Over twenty years, Aaron built and ran companies across five industries. He managed assets at Ameriprise Financial and J.P. Morgan Chase, built APBA — a licensed trade school, guided professionals in their career development and counseled founders and executives of MyCherio and RPS on strategic development.
Aaron served as the chief executive officer of TNA — a statewide trade association and an owner-operator of ECS — a mid-size commercial concrete company. His leadership substance is not theoretical but rather from the twenty years of advising clients, coaching professionals, managing crews, building business and advising founders and executives.
His rich career lends him a complete professional perspective that few possess — the perspective of a team member, mid-manager, executive, owner-operator, investor, and an understanding of the non-profit arena as well.
The learner
Aaron is a life-long learner. He studied eastern medicine and healing modalities, a practitioner of east asian internal martial arts (Baguazhang, Xingyiquan, and Tai Chi Chuan) and a lover of the arts. He is also an advocate and instructor of meditation methodologies such as Vipassana aka Mindfulness Meditation. He has volunteered his time as a lecturer and advocate of meditation at local colleges. Aaron is a learned student of philosophy, psychology, comparative religion, and metaphysics.
What he offers
What he offers is guidance, perspective, empowerment, and self-reliance. His primary function as a coach is to partner with his clients as a guide, confidant, and support, in the process of reflection, investigation, and examination to find clarity over challenges that are disruptive, bewildering, and especially unbearable for his clients.
The hero's prison
Aaron is a capable, driven, and a strong person. In his life, he bore everything because he felt he had capacity to bear it. Aaron believed in the hero's belief: "Great power comes with great responsibility." So he took on the responsibilities that were not his own to carry. That belief, Aaron has come to realize, is a hero's prison. The hero was his shadow and responsibility was his prison. It disabled him from being his natural self — the one that cares and gives and serves out of love, rather than out of duty and responsibility.
The dark night
At the height of his career, Aaron faced a sudden tragedy that plunged him into what can only be described as "The Dark Night of the Soul." During those existential years, he discovered that he had never known rest all his life nor peace. A surprisingly humbling revelation to him.
It was only when he was at the end of his strength that he learnt to rest.
In absolute exhaustion, he finally rested. There he learned to let go of striving and concern over outcome. He recognized peace in knowing he had done, without haste nor delay, what he could. Not his best; just simply what he could. Because what he could do is enough, and enough is his best at that moment, in that situation, and under that circumstance.
He learned to rest even when the next step is uncertain and dark. He recognized that his striving for clarity and excellence is not how it works. Clarity and excellence would only emerge naturally through rest and peace. He found the willingness for stillness and comfort in silence. And, that is where insight arises without effort and delay.
Out of the experience, Aaron founded Hakukyo-mon training center. He formalized keystone methodology and modalities of training meditative insight, and active stillness. What began as a personal reclamation of rest evolved into a commitment to share that same clarity with others.
Hakukyō-mon
In 2024 Aaron founded Hakukyō-mon — the Gate of the White Mirror — a non-profit training center. The method behind Umemyi was built there and is taught there: meditative practice for direct perception, work on shadow and persona, embodiment, and what behavioral science knows about interrupting a conditioned loop. It is organized into a pathway of five ranks.
Umemyi is the private door into the same work.