Aside from being founding director of the center, psychotherapist, author, public speaker and radio personality, I am a mother, a grandmother, a gardener, an artist and a playful spirit. I thank you for taking the time to visit my website. You will find a list of my services, experience and qualifications and select articles I have written. Also, please check out my book You're Not Finished Yet... the first chapter of which describes the effects of alcoholism on the family and how to deal with past traumas of living in a dysfunctional family. The last two chapters are about becoming more spiritual which is the final stage of recovery for a dysfunctional person. (Click here to read book reviews from Raymond Moody and Michael Tymn.) If you need more information please contact me at your convenience by either phone or email. Blessings, Karen.

• Masters Degree, Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work, New Brunswick, NJ. Specialization: Alcohol & Drug Studies

• Bachelors Degree, Magna Cum Laude, Art with specialization in Art Therapy, Jersey City State College

• Ordained, New York City, Interfaith Ministry. Interfaith is for people who want something above and beyond what normal religion gave them.

Angelic Whisperer Kathy Crosswell. Connecting To The Angels Kathy Brings Messages Of Inspiration And Enlightenment. She Is Well Known For Keeping It ‘Real’ And For Her Entertaining And Interactive Workshops and Talks. Don't miss this opportunity to hear from your guides and angels!

Known as the “Voice Builder to the World,” – or simply “The Maestro” – Gary Catona has trained many of the worlds greatest singers and entertainers including:  Whitney Houston, Andrea Bocelli, Tony Bennett, Babyface, Gloria Estefan, Michael Mc Donald, Sade, Steven Tyler, Brian Wilson, Johnny Mathis, Usher, Robin Thicke, Shakira, Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, Annie Lennox, Toni Braxton, Seal, Boys II Men, Backstreet Boys, Pharrell Williams, Lenny Kravitz, Gino Vannelli, Draco Rosa, Andy Williams, Liza Minnelli, and Earth, Wind and Fire.  (Please go to garycatona.com for a complete list of students)

Originally, Catona was interested in a career as an opera singer, but he lost his voice as a result of formal study with fourteen different voice teachers.  Undaunted, he moved to Austin, Texas in 1980 to research the mechanics of voice production at the music libraries at the University of Texas.  Ultimately, he formulated his revolutionary “voice-building-system,” which is the systematic process for building the muscles of the voice.  Catona decided to forgo a singing career and instead focus on teaching his groundbreaking voice-building system to the world.  His first gained notoriety when he built back the voice of a popular Texan singer named, Johnny Bush, who had lost his speaking and singing voice fourteen years earlier because of a vocal disorder called spasmotic dysphonia.  When Bush’s voice made a startling recovery after only ten voice-building sessions, Catona’s name spread nationally.

Catona moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and quickly established himself as the world’s premier voice builder.  His many projects included preparing Liza Minnelli, Babyface, and Seal for their respective tours, and also coached them on the road.  Catona taught and toured with the Italian tenor superstar, Andrea Bocelli, and did the same for pop icon, Sade.  In recent years, he has added legends Whitney Houston, Johnny Mathis, Jackson Browne, and rock sensation, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith to his roster of artistic greats.  Over the past decade, Catona has appeared in many newspapers and magazines both nationally and internationally (e.g., New York Times; USA Today; People; Vanity Fair; London Times) and has been featured on the popular television shows Entertainment Tonight and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in which his revolutionary work with celebrities was highlighted.  Over the past year, Catona has been the focus of intense media attention – internationally – for his role as the late Whitney Houston’s voice teacher.

Catona was born in Philadelphia to a traditional Italian/American family, and attended Penn State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts and a master’s degree in philosophy. His two passions – voice and philosophy – sustain his creative life.  Currently, Catona is committed to spreading his voice building system throughout the world, so everyone can benefit from his discoveries.  He has published two books: Thinking As Sport And Dance (philosophy book) and A Revolution In Singing.  He is currently preparing to release his third book called, Wisdom For Singers And Philosophers.  Catona has also released an iPhone/Pad app called: Voice Builder.

William Collinge, PhD, MPH, LCSW , my third guest, is a consultant, author, speaker and researcher in the field of integrative health care. He conducts a private practice of health-related psychotherapy and mind/body medicine in Eugene, Oregon, for individuals, couples and families facing challenges to health and well being. He has extensive experience supporting people with cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, HIV/AIDS, and other conditions, as well as veterans and their loved ones. He has led workshops and retreats across North America, in Hawaii, New Zealand and the UK. William is an Affiliate Faculty member of the Oregon Health & Science University. In addition he directs research projects sponsored by the National Institutes of Health through Collinge and Associates  His latest book is Partners in Healing: Simple Ways to Offer Support, Comfort and Care to a Loved One Facing Illness (Shambhala, 2008). More information on multiple grants, books and book chapters, articles, consulting and other activities

Joel Kahn, M.D.  is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine and Director of Cardiac Wellness, Michigan Healthcare Professionals PC. He is a graduate Summa Cum Laude of the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He lectures widely on the cardiac benefits of vegan nutrition and mind body practices. He also writes for Readers Digest Magazine as the Holistic Heart Doc and his first book, The Holistic Heart Book

“I know a lot of people. A lot. And I ask a lot of prying questions. But I’ve never run into a more intriguing biography than Howard Bloom’s in all my born days.” Paul Solman, Business and Economics Correspondent, PBS NewsHour

Howard Bloom has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein,[and] Freud,” by Britain’s Channel4 TV , “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine, and “The Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium” by Buckminster Fuller’s archivist. Bloom is the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (“mesmerizing”—The Washington Post), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (“reassuring and sobering”—The New Yorker), The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism (“Impressive, stimulating, and tremendously enjoyable.” James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic), and The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates (“Bloom’s argument will rock your world.” Barbara Ehrenreich).

Bloom has been published in arxiv.org, the leading pre-print site in advanced theoretical physics and math. He was invited to tell an international conference of quantum physicists in Moscow in 2005 why everything they know about quantum physics is wrong. And his book Global Brain was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium in 2010, with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.

Bloom has founded three international scientific groups: the Group Selection Squad (1995), which fought to gain acceptance for the concept of group selection in evolutionary biology; The International Paleopsychology Project (1997), which worked to create a new multi-disciplinary synthesis between cosmology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and history; and The Space Development Steering Committee (2007), an organization that includes astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchell and members from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

Bloom explains that his focus is “mass behavior, from the mass behavior of quarks to the mass behavior of human beings.” In 1968 Bloom turned down four fellowships in psychology and neurobiology and set off on a science project in a field he knew nothing about: popular culture. He was determined to tunnel into the forces of history by entering “the belly of the beast where new myths, new mass passions, and new mass movements are made.” Bloom used simple correlational techniques plus what he calls “tuned empathy” and “saturated intuition” to help build or sustain the careers of figures like Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Billy Idol, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, John Mellencamp, Queen, Kiss, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Run DMC, and roughly 100 others. In the process, he generated $28 billion in revenues (more than the gross domestic product of Oman or Luxembourg) for companies like Sony, Disney, Pepsi Cola, Coca Cola, and Warner Brothers.

Bloom also helped launch Farm Aid and Amnesty International’s American presence. He worked with the United Negro College Fund,the National Black United Fund, and the NAACP, and he put together the first public service radio campaign for solar power (1981).

Bloom’s focus on group behavior extends to geopolitics. He has debated one-one-one with senior officials from Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood and Gaza’s Hamas on Iran’s Arab-language international Alalam TV News Network. He has dissected headline issues on Saudi Arabia’s KSA1-TV and on Iran’s global English language Press-TV. And he has appeared fifty two times for up to five hours on 500 radio stations in North America.

Bloom is a former visiting scholar in the Graduate School of Psychology at NYU and a former core faculty member at the Graduate Institute in Meriden, Connecticut. In addition to arXiv.org, his scientific articles have appeared in PhysicaPlus, New Ideas in Psychology, and Across Species Comparisons and Psychopathology. Bloom has also written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Knight-Ridder Financial News Service, the Village Voice, and Cosmopolitan.  Bloom’s 90-minute per episode YouTube series, Howard the Humongous, pulls in a minimum of 45,000 hits and a maximum of 161,000 per installment.

Topping it all off, Bloom’s computer houses a not-so-secret and not-at-all humble project, his 7,100-chapter-long Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe Including the Human Soul. Pavel Kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences says that

“Bloom has created a new Scientific Paradigm. He explains in vast and compelling terms why we should forget all we know in complicated modern math and should start from the very beginning. …Bloom’s Grand Unified Theory… opens a window into entire systems we don’t yet know and/or see, new…collectivities that live, love, battle, win and lose each day of our gray lives. I never imagined that a new system of thought could produce so much light.”

Concludes Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.”

Nobel-Prize winner Dudley Herschbach calls Bloom’s insights “truly awesome.” There’s a reason. Bloom’s perspective comes from a once–in-the-history-of-science approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. Bloom started out normally enough, diving into microbiology, theoretical physics, and cosmology at the age of ten, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer that won prizes at local science fairs before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department at the University of Buffalo when he was still twelve. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate school fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine that won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine,

Then Bloom gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart and entered a field he knew nothing about– he become editor of the rock monthly Circus. Using correlational studies, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled Circus’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with founding a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom founded the biggest public relations firm in the music industry, The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Peter Gabriel, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members crusade for the right to express their identity…a skill that gave him an inside role in the rise of country crossover, disco, midwestern rock, fusion jazz, New Age music, punk rock, rap, and the form of crossover black music embodied in Prince and Michael Jackson.

The pinnacles of fame provided surprising raw material for scientific analysis. “When you’re at the center of the sort of attention-storm that hits when you’re working with a superstar,” Bloom says, “it’s as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. Time perception alters. You resolve crises in minutes, seeing solutions instantly, solutions that previously would have taken you weeks.

“More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he doesn’t know, one that seems to surge through him as if he were a length of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in an almost transcendent bond.” Bloom’s task was to first experience the exaltation, then to dissect it. “The model for this work,” he says, “cames from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic experiences of mystics, then to probe these experieces scientifically, a process that led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience.”

Bloom’s forays into power and its manipulations were also intense. “In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry’s elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes.”

The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom, the most disturbing of them all. Bloom co-founded Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, “Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true.”

Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and to the antidote he invented, “perceptual engineering,” which he defines as “a way of finding a valid truth that the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It’s what we do in much of science–seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick, and in the process altering society’s views.”

In 1981, Bloom organized the material he’d unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure that would first reveal itself in 1995′s The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. And he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 Bloom headed an insurgent academic circle called “The Group Selection Squad” whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology’s mandate was to “map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present.”

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his beyond-the-box insights Bloom has “raced ahead of the timid scientific herd” often “vaulting over their heads” with a “grand vision” that “we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.” In The Lucifer Principle, Global Brain, The Genius of the Beast, and his new book The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates, Howard Bloom brings those understandings from dimness into the light.

Denise David Williams
President/Producer 

After earning a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Hofstra University, Ms.Williams began her career as an actor's agent in New York City. Shortly after, she moved to Los Angeles and attended the Graduate Peter Stark Producing Program at USC.

Ms. Williams then began her production experience in the film industry at LucasFilm as an assistant in pre-production on E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Denise advanced to story analyst for Barry Krost at The Movie Company where she was responsible for developing television material for management clients and held production responsibilities on American Dreamer.

Ms. Williams then worked as Director of Creative Affairs for Arkoff International Pictures where she acquired and developed feature material for both Samuel Z. Arkoff and Louis Arkoff and had extensive production responsibilities on the feature film Up the Creek.

Denise was then hired by Daniel Melnick's IndieProd Co. at 20th Century Fox as story editor where she worked with writers and directors including Robert Zemeckis, Buck Henry and Lawrence Kasdan and on feature films Making Love and Unfaithfully Yours. Among some of the other films produced by The IndieProd Co. were: All That Jazz, That's Entertainment, Altered States, Roxanne, and First Family.

Ms. Williams served as Vice President of Production for Arnold Kopelson Entertainment, where she acquired and developed feature film projects for both foreign and domestic markets. Among the many projects under her auspices were Warlock, Triumph of the Spirit and Platoon, which grossed over $100 million dollars and garnered Best Director and Best Picture Academy Awards for director Oliver Stone and producer Arnold Kopelson, respectively.

Ms. Williams formed her own production company, MakeMagic Productions, whose mission is to produce highly entertaining films with global appeal. In 2002, MakeMagic produced the industry hit, My Dinner With Ovitz which Variety called "charming!" and Universal chief Ron Meyer and David Geffen called "brilliant".

MakeMagic is currently in development on the feature film JOHN MACK; staging the play adaptation of A GOOD AMERICAN and packaging the American adaptation of the French ensemble comedy, OSCAR DIVO, among other endeavors.

Ms. Williams is a member of the WGA west and a frequent script consultant. She is married to musician/composer/arranger Larry Williams and has a dog named Buddy

Daniel is a social engineer and evolutionary philosopher and strategist. He is the founder of Critical Path Global, a research and design institute aimed at developing an integrated set of technologies and processes capable of organizing and supporting a distributed and continually updating comprehensive critical path management system for humanity's total evolution.

He is working to repurpose and synthesize relevant state-of-the-art systems for information management, complexity processing, mathematical forecasting, and other data science tools into an integrated set of functions capable of global resource allocation planning and strategy. His aim is the shortest path to a fundamentally redesigned world-system that makes possible and supports the highest quality of life for all life, now and ongoingly.

Specifically, his focus is on the development of new systems of economics and governance that intrinsically incentivize life-enhancing behaviors at all levels of agency, supporting distributed and spontaneous problem solving and conscious participation in our global evolution.