Dain Dunston

Author, Speaker, Teacher, Coach

Dain Dunston is a storyteller, future-finder and CEO-whisperer who has been fascinated with the concept of elevated awareness and consciousness since he was in college.

Dain grew up in a family surrounded by literature, art, and music, from Prokofiev to Bebop to Blues. His mother was a reclusive painter and his father was on the fast track to becoming a CEO by the age of 45. From his earliest memories, he found himself fascinated by two fundamental philosophical questions: “Who are we?” And “Why are we here?”

Before he was two years old, he thought maybe he had found the answer to the first question. On a sidewalk outside the apartment his family lived in, he held a pencil and a piece of paper. “I can write,” he told an older girl. “No you can’t,” she said. “You’re just a baby.” To prove her wrong, he put pencil to paper and immediately plunged the sharpened pencil through the page and into his palm. But it wasn’t the pain that made him remember the moment, it was the astonishment. He knew he knew how to write. He knew it deep down. And if he couldn’t write, then who was he?

His father’s career success meant the family moved every year or two as he was transferred up the ladder, and Dain grew up across the U.S. and Australia. The Australian years gave the opportunity for extensive family travel throughout Asia and Europe, with significant visits to Hong Kong, Japan and Italy. Those years taught him to value diversity and look for magic in unexpected places. They also taught him, as he watched what his father went through on journey to the top, that he never wanted to go through what his father did.

Years later, studying at the newly opened University of California Santa Cruz, where he got praise for his early poetry, he began to question the then-common idea that psychedelic drugs were the gateway to higher consciousness. They could open the doors of perception, to quote Aldous Huxley, but for how long? The effects always seemed temporary. Dain was much more interested in understanding the more ancient traditions of Zen and Yoga. And so he began his own journey to the East.

He studied with a number of teachers in a number of traditions and spent years teaching in yoga ashrams in London, Santa Fe and Los Angeles. With a growing family, he also had to earn a living. He opened a health food restaurant in London, sold real estate in Santa Fe, and sometimes worked as a body guard, including one unforgettable weekend with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. And then, in his early 30s, began to earn money writing.