This is some extra background info that came out of my interview with Patt Lind-Kyle (which is featured in the upcoming edition of The Simplifier.

ST: Let’s start with your professional background. Did you grow up with Swamis?

PLK: No.I was born in Minnesota but grew up in California. I went to USC and got a degree in dental hygiene, when it was still a four year program. I did dental hygiene for eight years and then I taught, first at the University in Hawaii and then at Foothill College (just south of San Francisco) and was there for 15 years.

While I was there I got fascinated with how my students learned. I started looking into what was learning. At that time, in the late ’70’s, nobody was talking about learning and there weren’t classes in it, not even for teachers. So I took a year off teaching and took every class I could put together related to learning. I then put together an assessment on how we learn. I took eleven assessments and strung them together and created a profile of how people learn. If you knew how you learn, you knew how you could teach. Foothill College allowed me to teach my class for every student who entered the college. When Prop 13 (a tax initiative that resulted in a lot of money being taken from the community colleges) hit, they cut the class.

I wasn’t interested in teaching dental hygiene anymore so within a year, I resigned form the school and started my own practice.

ST: Utilizing the learning assessment?

PLK: Yes, I did their assessment and then would teach whatever they wanted to learn the way they learned. Then I started going to private schools and offering the assessment to students the teachers would identify as having difficulty. While at one of the schools, one of the parents came up to me and said, “I think you should bring this to where I work.” I asked, “Where do you work?” And he said, “the City of Sunnyvale”. They had a lot of money. I was brought in for two years. I did assessments on every single major person on staff. That’s how I got into the corporate world.

So then I wrote a book about it, which was never published because I got chronic fatigue. That just stopped everything. My husband David has taken that assessment and enlarged it. He uses it in his work with business leaders.

ST: How did you fall into meditation?

PLK: So I had chronic fatigue, got well, then wrote a book about it. When I took that out to the world, doors kept closing. Because I used methods that were “dangerous” to get well, they boycotted my book. I had a TV interview scheduled in Seattle and they called ahead to say that I was talking about dangerous methods.

ST: What was dangerous?

PLK: I went to a clinic in Sacramento that injected all the nutrients, you know the vitamins and minerals, along with hydrogen peroxide. What chronic fatigue needs is oxygen to the brain. As a dental hygienist, I knew that. When your gums start to bleed, generally, they need oxygen to get the aenarobes, to kill the little guys. So I knew what he was doing with me was going to work. Three weeks after I started the therapy, I got better. At the beginning, David had to drive me to Sacramento. In three weeks I was able to drive myself.

I wanted to tell people about this! I had something to tell, something to teach, I’d written a book about it–and they stopped it in its tracks. It really knocked me down.