Peter Russell M.A., D.C.S.
President
Peter Russell is a fellow of The World Business Academy, and of The Findhorn Foundation, and an Honorary Member of The Club of Budapest. At Cambridge University (UK), he studied mathematics and theoretical physics. Then, as he became increasingly fascinated by the mysteries of the human mind he changed to experimental psychology. Pursuing this interest, he traveled to India to study meditation and eastern philosophy, and on his return took up the first research post ever offered in Britain on the psychology of meditation. He also has a post-graduate degree in computer science, and conducted some of the early work on 3-dimensional displays, presaging by some twenty years the advent of virtual reality. In the 1970s, he was one of the first people to introduce human potential seminars into the corporate field, and for twenty years ran programs for senior management on creativity, stress management, personal development, and sustainable development. In1982 he coined the term “global brain” with his 1980s bestseller of the same name in which he predicted the Internet and the impact it would have. His principal interest is the deeper, spiritual significance of the times we are passing through.
Gail Brenner, Ph.D.
Treasurer
Gail Brenner is a clinical psychologist, speaker, and author—and a lover of truth with a fire that burns brightly.
For over 20 years, she has met with clients individually and in groups, bringing laser-like clarity and loving care to the confusion of common problems, such as reactive emotions, feelings of inadequacy, and relationship struggles. She is passionate about her work, inviting people to untangle personal identities that are the source of suffering, revealing the possibility of embodied living in harmony with all of life.
Gail has special expertise working with older adults and their families and brings clear seeing and compassion to the transitions of aging, death, and dying.
Gail was an assistant clinical professor at the University of California San Francisco where she trained physicians and maintained a clinical practice. She has published numerous professional articles on coping with stress and chronic medical illness. More recently, she is the author of the award-winning The End of Self-Help: Discovering Peace and Happiness Right at the Heart of Your Messy, Scary, Brilliant Life and At the Core of Every Heart: Reflections, Insights, and Practices for Waking Up and Living Free.
At first involved with the Buddhist community, Gail eventually discovered the direct path of nondual teachings—and her true home. She lives happily in Santa Barbara.
Cameron McColl
Cameron McColl was born and brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland. Over the years he’s lived in Australia, the UK, the US and the British Virgin Islands, with spells in France. Originally an electronics designer with an engineering degree from Edinburgh University, he’s started and grown several large companies, leading to IPO’s in the UK and US.
For many years Cameron lived two lives – one as a CEO, entrepreneur and public company director, with a busy family life and two growing kids, and the other as a student of Francis Lucille, a teacher of Advaita, whom he lovingly followed round the world for twenty years. In-between times he pursued his passion for sailing and the ocean.
With kids grown and a life that now flows between Sebastopol, his boat in Florida, and the British Virgin Islands he’s loving dedicating time to SAND to help it grow and mature without losing any of the laughter or spontaneity.
Báyò Akómoláfé
Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) changes diapers, loves ghee dosas with coconut chutney, and is ecstatically in love with his 6 year old daughter, Alethea, and 2 year old son, Kyah. He is the grateful life-partner of Ijeoma, author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017), and Chief Curator of The Emergence Network – a postactivism project concerned with responsiveness in precarious times.
Chris Fields
Chris Fields explores the consequences of treating all interactions as observations, and hence regarding the world as composed entirely of observers observing each other. He is interested in how observers draw boundaries around parts of their experiences to separate out “entities” including themselves, that they then regard as having properties, structure, locations in space, and identities through time. Answers to these questions about observation and the construction of bounded entities with identities, however tentative and partial, suggest approaches to open problems in cosmology, developmental biology, and cognitive science.
Biographical details and recent publications