Joseph Dispenza1942 - 2015

One-time Catholic monk turned award-winning author, screenwriter, film

critic, university professor, spiritual mentor and writer of scores of articles

about living a higher quality of life.

Born and raised in Ashtabula, Ohio, to Joseph Frank and Margaret Dispenza, Joseph graduated from St. John’s High school in 1960 and immediately took vows at an Order of the Holy Cross monastery in Indiana.

He spent eight years as a monk, including his first year in total silence, which he recounts in his book, God on Your Own: Finding a Path Outside Religion (2006).

After leaving the monastery, Joseph earned a B.A. in the humanities from St. Edwards University in Austin and an M.A. in communications and film history from the University of Texas at Austin.

He spent two years as director of the film and television division of the Center for Social Communications in San Antonio; three years as manager of education programs for the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C.; and two years as a lecturer in cinema history and screenwriting at American University in D.C.

Joseph moved to Santa Fe, N.M. in 1977 from Los Angeles, where he was a story editor for United Artists studios, to write House of Alarcon, an epic novel of a Spanish colonial family in New Mexico and the first of 16 books Joseph would author in his lifetime.

Joseph founded the Department of Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe (now the Santa Fe University of Art and Design), serving as its founding chair for seven years and teaching classes in media ethics.

It was a chance encounter in 1994 near Las Vegas, N.M., that altered the direction of Joseph’s life. Joseph met curandera Hazel Parcells (1889-1996), a pioneer of holistic healing who lived in the tiny village of Montezuma, N.M.

Joseph eventually moved to Montezuma to learn at Parcells feet her methods and her life story, both of which are the subject of Dispenza’s Live Better Longer (1997) and Healer (2014).

Joseph, along with husband Michael Herbert, a doctor of naturapathy, lived for the past 15 years in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they helped found LifePath Center, a retreat facility focusing on personal growth and alternative physical and spiritual healing.

Joseph retired from LifePath Center in 2011 with the publication of Older Man, Younger Man, a deeply personal reflection on his relationship with Herbert, whom he met in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1997.