I was born in the Bronx to a fifteen-year-old mother who was herself in the foster-care system. When I was still a baby, she asked Vic and Dot, the couple who had fostered her, to take care of me. They adopted me and raised me as their own.

They raised me in a 2,200-square-foot house in Spring Valley, New York, that at times, had 13 children living there. It was rarely quiet and almost never empty. Over more than fifty years, they opened their doors to more than seventy children. Some stayed for a few days. Others never left. All of them were treated like family.

Long before I knew words like service, ministry, or servant leadership, I was watching them lived out around me.

That house taught me something I am still trying to understand: love does not always need to know how the story ends before it opens the door.

That sense of service eventually carried me to the United States Military Academy at West Point and into the Army. I became a Black Hawk pilot and spent twenty-one years serving in assignments around the world, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over the years I led soldiers, worked in technology and acquisition, managed complex programs, and eventually commanded an organization supporting Apache helicopter production. The Army taught me discipline, responsibility, loyalty, sacrifice, and what it means to trust the people beside you.

It also gave me an identity.

For much of my adult life, if someone asked who I was, the answer was tied in some way to the uniform.

When I retired as a Lieutenant Colonel at the end of 2025, leaving the Army felt like a funeral and a birth happening at the same time. Something I had loved and given much of my life to was ending. At the same time, something new was asking to emerge.

I’m still discovering who Robert is without the uniform.

In 2015, I came home from a difficult deployment carrying more than I understood at the time. I had watched friends die. Not long after returning, I was also navigating a divorce that left me wondering whether I would ever experience love the way I hoped to again.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I accidentally stumbled into the world of psychedelic medicine.

At a music festival, I had what I would now describe as my first mystical experience.

I wasn’t looking for God. I wasn’t trying to have a spiritual awakening. I certainly didn’t have the language then that I have for it today.

But something happened.

For the first time in my life, I did not simply believe in God. I experienced God.

The experience was difficult to put into words. There was a profound sense of connection, love, and presence that seemed more real than anything I had previously understood spirituality to be. For a moment, the separation between myself, the people around me, and something much greater seemed to disappear.

It changed everything.

I did not leave the festival and immediately become a chaplain or start a church. I went back to my life. I continued serving in the Army. I remarried, became a father, pursued my doctorate, led organizations, and kept moving forward.

But I never forgot what I had experienced.

Nearly a decade later, as I was preparing to retire from the Army and navigating health challenges of my own, I found myself returning to that experience and to the world of psychedelic medicine with a very different intention.

This time I was not stumbling into it.

I was asking deeper questions.

What had happened to me all those years before? Why had it felt so sacred? Why did people across cultures and throughout history describe experiences that sounded so similar? What could these medicines teach us about consciousness, healing, God, and who we really are?

That exploration became one of the most important spiritual journeys of my life.

It eventually led me toward chaplaincy, sacred ceremony, and a new understanding of what service might look like after the Army.

I have had many teachers, and I expect I always will.

Yeshua, whom most people know as Jesus, is one of the most important. I speak about him often, study his words, and sometimes wear a clergy collar in my work as a chaplain. I do not consider myself a Christian in the traditional sense. Religious identity interests me less than the life Yeshua was inviting people to live: love God, love one another, forgive freely, care for those who suffer, recognize the sacred in the person before you, and seek the Kingdom of God within and among us.

Ram Dass has been another important teacher. His humor, humility, willingness to admit his own humanity, and invitation to be here now have deeply shaped me. So has his beautiful reminder that, in the end, we are all simply walking one another home.

But some of my greatest teachers are much closer to home.

My wife, Zaira, and our children, Sky, Rey, and Rio, are among the most important teachers in my life right now. They show me where I am impatient, where I am distracted, where I want to control things, and where I have another opportunity to choose love.

They remind me that spirituality is much easier to talk about than it is to live.

A few days after leaving the Army, I founded Heartspace Church, a spiritual community centered on the belief that the divine is not something distant from us, but something we can encounter within ourselves, within one another, and within the world around us.

Through Heartspace, I serve as a chaplain and help create spaces for community, spiritual practice, sacred ceremony, time in nature, honest conversation, and experiences with plant medicine. I do not see my role as having the answers for someone else. I try to walk beside people as they listen more deeply to what God, life, or their own heart may already be showing them.

Visit Heartspace →

Credentials matter, but I value them mostly for what they have allowed me to learn, the people they have allowed me to serve, and the ways they have prepared me for the work I am doing today.