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"i was a professor, a monk,
and a meditation teacher.
i was also exhausted."
This is the story of how I found my way back to myself and why I built Third Jewel so you don't have to find yours alone.
I didn't find meditation through a wellness routine or a self-improvement plan. I found it during one of the hardest periods of my life, when everything I thought I knew about myself was being rearranged. I'd studied Eastern philosophy in college and something about Buddhism had always resonated -- the pragmatism of it, the refusal to rely on metaphysics, the insistence that you test everything against your own experience. So when the pain was too much, I did a Google search and found the Order of Pragmatic Buddhists.
I started showing up on Thursday nights. Meditating. Listening to dharma talks. Sitting with people who were also trying to figure out how to live. The practice helped me get through the hard season. But when I started to get regulated, I realized I had no life outside my work. No friendships I was tending. No activities that were just mine. I had been so over-identified with my role as a professor (and later as an administrator) that I'd lost track of myself entirely.
That's when the real work began. Not just meditating to cope, but actually looking at the patterns underneath. I knew intellectually that I had lifelong conditional self-worth -- growing up in an alcoholic home tends to wire that in. But it wasn't until I took a Mindful Self-Compassion course that I heard how loud that tape was running. The course gave me the distance to step back and actually hear the story I was telling about myself. The epiphany of seeing how strong the poison of delusion is, and how it shapes every choice became the seed of Third Jewel.
I want to help people see their own stories and change them. Not through willpower or toxic positivity, but through the same four practices that changed mine: Clarity, Compassion, Choice, and Connection.
The Order of Pragmatic Buddhists was founded in St. Louis in 2006 by Jim Eubanks. It's a lay Buddhist order grounded in pragmatist philosophy emphasizing that the measure of any teaching is whether it actually works in your life, not whether it fits a doctrinal framework. That resonated with me. I wasn't looking for metaphysics. I was looking for something that could help me understand and navigate my life.
I started attending Thursday night dharma talks and meditation sessions. I signed up for monk training in 2010 or 2011 because the training structure gave the practice depth and accountability. I learn by committing. Around 2015, when the leader of the St. Louis sangha moved to California, I stepped in to lead the community. From there, increasing responsibility within the Order eventually brought me to the role of Abbot.
A lay Buddhist order grounded in pragmatist philosophy, with sanghas in the US and beyond. The Order holds that Buddhist practice is most valuable when tested against lived experience, not accepted on faith, but practiced and evaluated. Learn more at pragmaticbuddhism.org.
Being a Pragmatic Buddhist monk is making a serious commitment to practice and to community. It means showing up for the sangha, preparing and delivering dharma talks, mentoring practitioners, and holding the container for others to do their own work. It also means being accountable to a practice myself, which brings me to why I teach.
I teach because I learn by teaching. I need to show up for others to keep my own practice alive between sessions. The community is what sustains the practice. The insight that we cannot do this alone is the fourth C in the Third Jewel Method, and it may be the most important one.
I've spent my career at Webster University in St. Louis, where I've been a professor of sociology since completing my PhD at the University of California, Irvine in 2005. My research focused on economic and legal inequality -- work that eventually grew into a broader focus on sociology of law and LGBT rights in international context.
Over the years I moved between faculty and administrative roles, serving as Associate Dean, department chair, Acting Academic Director at the Geneva campus, and ultimately Interim Dean of the newly established College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Throughout all of it, I held onto my identity as a teacher first.
I mention the administrative work not to impress but to be honest: being a dean is exactly the kind of high-achieving, high-stress role that makes conditional self-worth worse. Administration was where I needed the Buddhist practice most. It's also where I saw most clearly how much my faculty colleagues needed it too.
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Faculty-Student Collaborative Human Rights Research
Facilitating Student Engagement: Social Responsibility and Freshmen Learning Communities
Creating Common Ground: A Process to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Conversation among University Faculty
Start with the free 7-day gratitude course, explore the method, or join the Third Jewel community. There's a place for you here, wherever you're starting from.