Richard Bradshaw, PhD is a psychologist (social/cross-cultural), meta-physician, writer and teacher, who loves nature and outdoor sports, is vegan and practices yoga and meditation daily. Deeply concerned with the quality of life for all inhabitants of this Earth eco-sphere, he is engaged in environmentalism, sustainability, Direct Democracy and encouraging a new worldview based on self-actualization through inner realization rather than a forever elusive, psychologically and environmentally destructive materialism. For him both inner and outer fulfillment and the freedom fulfillment brings begin inside an individual and manifest outward collectively molding the structure and nature of society.
My Journey
I was born in San Francisco, in the Mission District a few blocks from Haight-Ashbury, which should probably have been a clear indication of where my life would be heading. When I was four we moved to the high mountains of Colorado, where I lived until joining the Air Force at seventeen. Four years later I was freed, traveled a little, and ended up in Hawaii, where I soon fell in with people practicing Transcendental Meditation and yoga, and began studying astrology, Buddhism and other esoteric subjects.
That curiosity led me to the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I wandered from department to department before earning a BA in communications and an MA in Asian comparative religions. During those years I attended three Enlightenment Intensives, which combine dyadic communication with Zen meditation. They became some of the most defining moments of my search, and brought a quantum leap in my interest in self-realization and how it actually happens.
Twenty-six years in Asia
After three years as a teaching assistant in the UH Religion Department, I wanted to see what the rest of the world was about, and took a teaching position at a university in Japan, later moving to a much larger university near Tokyo. Long vacations let me spend months at a time across Southeast Asia, soaking up different cultures and getting to know many differing realities.
That experience led me to a PhD in social and cross-cultural psychology. I studied East-West psychology at the Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, then psychology at the University of Hawaii, and finally became a PhD candidate at La Trobe University in Melbourne while attending graduate seminars at the University of Tokyo. Five years of flying between Melbourne and Tokyo produced a 350-page dissertation on emotional experience among the Japanese, later published as Fundamentals of Japanese Emotional Experience.
In Japan I practiced Zazen every day for about three years at the San-Un (Three Cloud) Zendo in Kamakura, including twelve-hour sittings each month and four-day sesshin, where one sits, eats and sleeps on the same mat for the entire four days.
This experience leads to a scouring of all content from the mind, resulting in an awareness that is fixed within the magic of the present moment. Time passes unnoticed, for you are forever here and now.
I also founded the Kamakura Yoga Society, where I taught yoga and meditation for some years, and practiced Aikido for about twenty years, many of them at Hachimangu Shrine in Kamakura. Aikido is a kind of moving meditation: the awareness and attitude of water, and the spontaneity of the wind. And when the regimented rhythm of Japanese life made me restless, I earned a pilot’s license and found freedom in the skies above Japan, flying small aircraft out of the aero clubs at Yokota Air Base for many years.
Coming home
After twenty-six years away, the America I knew no longer existed, and I went through reverse culture shock for a couple of years. Living at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii eased my way back, and I returned to the classroom as a student once more, taking acting, oil painting, music theory, physics, astronomy, botany, peace studies and mediation, while writing two books of about 350 pages each on the meaning of freedom.
In 2020 I taught Psychology of Meditation through the Osher Institute at the University of Hawaii. Today I am semi-retired in Honolulu, teaching occasionally and doing a lot of writing, surfing, hiking, yoga and meditation, and still getting used to what the modern generation in America is all about: a wonderful generation, very different from my own, and both unique in the cosmos.
Where the books come from
Everything I have written grows out of this journey. The Freedom Series distills a lifetime of inquiry into the self and what it means to be free. The Clarity Series gathers those insights into short poems. And the Mandalam Series turns them into a metaphysical adventure through consciousness itself.
If you would like to start somewhere free, the Articles & Meditations page is a good doorway, or you can browse all the books in the shop.
