Joel Lesses founded the Education Training Center as a means of counseling those marginalized by trauma, addiction and psychological distress, and its effects including incarceration, homelessness and institutionalization. He is dedicated to reframing mental health distress as a potential spiritual marker. Joel has lived in Nepal and Israel and is also a poet expressing the landscape of the mystical elements of our human beings. He believes world religion, poetry, spirituality, and meditation encompass the most vital aspects of our mind and life. The crux of his own personal journey are the questions and answers to his own koan or inquiry: “what is the matter with me?” revealing the individual and universal aspects of our inherent and potent creativity. Everything is flux, everything is poetry. His other passions include the intersection of poetry, spirituality, science, and phenomenology shared and disparate in the human experience, with the transformative power of self-inquiry and introspection through contemplative and meditative practices. Joel holds the belief that the fundamental transformation of individuals and our collective comes through barreling inward, relentlessly asking the questions, “Who am I?” or “What am I” or “What is the matter with me?” The latter being a question which after years of examination, shattered a false sense of self, the work of integration of that experience being an ongoing work in progress.
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About the Author: Chris Meek
Dr. Chris Meek is an American philanthropist and finance officer. Meek is the co-founder and chairman of SoldierStrong, a charitable organization which provides support for U.S. service members and veterans. He is also the co-founder and chairman of START Now!, a non-profit which provides foreclosure counseling to homeowners, as well as senior director of global relationship management at S&P Global and a member of the Maxwell Advisory Board at Syracuse University.