Gary David spent most of his early adult life as a professional jazz musician culminating in a group he formed called The Sound of Feeling, an innovative vocal-instrumental group. He met epistemologist J. Samuel Bois in 1964 as a student and later a teacher of Epistemics, the science-art of innovating. He studied with Bois from 1964 to 1978 and became the editor of Bois’s textbook on Epistemics titled “The Art of Awareness.”
He taught classes at Viewpoints Institute and UCLA Extension from 1969-1974 while continuing his career as a professional musician. In 1975, he received a Ph.D. in epistemics from the Union Institute and University. In the same year, he married Emilie Conrad, whom he had met in the late 1960s. His interest in somatics began with Charlotte Selver in the early 1960s. But he was passionately struck by the creative, aesthetic vision of Emilie’s approach to movement as a process of participating at the ‘silent’ level. At her request, he played the music for Continuum, participated in Continuum classes, and taught epistemics to her students. For more than 20 years, he and Emilie shared a life and entered a dialog that helped shape each other’s sense of purpose and commitment in general and each other’s work in particular.
Currently, he has a private counseling practice and a monthly online forum called “The Art of Learning.” He sees learning as moving presence into the world, not just acquiring information and skills. His work in epistemics includes a 40-year study of the biology of human emotion through the work of Silvan Tomkins. Affect-script psychology that grew out of Tomkins’s work guides much of his participation with individuals and groups. He considers Continuum as learning, first-person. Affective awareness and emotional containment are vital to the process.