Casey Kochmer

I am a Taoist, rooting my lineage from the natural school of Taoist discovery. I have been a Taoist my entire life. As a child I spent most of my time wandering rivers and forests just exploring nature. I spent countless moments wandering up and down rivers and learning what it was to flow with life and nature. In this, I consider nature itself to be my first true teacher in life.

Later in life I decided to understand human culture. Being a Taoist is wonderful, but we are each interconnected in a larger society. Humanity has created its own subset of rules and beliefs to explore. So I went out and explored humanity for 15 years. In society, I was trained as a physicist and mathematician. Later I somehow also earned a mechanical engineering degree. How all this happened I am not sure since I started off as a marine biologist. One can get side tracked when exploring life. I do remember being told by a job recruiter at AT&T, all I could do with a physics education (with a A- grade average) was to wash test tubes for AT&T, so I figure maybe the engineering degree could be useful for also washing dishes besides cleaning out a few test tubes. I was wrong, it didn't help me wash dishes... but that's life, live and learn.

After finishing several official degrees so I could pretend to fit in society, I went off in my disguise to discover what it meant to be in main stream culture. I ended up working at first as a engineer building things out of Teflon. Then for a few years I built paper airplanes and real airplanes . Every 3 years I would just switch around to something new to experience. At some point I began computer programming and chasing logic patterns. I spent time exploring the Internet and building Drug and Alcohol treatment systems for purposes of helping people recover and get aid. Later on I even spent a year or so writing a few very boring XML and programming books. However, I did manage to slip some poetry into those programming books. So officially, I am also a published poet. Heh ;)!

Over ten years ago I decided western culture really wasn't that exciting. Main-stream culture was indeed crazy from my perspective but it wasn't a fun crazy. People seemed to have a bad habit about stressing out and concentrating on not enjoying their life. While instead, as a Taoist, I would just bebop about and always enjoy myself.

I decided to go back to writing and see what I could do to lighten things up a bit. I integrated my Taoist background with experiences revealed in mainstream culture and matured into becoming a Taoist Master teaching practices of acceptance.

A Personal Tao grew out of this. Here I am today, slowly building a Taoist Temple, helping others as a Taoist Master, teaching inner Taoist practices, opening the path of dreams into living and over time polishing the book: A Personal Tao.

Of course this history isn't complete, I could write an entirely different bio about my children, how I married my love Julie after knowing her for 3 days, stories about wandering the streets helping people, my consulting business, a lifelong practice of patterning studies or the healing practice I have been refining. The fact is we are each a rainbow of experience and stories. In that we each have so much to teach and show in our stories to the world.

The lesson being: never define a Taoist Master by degrees or the past. Instead look to the actions of their heart and in the now. A Taoist Master is never who you expect, but rather the person living fully and uniquely as themselves while teaching acceptance along the way.

Whats next? We will see tomorrow, It's always a day at a time.