The most formative time of David’s life was being raised by his great-grandmother. While his parents worked to support their new family, David went to live with Maria Lueras Maes in government-supported housing projects during the weekdays and often for longer stays. What he saw was a woman who knew much about dreams, herbs, and extrasensory perception. She would often have people come to her house and sit at her kitchen table while she told them things about their lives. When Maria was with David, they would often talk about their dreams and how to work with dreaming. A few times, David heard her neighbors call her “bruja,” which means "which" in Spanish. Maria was happy and had a loving family across the region, including Tularosa and Lincoln County, NM. Whatever caused it, when the young David started having intense experiences, he found he could count on his grandma and his mom and aunts to listen with care. One aunt thought something was continuing down the matrilineal line: from David's great, great grandmother (Rufina Lueras), through Maria, and then…, through David. 

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It was in this rich and nurturing environment that a seed was planted, took root, and began to grow. By age ten, David was being visited during the night by a range of people from “the other side.” His experiences led his family to consider the priesthood, due to their deep sense of Catholicism. Instead, David searched for and found another community across the southwest. Sandra Hunter and Carolyn Bennett, who lived in Alamogordo, began teaching David about the paranormal, including OBE, NDE, and other forms of mediumship. As a result of this unique adolescence, David decided to pursue the one college degree that would require him to understand such things across cultures: Religious Studies. At Arizona State University, David spent over a decade studying ritual, myth, and symbol, while also beginning conversations with psychics and mediums, often taking part in ceremonies in whatever congregation or community would welcome him as someone trying to understand religiosity. In mosques, temples, Blessingways, NAC meetings, synagogues, and across the wilderness of Sonora and the Southwest, David was the consummate learner hoping to gain real life experience from people, in addition to the books he started amassing. The challenge David set for himself was to understand without appropriating, to learn from in order to create something personally meaningful. During this time, psychics and mediums around Phoenix were sending some of their patrons to David. 

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Setting aside anything supernatural, David shifted his focus towards his doctoral studies in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC, David committed many years to understanding the politics and frictions of ethnotourism as well as his scholarly method of choice, ethnography. His training and then day job as a professor demanded that he guard against other scholars thinking he was a believer, or that he had “gone Native.” But his friends and family knew that on the day he submitted his dissertation for approval, it all came back in an instant: A person appeared in his bedroom smiling. The very next day, David would see this man who appeared the night before get hit by a car. His studies were coming to an end, and the veils between worlds were moving aside again. 

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In the decades since, David has continued interviewing psychics and mediums, traveling to meet curanderos and healers, furthering his reading, and slowly becoming one of the most recognized “professors of the paranormal.” In classes such as “Healing Across Cultures” and “Aliens, Psychics, and Ghosts,” David provides students with a healthy dose of the history of science as it pertains to figuring out why the supernatural remains so elusive to the mechanisms of objective science. And off campus, David started speaking about his private practice of curandismo, a catch-all phrase meaning the various modes of helping a person seeking wellness. To better deepen his practice, David traveled to Ashiya, Japan to study with the leader of the Gendai Reiki Ho school of reiki. Hiroshi Doi Sensei attuned David to be a Master of Gendai Reiki on April 22, 2022. Since returning to the U.S., he has greatly enjoyed offering calming and clarifying sessions to humans and increasingly more dogs. You can learn more about David’s practice, In the Light Reiki, here. 

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Similarly to how we expect scholars of culture to be enmeshed and speaking from “within” their communities, or as we expect botanists to spend much of their time among plants, David's scholarly approach to studying the healing and the paranormal involves speaking as and from, not about. He has spent his life endeavoring to make sense of the senses, phenomena, knowledge, and the "really real." While his work as a professor and storyteller consumes most of his professional time, he continually spends time in the laboratory of his curandero and reiki studio. Often booked for months in advance, his availability depends on the lunar calendar and his bandwidth for moving through the veils. Please consider some of the media below to learn more about David’s experiences with curandismo.​​