David. A. Nichol, MD, a 1990 graduate of the University of Colorado Medical School and a 1994 graduate of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry, practiced psychiatry in Topeka, Kansas, from 1994 to 1997, and completed his psychoanalytic training at the Topeka and Houston Psychoanalytic Institutes.

In 1998 he relocated to Marin County, California, where he had a private practice in psychiatry, and in 2007, moved back to Denver, Colorado, where he is now in private practice and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Dr. Nichol has taught meditation for 35 years to lay people and professionals, and regularly teaches the practice to his patients and to community members to alleviate stress and more severe disorders such as depression.

He brings an unusually broad experience with mind/body medicine to his medical practice. Prior to building his psychiatry practice, he bought and ran a natural food store for five years and worked as a massage therapist for one year. He is a certified yoga instructor, and over two decades, has himself spent a cumulative two years in intensive meditation.

In the last 25 years, he has organized three acclaimed conferences on transpersonal psychology, and appeared on radio and television programs around the country to teach meditation.

Bill Birchard is a veteran journalist and author who writes about management, business, the environment, and health care. He has been writing books and articles for 25 years. In 2009, he launched a website dedicated to discussing the process of book writing, www.stairwaytoearth.com.

During the past twenty years, Birchard has written for Fast Company, Tomorrow, CFO, Chief Executive, Stategy+Business, and Harvard Management Update. In 1999, he wrote the award-winning Counting What Counts about the crisis in corporate accountability, published with professor Marc J. Epstein.

In 2005, he wrote Nature's Keepers about the making of the Nature Conservancy, the largest environmental group in the world. In 2011, he wrote Merchants of Virtue about the making of sustainable companies.

Birchard has also worked for twenty years as a writing consultant and ghost writer for a variety of authors. He has written about ethics, health care, strategy, retailing, foreign policy, leadership, economic policy, and creativity. One of his business books became a New York Times bestseller.

Birchard has appeared on radio shows nationally, and on Boston's WCVB-TV's Chronicle and New York's WNBC-TV's Weekend Today. A meditator for 40 years, he lives in Amherst, New Hampshire.