Biography

Adventure Anthropologist

Happy Oasis is an Adventure Anthropologist with a unique message. Adopted by 7 tribal families, in 7 remote off-the-grid locations, in 7 countries, over 7 years, Happy embraced these tribal families’ unusually-joyous ways of communicating. Happy is the author of uncivilized ecstasies (2003), the national #1 best-selling adventure poetry book in New Zealand, where it was published. She also wrote Bliss Conscious Communication (2004) which ignited a new field of study, namely Blissology.These books are currently sold out. Pre-ordering is available for the 10th anniversary editions.

The Happiest 100 & Oprah

Happy Oasis is deemed one of “The Happiest 100” in the NYT #1 best-selling book, Happy For No Reason which featured the inspiring story of Happy’s name on Oprah.Happy founded Blissology University in 2013. Known as Bliss U or B.U., it is the first university to research the causes of bliss, introduce the Blissiplines, and certify Blissologists, because Happy believes that everyone deserves a degree of bliss. Happy has taught thousands of Budding Blissologists certificate courses.

Blissology University Certification

She offers advanced certification classes via Blissology University including Certified Blossoming Blissologist, Certified Blooming Blissologist and Certified Pragmatic Ecstatic.Happy also leads Succulent Strategies for Supernatural Health and Living Your Godzillionaire Lifestyle courses as well as co-teaching Living Free In An Unfree World with her beloved, musician Johnny Light, with whom she is slowly and succulently touring the North American Continent in their creational vehicle.

Newsletter Publisher, Author & Editor

Happy Oasis is the publisher, author and editor of the occasional Raw Spirit, Bliss U and Heaven on Earth news. The latter on-line publication is a monthly exploration of insights, Blissiplines, humor and provocative interviews with the world’s leading Blissologists to create “heaven on earth”.

Early Years & World Travels

Happy Oasis has enjoyed an unusually eclectic and adventurous life. At age 16, Happy hiked Wyoming’s Wind River mountains, then received a year-long scholarship to Hobart Matriculation College in Hobart, Tasmania. At 17, she started guiding trekkers through Tasmania’s hinterlands.

The next summer, she taught horse riding, sailing and kayaking at a summer camp in Michigan.After a winter at Ohio University studying Anthropology, Art and Biology (as well as parachuting), she was inspired by her anthropology professor to postpone her university education in order to live her dream of gleaning wisdom from ancient earth-revering peoples, by abiding with the last tribal peoples who were living in the wilderness while they still existed in their wild, rapidly-disappearing habitats.

To accomplish this, at age 18, Happy courageously journeyed to Cairns, Australia alone, financially supporting herself, while learning how to farm and forage in the tropics, sleeping al fresco on island beaches, working as a photographer, construction contractor, farmers’ market vendor, farmhand, and vegetarian fisherwoman, who saved money while working with vigor on a prawn trawler at sea in the wild tropical waters of Northern Australia near Papau New Guinea.

From the outback of Australia, at age 19, Happy traveled to Sydney, Australia then backpacked through Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, India and Nepal for more than a year. With just $50 in her pocket, she returned from India to Thailand to live amidst Buddhist nuns, study Tai Kwon Do from a former Korean Olympic Coach, and establish herself as one of the foremost contractors of English teaching at the time, free-lancing to corporate Thai management staff, international ambassadorial staff, and Thai government leaders in Bangkok in the mid-1980s.

After trekking to Darjeeling, India in hopes to study with Tenzin Norgay (who accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary to the top of Everest), Happy was dismissed by the Sherpa trekking school because she was a woman. Thus, she decided to return to the USA to receive guiding certification from NOLS, National Outdoor Leadership. She excelled at the month-long, advanced mountaineering and glacier-travel course through the Cascades of Washington.

She later worked as an elephant and rafting guide with Burmese friends, with whom she led international backpackers through the jungle to via machete-hewn bamboo river rafts that Happy and her friends sliced from the jungle and rapped with jungle rope, then floated down stream, then guided travelers the rest of the way via elephant to Thailand’s most revered, striking and resplendent waterfalls.

Trekking Guide in the Himalayas

Happy Oasis also volunteered for several astonishingly-adventurous seasons as a trekking guide high up in the Himalayas of Uttar Pradesh and Himal Pradesh, India.After backpacking through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, in the winter of 1988 Happy headed north for the summer served one of her highest calling for several seasons as a professional tree planter. She  planted approximately 100,000 trees – up to 500 tiny saplings per day – mostly in beautiful British Columbia.

College Years & Cultural Anthropology

Later in 1989, she moved to Santa Cruz, California to study at Cabrillo College in Aptos, then UC Santa Cruz. She founded “Landscaping With Love”, specializing in edible and xeriscapic gardening, to support her studies. She is a certified massage therapist in the state of California.

Living alone in the Redwoods, Happy was possibly the closest human being to the shocking Santa Cruz Earthquake of 1989. She experienced the forest land rolling like large ocean waves and was safely protected while abiding in the a faerie ring of Redwood trees.

Happy graduated in Cultural Anthropology about a decade later in a unique and amazing way. Northern Arizona University was expanding their program across Arizona, proclaiming on billboards that NAU would “go anywhere in Arizona to reach students”.

Forest Service Lookout, International Adventures & Entrepreneurship

Happy Oasis convinced NAU to follow through on their “go anywhere” promise, which meant that Happy’s professors hiked up, one by one, to Happy’s remote, steep mountain top forest fire lookout tower where she worked for the US Forest Service as a forest fire lookout.

Happy thereby received individual university tuition from the most intrepid, and sometimes mountain lion-fearing professors, while Happy was on a full scholarship and abiding in the hinterlands of Prescott National Forest as a professional forest fire look out.

In her teens, twenties and thirties, between her international eco-entrepreneurial adventures which sustained her financially, Happy backpacked far and wide for more than a decade as an international peripetic poet, volunteer and entrepreneur, exploring the most spectacular and pristine wilderness areas she could find as an adventure guide, translator and scholar from Australia’s outback to Alaska’s glaciers, from Thailand’s jungles to Hawaii’s hidden treasures, from New Zealand’s most isolated islands to Canada’s Rocky Mountains, from California’s Sierras to Arizona’s little known fingers of the Grand Canyon.

Tribal Families & Refugee Camps

During her 20s and 30s, Happy’s various tribal families were subjected to infiltration of roads, ideas and products of American culture, land theft, hunger, battles, acculturation, forced civilization, diasporas and genocide due to various presiding governments who wanted their prized land and lifestyles for resource exploitation and resettling of burgeoning populations.

Happy subsequently volunteered at refugee camps in Southeast Asia and at numerous orphanages and ashrams in India, etc. Serving as the coordinator at Thailand’s largest meditation jungle monastery, she introduced raw vegan and wild-foraged foods to monks, nuns and to hundreds of international backpacking meditation students.

Naturalist on Princess Cruises in Alaska

Back in the USA, during the 1990s, Happy Oasis was hired by Princess Cruises as a professional photographer, naturalist, biologist and anthropologist who researched and choreographed four educational, inspirational, comedy Adventures In Alaska shows for audiences of 2000 four times per week while aboard the Dawn Princes ship during spring and summer months.

Happy’s aim was to focus on bringing knowledge regarding the importance of preserving Alaska’s enormous Tongass National (enormous Rain) Forest and Arctic Wildlife Refuge to the cruise ship guests. This inspired thousands to write post cards to congressional and senatorial representatives, thereby initiating debates that have since preserved these areas.

Yoga Teaching, Raw Vegan Lifestyle & Foraging

Meanwhile, after two decades of eclectic health studies, gleaning health wisdom from cutting-edge researchers and mountain tops sadhus, forest healers to tribal wilderness sages as well as cutting-edge health education centers such as OHI, Optimum Health Institute of San Diego, Happy served as a yoga teacher of kunjal kriya and translator at The Spa, a raw vegan cleansing and fasting retreat on Ko Samui Island of Thailand in the late 1990s where she first taught what she had learned about organic raw vegan cleansing, colonics and natural therapies gleaned from living in the wild.

Between summertime forest fire look tower forays back in the USA, Happy ran the Occasional Raw Restaurant by donation only at her Happy Oasis Sanctuary in the gorgeous Granite Dells of Arizona, now called Heaven on Earth. Lunch guests had the option to forage for their meals alongside in the wild, in the garden and in the orchard.

Inspirational Orator & Public Speaker

As an inspirational orator at symposiums, retreats, temples, churches, schools, colleges, and universities as well as on tv and radio shows,  rather than claiming the stage at her own festivals, Happy loved offering up the Raw Spirit Festival stages to others in enthusiastic support of the many blossoming presenters, performers, authors, chefs and edu-tainers who encourage us to achieve astounding heights of health and harmony to benefit both humanity and the Earth.

Health & Happiness Coach, Philanthropist & Festival Organizer

Today, Happy is an occasional Health & Happiness Consultant with a selective clientele. She is the founder, philanthropist and CVO of the Raw Spirit Festival, an educational 501c3 non profit, the world’s largest raw vegan eco-music- peace events, which offered 200 festivals and mini-fests between 2004 and 2012.

These hallmark events brought together more raw vegan leaders than any other raw vegan festivals on earth for “Inspiration, Education and Celebration”. Her Raw Spirit Festivals were the first to weave fun into education. The Raw Spirit Fests featured 9 educational stages, as well as pre-fest raw-eco-peace business dinners and raw-eco-peace job fairs.

There were several hundred vendor booths, a dynamic doctors stage, a raw demos stage, a meditation area, ongoing yoga, dance, art and children’s programs, main speaking and music stages, a healing music stage, organic raw meals being served to hungry participants,  sometimes 30,000 meals per weekend… plus everything imaginable with the aim to create heaven on earth via encouraging us to have fun and to embody the ethics of compassion and lovingkindness. 

Thus, Happy is widely considered to be one of the most important contributors who catalyzed today’s raw vegan-eco-peace & organics movement, including building today’s billion dollar raw vegan economy. Due to the festival’s unwavering position regarding banning GMOs, the festival was infiltrated by a series of agents over many years.

This pestilence eventually led to the festival’s demise. Seeing this, Happy meanwhile, was freely and vigorously helping others who were inspired to start up their own festivals around the world which were modeled after her Raw Spirit Festivals.

Let’s Get Wild, Fitness Mentor & Sleep Consultant

Happy Oasis encourages us to eat joyfully and lovingly with awareness; intuitively, gratefully, and inclusively while honoring the spirit in all life, remembering to embrace not only more organic, but also local, wild, edible plants whenever possible. Happy teaches and demonstrates these principles interactively at fun-loving Let’s Get Wild! edible plant foraging events and outdoor dining retreats each year. She has taught Let’s Get Wild in more than a dozen eco-systems around the earth thus far.

As an erstwhile athlete with unusual strength, Happy is also a Fitness Mentor and Sleep Consultant who loves teaching selective clientele how to perform oodles of pushups with grace and ease, climb mountains, skip while singing, prepare delicious simple raw, feral vegan meals without appliances, and enjoy swimming in wild, sacred and beautiful places.

Composing Songs, Writing Poetry & Meditation

Happy Oasis enjoys writing songs, writing poetry, singing, busking, and meditating with friends with plans of bringing forth more Meditation Celebrations, Slow Down & Sleep Retreats and Wise Wild Woman events. Feel free to inquire at happy@happyoasis.com if you would like to host her or attend such events.www.BlissologyUniversity.com is the world’s first, now-germinating, research university devoted to the study of bliss, Blissology, via exploring the arts, sciences, ethical and spiritual practices, focusing upon the perspectives, lifestyles, and heavenly habits that create conditions for joy, happiness, contentment and bliss, namely the Blissiplines. www.WildVegetarianAdventures.com

Wild Vegetarian Adventures & Uncivilized Ecstasies

Decades ago while hiking in the Himalayas, Happy founded Wild Vegetarian Adventures, “Joyous Worldwide Journeys in Sacred Wild Places”.In the jungle, meditating beneath the full moon, while serving as Coordinator of a jungle monastery, Happy first dreamed up the Raw Spirit Festival, what would become the largest & longest lived 501c3 non-profit raw vegan-eco-peace-music festival, based in Sedona, Arizona, for “education, inspiration and celebration”.

While residing on the South Pacific’s wildest island, Motu Aotea, of New Zealand, Happy compiled two decades of her poetry into Uncivilized Ecstasies, New Zealand’s best selling adventure poetry book. In the flow of authoring Bliss Conscious Communication, Happy coined the terms Blissologist, Blissiplines, May The Bliss Be With You, Myriad Blissings, Let’s Activate The Miraculous and Bliss Forth! Her Bliss book is the world’s first interactive blissful communications playbook and is sought out at Communications classes by high schools, colleges, universities, spiritual retreats, churches, therapists and more.

Volunteering

The primary sponsor of the Raw Spirit Festival for which she essentially volunteered for eight years, Happy Oasis realized at a young age that it was not her destiny to bear children due to health concerns.Therefore, she chose to commit herself to volunteering, which she has done for decades with, for example, Habitat for Humanity, Mother Theresa in New Delhi, as a trekking guide in the Himalayas, Tasmania and Alaska, etc… as the International Meditation Retreat Coordinator at Thailand’s Wat Suon Mokkh Jungle Monastery.

She has been the leading volunteer or volunteer manager at numerous temples, ashrams, monasteries, refugee camps, organic farms, marine biology research programs, tribal hamlets and orphanages in many nations. Founding editor-publisher of the Inspiring Times monthly magazine, Happy’s prolific articles, stories, poetry and philosophy have also featured in books, magazines and newspapers internationally.

Best Selling Poetry & Bliss Book

While in solitary refinement as a forest fire lookout for nearly a dozen years on a mountain top and while backpacking broadly and abiding on New Zealand’s remote, virtually-uninhabited Motu Aotea (White Cloud Island), Happy authored the Earth’s only wild, raw vegan, international travelers’ adventure poetry book, Uncivilized Ecstasies, a New Zealand best-seller and Bliss Conscious Communication, the world’s first interactive playbook that heightens conversational kundalini.

A lifelong, gentle-but-persistent, environmental, peace, cultural and social activist, Happy Oasis has been instrumental in winning several environmental cases, the most recent located beside her spectacular Arizona home retreat center when she appealed to and joined forces with the Army Corps of Engineers to stop developers from illegally building condominiums on a gorgeous little forested canyon lake which the developers destroyed.Upon her counsel, the Army Corps oversaw the developers’ replanting of hundreds of trees, which with Happy’s prompting, culminated in the developer donating the unusually scenic land for a permanent open-space park now annexed and managed by the City of Prescott, AZ. Oasis has worked as a consultant to environmental organizations and a guest lecturer at universities.

Raw Spirit Festival Combines Spirit with Raw

As the Chief Visionary, Happy’s dream is to see Raw Spirit Festivals and other similar, cooperating, next-generation festivals expand to serve humanity around the planet. Due to diligent persistence and determination to follow the highest spiritual truth in a pragmatic way, while there were merely 4 raw vegan restaurants when Raw Spirit began, today there are more than 300 restaurants.Moreover, the raw vegan diet has alas been recognized as the #1 weight loss, cleansing, healing and disease-prevention diet in the world. Alas, people around the world are re-discovering what has been for centuries one of nature’s best-kept health secrets.

Although there has yet to be a festival that combines Spirit (via meditation, intention, visualization, peace prayers, yoga, uplifting music, inspired poetry, ethical and wisdom teachings) with Raw, hence “Raw Spirit”, Happy is now mentoring other young raw vegan festival producers around the world to create their own special versions of Raw Spirit.Happy concocted the idea of the Raw Spirit 100 Club in 2010, which hallmarked the raw and healthy-living movement’s first ever service organization of 100 seasoned professionals who have been contributors to the Raw Spirit Festival.

However, Happy Oasis is foremost a meditation friend, visionary, blissologist, ecologist, adventure anthropologist, poet, songwriter, swimmer, lover of wisdom, natural philosopher, linguist, celebrant and wilderness guide who still frequently sleeps beneath the stars, rather than a festival office administrator.

Therefore, she choose to opt out of the huge work load of festival production and administration by instead rejoining the open roads and trails, and only occasionally offering intimate retreats, playshops and salubriously-short seminars at other people’s festivals and expos rather than produce more of the enormous Raw Spirit festivals that served thousands each weekend.

Happy enjoys playing music to one friend (of any species) at a time while walking or skipping through the wilderness, swimming in oceans, rivers and streams. She appreciates sleeping, wondering, cuddling, and pillow talk; praying, imagining, silently receiving then sharing inspirational affirmations, parables, and poetry; gazing into nature, running like a gazelle, and slowly exploring this incredibly wild and beautiful planet one precious breath and step, moment by moment.

Perpetual Tour & Exploration of Bliss

Happy Oasis has been on perpetual tour for more than three decades, slowly exploring this magnificent planet while serving people and projects whenever a higher calling calls.These days, to help Americans exercise their cheer muscles, Happy leads Bliss Conscious Communication certificate courses via Blissology University while slowly traveling around the USA in our cozy creational vehicle (rv). Happy hopes to bring this pragmatic ecstatic program overseas for the benefit of people in many nations in the near future. Johnny Light enhances the program with his beautiful music.

We hope you grace us with your presence and reach out to host one of our events to enjoy the gift of life in ever greater most bliss consciousness, health and joy. Exulted Friend, I am amazed that you read this astonishingly-long bio! There is much more to this little story; however, I am too busy living and loving to write any more now. I celebrate you. I love you.

Let’s activate the miraculous together as we…

Bliss Forth With Love,

Happy Oasis