Steve Bhaerman is an internationally known author, humorist, and workshop leader. For the past 23 years, he has written and performed as Swami Beyondananda, the "Cosmic Comic." Swami's comedy has been called "irreverently uplifting" and has been described both as "comedy disguised as wisdom" and "wisdom disguised as comedy."

As the Swami, Steve is the author of Driving Your Own Karma (1989), When You See a Sacred Cow, Milk It For All It's Worth (1993), Duck Soup for the Soul (1999) and Swami for Precedent: A 7-Step Plan to Heal the Body Politic and Cure Electile Dysfunction (2004).

In his "past life" (before Swami), Steve started an alternative high school in Washington, D.C. and co-authored a book about his experiences, No Particular Place to Go: Making of a Free High School. A political science major, he later taught history to autoworkers at Wayne State University in Detroit as part of the Weekend College. In 1980, Steve co-founded Pathways Magazine in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one of the first publications bringing together holistic health, personal growth, spirituality, and politics. Subsequent to Pathways, Steve was a freelance writer and co-author with Don McMillan of Friends and Lovers: How to Meet the People You Want to Meet (Writer's Digest Books, 1986).

Since 2005, Steve has written a political blog with a spiritual perspective, Notes From the Trail, hailed as an encouraging voice "in the bewilderness." His latest book, written with cellular biologist Bruce H. Lipton, PhD is Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There From Here (Hay House, 2009). Steve is active in transpartisan politics and the practical application of Spontaneous Evolution. 

Rob Robertson,M.D. is 1974 graduate of the University of Louisville School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in Emergency Medicine at the U.of L. Affiliated Hospitals and was appointed Director of Emergency Services at Baptist Hospital in Western Kentucky. During his tenure there, the EM Department grew to a patient load of over 50,000 visits annually. In 1994, Dr. Robertson opened a wellness and preventive medicine practice called Doctors Nutrition System and developed nutritional supplements and protocols that were incorporated into their practices by multiple physicians throughout the Midwest.

In researching products for his company, he discovered transfer factors through the over 3,000 articles that had been published since 1949. " I was simply overwhelmed. Why hadn't I heard about this?" Transfer factors and their use in augmenting the immune response seemed like the " the missing link in our attempt to provide patients with a natural, safe way to lessen their chances of becoming ill." When Dr. Robertson discovered that transfer factors were going to be made available commercially, he closed his medical practice and sold his supplement company because, " I simply had to become involved in helping to tell the world, literally the world, about what I consider to be one of the defining discoveries in the history of medical science."

The availability of transfer factors and his interest in the perplexing Fibromyalgia Syndrome led to his incorporating natural products developed by William J. Hennen, Ph.D. into a program which has been named THE FIBROMYALGIA RECOVERY PROGRAM. "Do we have all of the answers?I'm not certain that anyone will ever be able to make that claim. But we feel very confidant that by stressing and addressing the immune system breakdown and dysfunction, we have a way to intervene in the fibromyalgics multitude of symptoms in a beneficial way. One of the most gratifying experiences that I've ever had is to hear a fibromyalgic call and tell me that they just want to say thanks for having their life given back to them." Dr. Robertson is now involved full-time in THE FIBROMYALGIA RECOVERY PROGRAM and in continuing to help tell the transfer factor story.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar and campaign coordinator for RootsAction. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War. He blogs at DavidSwanson and WarIsACrime. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.

ROGER J. WOOLGER, PH.D, was a Jungian analyst, regression therapist and professional lecturer with degrees in psychology, religion and philosophy from Oxford and London Universities. He trained as an analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich. Born a British citizen, Roger lived and taught Jungian and transpersonal  psychology and comparative religion in North America and England. He was a Guest Professor at Vassar College, where he gave the Mary Mellon Memorial lectures in 1988. He was also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Vermont (1975) and Concordia University, Montreal (1979-80). He led workshops at the New York Open Center, Esalen Institute and Omega Institute, and speaks at a broad range of conferences internationally.

Roger Woolger's first book, Other Lives Other Selves, (Doubleday, 1987) is an innovative synthesis of Jungian depth psychology, bodywork, yoga psychology, psychodrama and eastern meditation principles.  It has been translated into German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and French. Widely regarded as the definitive work in the field of regression therapy, this and his later works such as Eternal Return (tape set) and Healing You Past Lives (2004) integrates aspects of Tibetan Buddhism and shamanism. The work has evolved in the last decade into the highly original therapeutic tool which is called Deep Memory Process™.  He discussed and demonstrated this work on American, Canadian and Italian network television, appearing in a PBS special in the States.

He ran training programs for therapists in North America and Britain, also teaching professionals in Holland and Germany . Also a series of training programs throughout Brazil where in 1996 he was a keynote speaker at the International Transpersonal Psychology Conference in Manaus hosted by Stanislav Grof. He was also an acclaimed keynote speaker at  first Brazilian International Transpersonal Psychology Conference in Lindoya the following year and at the Third international Conference in Lisbon in 2003. He also presented at the First World Congress for Regression Therapy in Holland in 2003. He published numerous articles and reviews in the field of  Jungian, Transpersonal and religious psychology.

Roger Woolger was a well known teacher in Britain, having appeared in 1966 in the Channel 4 television series Transformations and in various other television programs.  In 1997 he gave a much noted talk "The Presence of Other Worlds in Psychotherapy and Healing" at the Beyond the Brain Conference co-sponsored by the British Scientific and Medical Network and the Institute for Noetic Sciences (California) at Cambridge University. His talk was the fruit of a lifelong study of the perennial philosophy and the mystical traditions of Christianity and Sufism, just as his practice of psychotherapy was early on shaped by the practice of Buddhist vipassana meditation and  the mysticism of Simone Weil. The talk in question was later published in Thinking Beyond the Brain, edited by his colleague David Lorimer. In 2004 he presented at a Conference sponsored by the Royal College of Psychiatrists called Beyond Death: Does Consciousness Survive? This paper can also be downloaded here.

Roger also taught literature, published articles on dreamwork and meditation and gave film seminars on Fellini, Bergman and Cocteau. He was an amateur Shakespeare actor and teacher. His popular second book, The Goddess Within (Ballantine, 1989) written with Jennifer Barker,  is an in depth exploration of feminine psychology as mirrored in the myths, conflicts and wounding of the Greek goddesses; it draws upon Rogers scholarly knowledge of  Jungian writing, the history of religion and feminist revisionist history. This very  entertaining book has had much success in the US, Germany and Brazil.

A lifelong interest in the Grail legend and the esoteric spirituality of medieval Europe inspired Roger to lead several extraordinary  tours to sacred sites in the South of France, to troubadour and Cathar country; sites of Black Madonnas and the Magdalene.  See Magdalene Tours

Claire Hope Cummings is an environmental lawyer, journalist, and the author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press, March 2008).

Claire’s stories focus on the environmental and political implications of how we eat and how food and farming reconnects us to each other and the places where we live.

Claire brings three decades of broad experience in agriculture to her work. She has farmed in California and in Vietnam, where she had an organic farm on the Mekong Delta. For four years she was an attorney for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Office of General Counsel.

For the last 15 years, Claire has been active in the local food and farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, helping to found the Marin County food policy council, and serving on the boards of organizations such as Earth Island Institute, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Food First, and the Elmwood Institute—the predecessor organization for the Center for Ecoliteracy. Claire was awarded a Food and Society Policy Fellowship in 2001. She currently advises The Columbia Foundation’s sustainable communities and food system programs.

“Claire Cummings, Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry.”
Denise O’Brien, Orion magazine September/October 2007, on being asked who the best thinkers in her field were. Denise ran a very close race for Iowa State Secretary of Agriculture in 2006. She is the founder and director of Women, Food and Agriculture Network.

To learn more about Claire’s views on the future of food and farming, and her experiences farming on the Mekong River, read an online interview conducted by Bioneers:
The New Food Movement

As a lawyer, Claire represented and advised environmental and native groups on environmental and cultural preservation throughout the U.S. In Hawai‘i Claire represented the Halawa Valley Coalition and The Hawai‘i La‘ieikawai Association during the H3 litigation and was a founder of Hui Aina o Hana. Claire has also represented and worked extensively with the Winnenmen Wintu tribe in Northern California as well as traditional native groups in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and elsewhere. She is a founder of The Cultural Conservancy, a native land rights organization.

Webcast: "Ripe for Change"- Innovative Agricultural Policy for Hawai'i Island
by Claire Hope Cummings, Hawai'i Island Food Summit October 2007

Claire has contributed to and been featured in many books and films, including "The Future of Food" and "Ripe for Change", nationally aired on PBS.

One of the most fascinating people on the teaching landscape is Lawrence Lanoff. Truly a renaissance man, Lawrence is a film director, photographer, author… and a deeply enlightened healer and teacher. He grew up on the streets of New York City in the 1970’s, in a tumultuous time that provided him with some of his greatest spiritual lessons and bringing a grounded practicality to Lawrence’s work. He calls himself a “rubber meets the road kinda guy” as he applies this practical essence to his artistic and spiritual skills over a 20 year span, to an amazing array of disciplines, starting with a couple of dream jobs – the directing of movies and as a photographer for Playboy Magazine. This is a man who has discovered that the way people understand movies is similar to the ways in which they understand dreams, symbols, and ultimately, themselves – and used that knowledge to unlock the secret of life. 

During this time, Lawrence studied physics, yoga, spirituality, neuroscience, photography, meditation, magic, social biology, semiotics, advertising design, computer science, philosophy, anatomy, meta-physics, psychology, NLP, hypnosis, fine art, massage therapy, secret tantra, Taoism, film, television, art therapy, marketing and business communication. He even managed to work in a Doctorate in Cognitive Studies.

Over the past seven years, Lawrence has been in a process of refining his radical teachings, leading people into a new kind of freedom, literally deprogramming them from the sleep imposed by cults and religions. What is slowly evolving is a revolutionary new theory of consciousness that incorporates evolution, symbolism, metaphor, neurobiology, and their relationship to healing, spiritual evolution, and neuro-economics — the neural pathways that influences our deepest feelings about self worth and money, and, of course, sex and relationships.

Robert Allen Bartlett is a practicing alchemist and author. A natural born scientist, Robert’s interest in geology and the sciences in general prompted him to construct his own home laboratory when only 9 years old. Roberts interest in the ancient use of natural materials lead him to the study of alchemical works at the age of 12 and it has become his lifelong passion. In 1974, he left San Jose State University to pursue an intensive course of alchemical study at the Paracelsus Research Society (later Paracelsus College) under the guidance of Dr. Albert Reidel (Frater Albertus). During this time, Robert lived in central Idaho where he performed personal research on botanical materials and worked underground mining antimony (an important alchemical resource). By 1976, at the prompting of Frater Albertus, Robert returned to college at Boise State University to complete his degree in chemistry with the view of working at the newly formed Paralab, a commercial offshoot of Paracelsus College. During this time Robert lived in Boise and was employed as a geochemical assayer for the mining industry. In 1979, he received his B.S. degree chemistry and immediately began work at Paralab as Chief Chemist. Working closely with Frater Albertus, Robert researched and developed a wide range of mineral and metallic preparations following Western and Eastern alchemical traditions for applications in alternative health care. Later, Robert was selected by Frater Albertus to become a Director of Research at Tristar, the future vision of Frater Albertus which would combine the Paracelsus College, Paralab, and a Healing Arts Center into one complex. Unfortunately with the death of Frater Albertus in 1984, both the college and Paralab closed its doors and the Tristar dream was never realized. Robert’s pursuit of alchemical research never diminished, as he continued his chemistry career as a research scientist for new ceramic materials, then later as the Chemistry Department Manager for a large materials testing laboratory. In this new environment, he was able to document and perfect alchemical experiments in ways undreamed of by the ancient alchemists using the very latest in scientific instrumentation. Robert is currently living in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two daughters where he has been teaching classes and giving workshops on practical alchemy since 2002. He is an instructor with Flamel College and will be presenting a two-session Spagyrics Workshop at the conference. He also produces a line of spagyric and homeopathic mineral salts under the Terre Vitae label. His latest book is Real Alchemy.