On awakening, grief, running, and the unlikely path that led here.
When Scott was eighteen years old, something happened that he would spend the next nine years trying to forget.
Each morning began with two hours of intense, uncontrollable thought flooding. Then it would stop, and what remained for the rest of the day was complete emptiness. No thoughts. No sense of self. No identity, no gender, no desires. Just a vast open dissolution that lasted until the next morning, when the flooding would begin again. After a month, even the thought flooding stopped. And the emptiness endured alone, unbroken, for three more months.
He was a freshman at Emory University. His father was a psychiatrist. His mother was a psychiatric nurse. And he had no framework for what was happening to him.
Around the same time, his closest friend began showing signs of psychosis. And Scott, watching his friend dissolve into schizophrenia while he himself felt the floor of his own identity giving way, made a decision that the mind makes when it is overwhelmed: he sealed it all away. The awakening. The emptiness. The four months of living without a self. He closed the door and he ran.
He ran for seven years. Through alcohol and substances and relationships that looked like love and functioned like numbing. Through the relentless pursuit of achievement, through art school and medical school and everything in between. Through the kind of self-destruction that is so gradual and so normalized that it barely registers as destruction at all, until the body starts to give out, until the mind starts to fracture, until nothing works anymore and you are standing in front of the emptiness you have been running from with no tools left to run with.
None of it touched what was underneath. That is the thing about avoidance: it is exhausting and it does not work. The emptiness does not go away. It waits. And the harder you run, the stronger it gets.
"The emptiness does not go away. It waits. And the harder you run, the stronger it gets."
What stopped him was grief.
Not immediately. Not cleanly. But at a silent retreat in Asilomar, California, the teacher Adyashanti said something that landed like a stone in still water: you can walk around and look at how beautiful everything is, or you can stop right where you are and find out what you are avoiding.
Scott sat down. He found his best friend. He found the nine years of grief he had been carrying for the boy who fell into madness while he stood next to him helpless. He found the awakening he had sealed away at eighteen. And he began to cry.
He cried for eight hours a day for the rest of that retreat. They would not let him sit in the meditation hall because he was making too much noise.
That was the beginning of three years of the most intensive inner work he has ever done. Four silent retreats a year. Four to twelve hours of meditation a day. Two hours of grief practice daily. Intensive therapy twice a week. And slowly, then all at once, the patterns that had run his life began to loosen. The emptiness stopped being a monster. It began to feel like ground.
He trained as a therapist at Naropa University, one of the only graduate programs in contemplative psychotherapy in the world. He spent four years at Rogers Behavioral Health building and running a residential DBT program for adolescent girls at the highest risk. He built his own practice, married his clinical partner Cate, had children, and eventually made the decision that surprised everyone including himself: to sell nearly everything and move to Mallorca, Spain, to build a life more fully in alignment with what he actually believes.
He is a Licensed Professional Counselor with thirteen years of clinical experience and twenty-seven years of personal mindfulness practice including twenty-five silent retreats. He teaches in the Clear Light Lineage.
Scott sought affirmation as a teacher from Sharon Landrith of the Clear Light lineage. Sharon had herself been asked to teach by Adyashanti. Having attended Scott's retreats and witnessed his practice over many years, she affirmed him as a teacher in the lineage with what she called "great joy and confidence," noting that he had moved through the early stages of awakening without a guide other than awake awareness itself. In her affirmation she wrote that she saw him as "very prepared through experience to be a guide and mentor to others in the awaking and embodying of that process."
But more than any of that: he is someone who has been where you are. Who has felt the emptiness and run from it and been brought back to it by forces stronger than his own resistance. Who knows, from the inside, what it costs to finally stop running. And what becomes possible when you do.