Henry J. Novak has lived one life as two men, and spent the second half of it reconciling them.

For the better part of a decade he was a federal prosecutor. A graduate of Southern Methodist University (B.A., 1963; J.D., 1966), he served as law clerk to two federal judges — one on the U.S. District Court, another on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — before prosecuting white-collar and criminal cases as an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Houston. By every outward measure he was succeeding. Inwardly, he was running on empty.

In the late 1970s, worn down and quietly in despair, Henry walked away from the law. What followed was not a tidy conversion but a long descent and a longer climb back. In 1979, in Oakland, California, he received shaktipat — an awakening of inner energy — from Swami Muktananda, and was introduced to the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism, which holds that all of reality is a single, living, conscious whole. That meeting set the course of the next forty years.

Henry did not abandon his rigor; he turned it inward. He brought a prosecutor’s demand for evidence to the life of the spirit, testing what he experienced against Jungian depth psychology, positive psychology, neuroscience, the new physics of consciousness, and the great contemplative traditions of East and West. Along the way he returned to law practice in Austin, made and lost fortunes, drafted citizen legislation that expanded medical freedom in Colorado and Texas, became a Certified HeartMath® Trainer, and developed Appreciative Self Inquiry — a method he adapted from organizational Appreciative Inquiry for the work of personal transformation.

What he learned, he now teaches. Henry’s subject is well-being — not a fleeting mood but a durable way of living that anyone can cultivate, whatever they believe. His approach joins the lawyer’s clarity to the mystic’s depth, and the Western sciences of flourishing to the Eastern maps of consciousness, and offers them not as a doctrine to be adopted but as practices to be tried.

Now in his ninth decade, his curiosity undimmed, Henry writes and teaches as an elder who has walked the whole road — down into the hard places and back up into the light — and who believes the way home is open to everyone.