Meet Sam
A nondual astrologer helping spiritually serious adults see recurring patterns clearly.
There’s a song by The Call (famous for the 80’s hit, “The Walls Came Down”) that I love for the powerful way it describes a childhood steeped in heavy-handed instruction. Here's a quote:
“When I was quite young…”
I had learned to fear
I was taught to listen
But not to hear
From my mother’s arms
I was cruelly torn
And they whipped my ass
On the day I was born
from “In the River’
found on “Into the Woods”
The Call
Elektra Records - 1987
Easter. Circa 1975. I was literally wearing a clown suit. My little brother was dressed like Colonel Sanders. And no, we were not responsible for our fashion choices at the time.
Clearly, that’s not a sentimental look back. It’s not the rocking-chair version of childhood with sepia light, screen doors, and grandmother’s quilt folded over a cedar chest. It’s more like the kind where fear is deeply kneaded into the body and mind before the child has language for it. That child builds an inner refuge.
Those lyrices gets very close to the atmosphere I was raised in.
I grew up in Kentucky, in an evangelical home shaped by a World War II Navy veteran father and a mother I can only describe as a Bourbon County hellcat. My father was quiet, disciplined, and mystical in his own hard-shelled way. My mother was vivid, fierce, devout, theatrical, and dangerous when crossed. Between them, I learned order, shame, reverence, fear, loyalty, imagination, and the strange religious logic that says a child is loved while being corrected into submission.
The author was predictably petrified for his first-grade school portrait in 1971.
A child learns rules before he learns reasons. He learns the difference between listening and being heard. He learns that adults can change temperature without warning, and that love can arrive with bacon grease, King James English, Pine-Sol, cigarette smoke, sweet tea, a plate kept warm on the stove, and a switch stripped clean from a walnut or catalpa tree.
I was shy, intensely inward, afraid of other children, wary of adults, and convinced I was excellent at exactly one thing: drawing. So I drew. I drew because paper behaved better than people. A line could be corrected. A face could be made kind. A mistake could be erased, or at least worked into the shading. That was my first sense of owned security.
It was also my first education in recognizing patterns.
I was not raised to become this.
Mom would get angry if we were caught playing Monopoly at a friend’s house. “That’s gamblin’!” Imagine if she saw me now.
Confidence was not gently cultivated in my childhood home.
It was expected, shamed, demanded, and sometimes beaten in. I lived mostly inside: inside my head, inside my room, inside the clean, controllable borders of all that paper, where the world sat still long enough for me to study it.
That inwardness became art. Then commercial design. Then advertising. Then strategy. Then the long adult education of learning that a person can look functional, even successful, while still being run by old machinery. The same conflicts. The same longings. The same avoidances. The same private dramas, now with better furniture, better coffee, and a calendar full of obligations.
That is the terrain I work with now. My readings use astrological analysis and non-dual pointing to help people see the structure behind those loops. I don’t predict the future, polish your personality, or hand you a more interesting identity. Natal and transit charts, read soberly, can show the machinery behind an ego-personality. A non-dual perspective points to what is aware of that machinery.
Making that distinction clear is the point of what I offer.
The first rebellion was a quiet one.
My attraction to Eastern thought began as a curiosity. Then it became a kind of private comfort.
In my childhood home, certain things were trusted, and other things were suspect.
Dad was soft-spoken yet brooding. His Pacific theater experience chiseled out his disdain for anything eastern. As a child, I thought he was merely close-minded. As an adult and Advaita student, I recognize the pain it caused him.
The inherited religion came with courtroom energy, thunder, and the threat of eternal punishment hanging over ordinary human desire.
As I got older, the inherited answers stopped working. Not because I became brave. Let’s not get carried away. They stopped working because the questions became too real to keep treating them as religious furniture.
Eternal damnation. Free will. Desire. Shame. Forgiveness. The peculiar cruelty of a love that says, accept me or suffer forever. Once those questions were no longer theoretical, evangelical certainty could not survive their scrutiny.
So I went headlong into almost everything I had been warned about: Eastern thought, martial arts, tarot, runes, Western astrology, Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, Advaita, non-duality. Some of it was useful. Some of it was serious. Some of it was probably nonsense. Fair enough.
I was not trying to become mystical. I was trying to understand why a human being can be sincere, intelligent, frightened, desirous, ashamed, spiritually hungry, and still driven by mechanics he barely understands. That question never left. It is still the question I bring into every session.
The church of endurance.
Non-dual teaching states unequivocally, we don’t have a body; we experience a body.
Cycling belongs in that same interior country. Not lifestyle cycling. Old-school road cycling. The long, strange, devotional kind, where the chain hums, the breath gets honest, the legs tell the truth, and the mind has nowhere to hide.
I found the bicycle as freedom first. It carried me away from the house, the rules, the heavy religious air, and the feeling that every movement was being graded by an invisible committee with bad lighting and strong opinions.
Later, the bike became discipline: training, climbing, time trialing. No pack to hide in. No teammate to blame. Just position, breath, power, pacing, fear, resistance, and the private negotiation between what the mind says is impossible and what the body can still do.
Ride hard enough alone and the self-image comes apart in real time. You hear its bargains. You watch it dramatize discomfort. Sometimes you obey it. Sometimes you don’t.
There’s no contradiction in training the body with devotion while knowing you are not the body.
Cycling belongs to the field of activity: body, senses, mind, effort, fatigue, skill. What I am is the knowing presence in which all of that appears, works, burns, protests, recovers, and passes. On the bike, that distinction becomes practical. The body may be suffering, the mind may be bargaining, but neither one has to be mistaken for the one who knows them.
Me, in full tuck during the Karen Hornbostel Memorial Time Trial in Aurora, Colorado, May 2026. There are many reasons to love time trial racing. To me, it’s “meditation racing.”
What a long, strange trip it’s been...
Eventually, I came to Boulder for more progressive culture, better cycling, and a little more room to breathe. Colorado didn’t create my point of view; it gave me cleaner air, harder climbs, and a sharper view of what had already become clear.
A person can change their scenery and still carry the same mental and emotional structure into every room. My work begins where that structure becomes so visible that it can stop passing for you.
It was especially the complex healthcare marketing work, regarding therapies and testing modalities from cancer to diabetes, that trained me to study people closely: language, motive, repetition, story, contradiction, and the gap between what people say they want and what their behavior keeps revealing.
I worked my way from Louisville to Kansas City for a poverty-paying graphic design job at a media ministry, then through marketing agency life near the Great Lakes, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and finally Boulder, Colorado. Along the way, I became a designer, art director, executive creative director, strategist, researcher, and brand consultant for national and international brands, predominantly in healthcare.
The professional life was part of the teaching.
Why I read charts this way.
I am not a guru. That should be unspeakably obvious from the preceding evidence. I am also not a therapist, fortune teller, or life coach. I am a non-dual astrologer who interprets charts as symbolic descriptions of structures that recur in ways that help my clients stop mistaking those patterns for personal failure, see the shape of what keeps repeating, and meet their lives with more honesty and compassion.
The useful part of my life is not that fear, shame, ambition, fantasy, guilt, longing, performance, or self-protection have often been transcended. It’s that I learned how identification with those forces hardens into the self-image we spend so much energy defending. First by living it badly, then by studying it, then by watching the same basic structures appear in other capable people who could explain themselves beautifully, and yet still couldn’t
stop repeating those patterns. That is where astrology became more than a fascination or a party piece. It gave symbolic precision to what I had been watching for years. Non-duality took it from observation to correction.
The structure is not what you are. It is what you keep mistaking for yourself.
Who I work best with.
My sessions are direct, interpretive, and sober.
I work best with people who are capable, responsible, and tired of hearing themselves explain the same problem in increasingly intelligent language. People with real stakes. People who have succeeded enough to know that success does not end confusion.
I work best with people who are spiritually mature enough not to hide in a cloud of incense and and don’t tolerate one blown in their direction. People who do not want pop astrology, cosmic compliments, or another explanation that lets the ego feel briefly fascinating before it resumes business as usual.
We’ll look at the chart (or charts), the question, the pattern, the life, and the self-image that’s trying to manage it all.
The aim is not comfort. The aim is clearer sight.
What I offer.
I offer a serious astrological and non-dual reading of the repeating structure behind a host of challenges that might be appearing in your life: stagnation, conflict, longing, avoidance, ambition, exhaustion, indecision, or where you feel divided inside.
Most people come to a reading carrying a life problem: work difficulties, marriage is unfulfilling, struggling to find purpose, grappling with desire or grief, money woes, restlessness, or the feeling that the life they're living looks much more resolved than it feels.
But I want to make it very clear that I am not a relationship counselor, financial advisor, psychologist, therapist, or life coach. I do not diagnose, treat, advise on investments, tell you whether to stay married, or prescribe what you should do with your life.
The problem you bring to the first session usually gives us a doorway to enter. It is rarely the final subject. The deeper question usually sounds like this:
“What keeps turning different situations into the same experience?”
That’s where the reading starts to become really useful.