Paul Robear is the President and Executive Director of the Cuyamungue Institute(CI) .  Paul became involved with the CI in the early 1990′s. In 2011, Paul joined the Board of Directors of the CI and was elected President a short time later. Reporting to the Board of Directors, as President, Paul has overall strategic and operational responsibility for the institute programs, facilities, and execution of its mission. 

A life-long study of the ancient wisdom traditions, along with his entrepreneurial skills prepared Paul for his leadership role at CI. Driven with intensity, focus and passion to facilitate greater awareness of these “age old” technologies, Paul considers it a blessing to help facilitate the work of CI, and feels the time has come to recognize the need to bridge cross-cultural wisdom traditions with the needs of today’s world. That spiritual insight born of direct experience can provide practical solutions for the challenges ahead, keeps this work compelling and relevant. 

“I see this work in the larger context,” Paul says, “from Experience, along with Education, and the ongoing Exploration in the field of consciousness studies. By exploring our own direct experience in the context of ritual, we are tapping into the realm of human imagination and creative processes, for richer experience of life.

Paul’s core passion is facilitating the Ecstatic Trance Ritual Body Posture events, both in person at the headquarters of the Cuyamungue Institute in Santa Fe NM, and now worldwide via ZOOM. He draws on his real life experience, which correlates to the ground-breaking research of CI’s founder,  anthropologist Dr. Felicitas Goodman and other key researchers in the field of trance and consciousness studies. A ceremonialist and ritual artist, Paul considers the experiential sessions he leads as his “inner office hours.”

Paul and Laura were asked to translate the work of the Cuyamunge Institute as an art installation in 2017 for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Working in collaboration with Australian artist Mel O’Callahan,  he choreographed the performance piece, and they advised on the look, sound, function, and symbolic meaning of CI’s ritual tools. In addition, they taught a workshop for 100 art students at Parsons Paris School of Design in preparation to participate in the exhibit’s daily performances

Paul’s professional skills range from management, multi-media distribution, sales, marketing, publishing. The mission of the media company he created around wife Laura Lee’s nationally syndicated terrestrial radio talk show is self-discovery. The publishing and retail arm had international distribution and sold over 200,000 books, videos, and audio books. To steer CI into the future, Paul brings all this and more to CI, with weekly live, interactive webcasts of experiential sessions of Ecstatic Trance Ritual Body Postures for an international community, and with Conversation4Exploration interviews every Sunday, with a wide range of guests from the arts and sciences. Paul adds and oversees new weekly content to CI’s YouTube, Facebook, and Podcast channels.