and what children call Play share the basic characteristic of complete self-less absorption and engagement in the moment. This "state" of complete unconflicted behavior is nature's baseline, her expectation, for optimum learning, performance and well-being. Yoga, meditation and athletics, when approached in their true spirit, attune us to this optimum state. Looking deeper we discover that all learning, performance and wellness is "state specific." States of being are primary; they come first, filter and define what we learn, how we perform, and our relative wellness or disease, moment to moment.

Conferences, Public Speaking & Workshops
Beginning in the 1980's Michael has been challenging national and international audiences. He organized Learning Without Limits, a national educational conference on play-based models of learning and performance. He has presented workshops and keynote addresses in San Francisco, Atlanta, Washington DC, Dallas, Los Angeles, in Canada, India, Poland, Amsterdam, London, Milan, Salzburg, Stockholm, Munich, Innsbruck, and many other venues before the Association of Pre and Prenatal Psychology & Health, the Transpersonal Psychology Association, Waldorf educators, Child-Spirit groups, educational, home school, research and business associations.

Touch the Future
Touch the Future is a nonprofit 501c3 learning design center. The mission is to apply research on optimum states of learning and performance, what athletes call the Zone, what researchers call Flow and what every child know as Play, to parenting and to education. Touch the Future's website (see: www.ttfuture.org), hosts an extensive archive of interviews and publications on birth, bonding, brain development, imagination, fitness, sports, competition, and an array of inspired educational and play based learning models.

Film and Media Production  
Michael has over twenty-five years of professional experience producing film, video, print and interactive media programs for public education, medical research, corporations, national and international television broadcasters, UNESCO and private foundations. Most notable is a twenty year history working with the life and teachings of J. Krishnamurti, directing two feature documentaries, The Challenge of Change and With A Silent Mind plus a twelve-part encapsulation of major themes entitled Beyond Myth & Tradition. Most recently he designed and produced a traveling museum exhibit summarizing the life and teachings of J. Krishnamurti. Plans are underway for a major international documentary exploring Krishnamurti’s views of education. Michael also produced and directed a ninety-minute biographical documentary on the life of Paramahansa Yogananda, teacher and author of Autobiography of a Yogi.

The Nurturing Project
The Nurturing Project revolutionizes the way that local communities mentor and support parents and the people who care for young children. Nurturing partners civic organizations with childcare providers, drawing together, on a regular basis, civic-mentors, parents and providers in creative dialogue. The goal is to surround parents and early childcare providers with the most inspired information, nonviolent communication and group communication skills. The system is designed to develop the personal relationships required to meet local needs with local resources, neighborhood by neighborhood, all across the land. (see: www.nurturing.us)