Joseph Dispenza

Joseph Dispenza is the author of God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion, The Way of the Traveler, and Live Better Longer, and ten other books and scores of articles about living a higher quality of life. He is a former university professor who lived for several years in a monastery learning personal spirituality firsthand. He is in practice as a spiritual counselor.

Joseph brings to LifePath more than thirty years of teaching, counseling, and spiritual practice. He entered the Order of Holy Cross after high school and lived the life of a monk for eight years - the first year of which he spent in total silence. Later, he left the monastery to pursue a more active life, working for social change with a number of humanitarian organizations.

After earning a B.A. in the Humanities and an M.A. in Communication, he was for several years the director of Education Programs for the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C., and later, a story editor for United Artists studios in Los Angeles. In the mid-1970s he left Hollywood for Santa Fe, where he took up the life of a writer. The House of Alarcon, an epic novel of a Spanish colonial family in New Mexico, was published in the United States and simultaneously in the United Kingdom.

Joseph created a highly successful academic program in Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe, and served as its founding Chair for seven years, while also teaching courses in Media Ethics. In 1994 he met Dr. Hazel Parcells, a centenarian pioneer of holistic healing, who eventually became his teacher and the subject of his book, Live Better Longer. Dr. Parcells lived to the age of 106 practicing her own innovative alte ative healing methods. Later, Joseph became the Director of Parcells Center, an organization that disseminates information on holistic approaches to wellness.

Joseph's dream for many years has been to create a retreat program away from the dominant culture for people sincerely seeking to question the great truths of life - to offer to others the unique experiences he had as a monk and a student of spirituality. With two colleagues, he founded LifePath Retreats in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in 2000. He conducts retreats at LifePath Center in San Miguel, where he lives and writes.