I have lived two professional lives. The first began in Mexico in the mid-1990s, when I was still a teenager discovering that the human mind could be understood, explored, and trained. The second began in Texas over a decade later, when I returned to school as a non-traditional student and rebuilt everything from scratch. What connects these two lives is a single question: How do we become who we are?

The First Life: Mexico (1995–2007)

I encountered Endocentric Psychology when I was fifteen, through audio programs handed to me by my Dad, designed to induce altered states of consciousness for enhanced learning. Those recordings helped me through high school and planted seeds I would not fully understand for years. By my early twenties, I was not just a participant but a collaborator—helping to build one of the largest personal development movements in Mexico during the late 1990s and early 2000s. My father's Empowerment Center International Seminars.

With colleagues and Family, I co-founded Vivencias S.C. and established it across five cities in central Mexico. I trained as a facilitator and researcher, developed curricula for organizational change, and worked with clients ranging from DeAcero, Televisa and Honda to state education departments, private universities and municipal governments. I earned certifications in Design Human Engineering directly from Richard Bandler, trained with Robert Dilts, and became a licensed Master Practitioner of NLP. I was young, driven, and certain I had found my life's work.

Then social disruption in Mexico became impossible to ignore. In 2007, my family—holding dual citizenship—made the difficult decision to migrate to Texas. I left behind sixty-plus college credits that would not transfer, an established career, and an entire network of relationships built over fifteen years. I arrived in San Antonio ready to start over, knowing only that I would need to work my way back to doing what mattered...

The Second Life: Texas (2007–Present)

Starting over meant working jobs I had not imagined—phone banking at Wells Fargo, serving tables, cleaning houses. Each role taught me something about humility, about the people my grandparents had been, about the texture of American life from the ground up. I took pride in small victories: placing top in my team at Wells Fargo, helping bring our department to its best performance ranking. But I never stopped wanting to return to research, to teaching, to the work of understanding human beings and ultimately myself.

As my children grew I made space to go back to school. I enrolled at Alamo Colleges, then transferred to Texas A&M University–San Antonio. I chose psychology as a logical continuation of my previous work—a chance to approach from a scientific angle what I had explored experientially in Mexico. Then came a surprise: a required General Biology course reignited a curiosity I had carried since childhood science fairs, when I researched HIV at age twelve, developed pH sensors in high school and was amazed at genetic developments in the late 90s.

Texas A&M opened a door I had not known existed. Within months, I was admitted to the Master of Science program in Biology, awarded a teaching assistantship, and embarked on graduate research using computational tools to study evolutionary adaptation in cave shrimp. I graduated Cum Laude with my B.S. in Psychology in 2022 and completed my M.S. in Biology in 2024. At an age when many are settling into mid-career routines, I was just beginning my formal scientific training.

The Integration: Both Lives Converge

Today I teach biology at the same university where I was once a non-traditional undergraduate wondering if it was too late to start over. I remain an active Psicoterapeuta Didáctico Endocéntrico, collaborating virtually with the Institute I first encountered almost thirty years ago. In 2025, I returned to Querétaro to co-develop research protocols using EEG monitoring to study the brain during Endocentric processes—bringing my scientific training back to the work that first shaped me.

I have written the epilogue for  the foundational book on Endocentric Psychology which served as the introduction for the second one. I have helped edit and publish a 351-page memoir for a mentor who shaped my early training. I am currently collaborating on two more books and conducting research that bridges neuroscience with decades of experiential psychological work. I am applying to doctoral programs in psychophysiology because I want to continue building this bridge—between the molecular and the meaningful, between what can be measured and what must be lived.

What I Have Learned

The thread connecting my two lives is simple: I know human beings are the originators of their experience, not merely the products of circumstance. This is not wishful thinking—it is a proposition that can be explored, tested, and verified through experience. My scientific training has given me tools to investigate this proposition at the molecular level, studying how organisms adapt to extreme environments. My psychological and therapeutic training has given me tools to investigate it at the level of individual human consciousness and perception.

What I have learned from both paths is that adaptation is not passive. Whether we are talking about a shrimp surviving in the stratified waters of a Yucatan cenote or a person navigating the challenges of immigration, career change, and personal growth, the capacity to respond creatively to circumstance is fundamental to life. And that capacity can be understood, developed, and shared.

I am still learning. I expect to be learning for the rest of my life. Gray hairs are appearing now, but the weight I carried as a young man has been replaced by something lighter—a sense that contributing is more satisfying than accumulating, that teaching is as valuable as learning, and that the most interesting questions are the ones you never finish answering… never stop exploring!