Joan writes and talks about the wonder of simply being alive. She has a background in Buddhism, Advaita, radical nonduality and nontraditional meditation and inquiry, but she identifies with no particular tradition. Joan spent time with many different teachers. She was especially close with Toni Packer, a former Zen teacher who left that tradition behind to work in a simpler and more open way. Joan lived and worked for five years at the retreat center Toni founded. Joan absorbed insights from all of her teachers, but she writes and talks out of her own direct experience and the alive presence to which they all pointed. Joan's background also includes somatic work, addiction recovery, political activism, martial arts, and visual arts. Joan has been a bodyworker, a college professor, a janitor, a barista, a clerical worker, and many other things along the way. In addition to writing books, she writes articles on Substack and meets with people on Zoom. She has held public and private meetings as well as occasional workshops and retreats since 1996. Joan believes everyone has a unique path and that no one's path can be a template for anyone else to follow. She describes her writings and meetings with people as explorations, "like a child exploring its toes or a lover exploring the beloved," and she adds, "There is no end to such explorations, all of which are forms of play." Joan grew up in the Chicago area, has lived in both New York and California, and currently resides in southern Oregon. She is the author of Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life (1996), Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is (2003), Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogs about Nonduality (2010), Nothing to Grasp (2012), and Death: The End of Self-Improvement (2019).