About the Author

I am contrarian by nature. The status-quo has never been sacred to me. I question everything, so I tend to have trouble fitting in. This innate tendency drives me. It is what pushed me out of my tenured teaching position in the US. I left voluntarily to pursue my life-long dream of traveling, researching, and writing.

I moved half-way around the world to Taiwan, a large island nation to the southwest of Japan. Taking that leap proved to be a blessing in so many ways. I met my husband there. I paid off my debts. I adapted and evolved. I began to perceive and consciously deconstruct some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning my thought processes. Being forced to adapt to a new culture made me stronger, more tolerant, open-minded, and patient than I was.

Early travel experiences gave me a deep love and respect for nature as well as a profound desire to help people everywhere empower themselves to live happier, healthier, and freer lives. These two passions have run like a river through my life, pushing me into formal education in the sciences and fueling my continual self-education across disciplines.

I value integrity and discourse. I welcome opposing viewpoints, especially when they can be backed up with data I can review for myself. I will consider the word of “experts”, but I insist on ideological soundness and integrity. I believe we are weakened when we limit ourselves to people who only echo our beliefs. I don’t want to be put in an identity box: labeled, packaged, and shrink-wrapped into someone else’s definition of me. I believe we become stronger when we are forced to defend our ideas and thought processes with evidence, experience, and data. It is essential exercise for our minds and spirits. Furthermore, it is a path we must start taking en masse if we want humanity to balance its needs with the needs of other living things and what the planet can provide. Above all, I believe we must possess the integrity to adjust our understanding in light of new evidence, experience and data.

I research. I explore. I delight in finding and sharing information and tools that give little people like me more power to live our lives authentically. I want to inspire you to ask questions, evaluate your own beliefs, and seek knowledge, skills, and truth for yourself. I hope to find others with similar passions, interests, and goals along the way. This blog is my beacon. If you are out there, please join me.

Yours,

Pria

PS. I value my privacy and yours. Pria is my nickname, designed to give me some protection in this sociopolitical climate of censorship. I hope we can get to know each other over a long time. I tend to poke at sacred cows, and my irreverence for the status quo may irritate people seeking security in an insecure world. It is never my intention to offend (I can’t spare the energy I need for rational analysis to attack other people), but I have learned that people who get offended are insecure in the validity of their viewpoints. It’s their choice to adopt weak narratives and it’s their choice to fall back on indignation when they can’t justify the viewpoints with data. We live in a climate of persecution of anyone willing to share unpopular and unsanctioned viewpoints and data. If you agree with a “cancel culture” that silences or punishes people for rocking the boat, then you should probably avoid my site. I hope you can plow your way through emotional reactions (as I had to do as well) and find me on the other side.