Garth Fisher, LCSW, grew up in a small, conservative Indiana town deeply invested in religious fundamentalism, where psychic divination and mediumship were deemed the dirty work of the devil. He attended a fundamentalist college and a state university, where he gained a degree in social work. He spent three years as a psychiatric social worker with the Army and worked with a wide variety of clients in a small rural Wisconsin mental health center. At 80-plus years young, he continues to work in the field of mental health, currently as a counselor in a small outpatient clinic in Beloit, Wisconsin.

In the early 1970s, Garth established the fourth biofeedback program in Wisconsin, working with a big-box EMG, GSR, heart rate and temperature units as well as EEG. He was introduced to Eastern thought and philosophy during a meeting with the legendary Elmer Green and others who were researching biofeedback in India.

His psycho-spiritual horizons broadened while studying hypnosis (past life regressions, multiple personality disorder, alien abductions, and life between lives), Albert Ellis, Native American spirituality, Edgar Cayce, Reiki, karate, chi, and ultimately the Spiritualist movement, whose members channel messages from the "other side."

Untethered from his fundamentalist roots, Garth worked three summers at Wonewac Spiritualist Camp as an "intuitive reader" and found that it was much like doing his counseling work, relaxation training, and hypnosis. Doing intuitive readings was a inner mental shift that opened to a flow of information.

While studying hypnosis, meditation, relaxation, and the concept of past lives over the next 15 years, Garth prepared for each next day's class by writing a note for each participant: whatever "just came to me." He placed it in an envelope and at the class fanned out the envelopes so that people could select one. Very often, the feedback was, "It was just what I needed to hear" or "Wow, this really fits me." Thus the creation, some 28 years ago, of the first book in his three-volume trilogy, Fortune Cookies: Recipes for a Master in Training.