Sarah McLean 

Recently featured in the NY Times and quickly emerging as the face of mainstream meditation, Sarah McLean, Director of the Sedona Meditation Training Company, inspires seekers worldwide to take time out for time in through meditation.

Sarah’s experience is vast – along with her 18 year meditation practice, she was the founding education director of Deepak Chopra’s Center, directed Byron Katie’s School for the Work, and assisted to Seat of the Soul author, Gary Zukav.  She’s explored world spiritual traditions: She’s been a 2-year resident in a Zen Buddhist monastery, lived in an ashram in India, bicycled along the silk route through Pakistan, and trekked the golden triangle in Asia.

Known for her inspirational and dynamic style of teaching, Sarah makes meditation accessible to anyone. She distills her diverse experiences and perspectives and created programs where people “can find themselves without having to leave their ‘lives’.” She loves to facilitate ‘ah-ha moments’, and help people reach their fullest potential.  You can reach her at meditate@esedona.net, 928.204.0067 or visit her web site at www.sedonameditation.com.

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Andrew Bell

Andrew Bell is a 19 year old freshman at Trinity, a prestigious liberal arts college in Connecticut. 

He is a monthly columnist for the Sedona Intensive Newsletter and can be heard weekly on spiritual truth radio at margaretwendt.com.

He is very politically and artistically active and is an avid sports fan.

You can contact Andrew at Andrew.Bell@trincoll.edu

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John David Balla

John David Balla is a former eBusiness analyst, and systems integrator who now subsists as a corporate dropout in search of knowledge that brings forth healing, wisdom and freedom by bridging conventional paradigms of technology with ancient ones.

John has published articles in Knowledge Management Magazine, InformationWeek, eDocs, Inform, and was a regular speaker at technology-based trade shows for a number of years.

John is also a full time marketing consultant, copywriter, author, web designer, business consultant and volunteer committed to spiritual principles and practices. He can be reached at jballa@msn.com

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Byron Katie 

Byron Katie, founder of The Work, has one job: to teach people how to end their own suffering. As she guides people through the powerful process of inquiry called The Work, they find that their stressful beliefs—about life, other people, or themselves— radically shift and their lives are changed forever.

Based on Byron Katie’s direct experience of how suffering is created and ended, The Work is an astonishingly simple process, accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds, and requires nothing more than a pen and paper and an open mind.

Through this process, anyone can learn to trace unhappiness to its source and eliminate it there. Katie (as everyone calls her) not only shows us that all the problems in the world originate in our thinking: she gives us the tool to open our minds and set ourselves free.

Katie is the author of three bestselling books:
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (with Stephen Mitchell),
I Need Your Love—Is That True?: How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead (with Michael Katz),
and the recently published A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are (with Stephen Mitchell).

Her latest book is Question Your Thinking, Change The World: Quotations from Byron Katie.

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Bill Sharon

Bill Sharon has been conducting seminars, workshops and consulting assignments in the area of risk management for the past 12 years. He has 25 years experience in the Financial Services and Marketing/Communications industry in a variety of “C” level positions and consultancies. In managing projects that result in significant change in organizational culture, Bill’s operational experience is a major factor in crafting his deliverables—they are results oriented.

He is featured in numerous industry magazines (CIO Magazine, Business Finance Magazine, Business Credit Magazine) has authored an executive briefing on managing risk in marketing services published by the Cutter Consortium in May 2005 and has published a series of articles that are widely distributed on the Internet (BetterManagement. com, ContinuityCentral.com) and at www.sorms.com Bill holds a clinical degree and, for the first ten years of his professional life worked with adolescents in the South Bronx and East Harlem, an experience that taught him the very difficult skill of how to listen. He can be contacted at bsharon@sorms.com

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James Redfield

When author and therapist James Redfield self-published his first novel in 1993, the immediate ground swell of enthusiasm from booksellers and readers made The Celestine Prophecy one of the most successful self-published books of all time.

Since 1994, when Warner Books published The Celestine Prophecy in hard cover, this adventure parable about a spiritual journey to Peru became one of modern publishing’s greatest success stories. According to Publishing Trends, The Celestine Prophecy was the #1 international bestseller of 1996 (#2 in 1995).

In 1995 and 1996, it was the #1 American book in the world. This phenomenal novel spent over 3 years on the New York Times bestsellers list and appeared on lists around the world. In 1996, an eagerly awaited sequel, The Tenth Insight: Holding The Vision, which also became an instant bestseller, joined The Celestine Prophecy. The two books spent a combined 74 weeks on the New York Times list, making James Redfield the best-selling hard cover author in the world in 1996, as cited in BP Report (January 1997).

James Redfield was 43 when he published The Celestine Prophecy, which chronicles Nine Insights into a greater spirituality. He has been keenly interested in human spirituality all of his life. Born on March 19, 1950, he grew up in a rural area near Birmingham, Alabama. From an early age, he was motivated by a need for clarity about spiritual matters. Brought up in a Methodist Church that was loving and community-oriented, he was nevertheless frustrated by a lack of answers to his questions about the true nature of spiritual experience. As a young man, he studied Eastern philosophies, including Taoism and Zen, while majoring in sociology at Auburn University. He later received a Master’s degree in counseling and spent more than 15 years as a therapist to abused adolescents. During this time, he was drawn into the human potential movement and turned to it for theories about intuitions and psychic phenomena that would help his troubled clients. All along, Redfield was forming ideas that would eventually find their way into The Celestine Prophecy. In 1989, he quit his job as a therapist to write full-time, synthesizing his interest in interactive psychology, Eastern and Western philosophies, science, futurism, ecology, history, and mysticism.

Using an adventure parable approach that has been called “part Indiana Jones, part Scott Peck,” The Celestine Prophecy created a model for spiritual perception and actualization that resonated with millions of people and focused on the mysterious coincidences that occur in each of our lives. Disdaining the spotlight himself, Redfield proclaimed in The Celestine Prophecy that each of us must intuit his own spiritual destiny.

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