About Avi

After graduate study in philosophy at the University of British Columbia and Georgetown University, Avi experienced a spiritual awakening that changed his life and led him to become a meditation teacher and spiritual guide. In order to learn to help others with their own spiritual journeys, he completed his professional certification in spiritual direction at the Transformational Arts College. (A spiritual director is a professional who accompanies and supports others on their spiritual journey.) Since then, Avi has helped many people of different backgrounds to pursue life-enhancing spiritual practices.

Avi is a teacher and founding director at The Consciousness Explorers Club, a cutting-edge meditation community in Toronto. He wrote and recorded meditations for chronic pain which were used in a major study of cancer survivors by researchers at UBC. He is also a content creator and writer for the Calm meditation app.   He has led meditation workshops for organizations and companies around Toronto. 

In recognition of his work, Avi was awarded the New Contemplatives Prize by Spiritual Directors International in 2015. He has also been invited to deliver public lectures at Consciousness Hackers Toronto and The Limmud Toronto Jewish Learning Conference. He was recently featured in an article about the connection between Judaism and Buddhism. 

As a philosopher, Avi wrote his master’s thesis on the methodological foundations of moral theory, and he incorporated ideas from his thesis into the Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 6th Ed., while working as a research assistant with Tom Beauchamp. He published a paper on Body Integrity Identity Disorder in the American Journal of Bioethics. More recently, he has engaged in public dialogue about spiritual philosophy with spiritual thinkers including Tim Freke.  

Avi is also a web developer having completed his training at the Full-Time Web Development Immersive at HackerYou. His developer website is www.avicodes.com.