Home

Michael Mendizza

Writer, Filmmaker

Michael Mendizza

ABOUT

In 1981 Michael embarked on The Betrayal of Intimacy, an independent research and public awareness project to help prevent sexual violence. Michael observed that the abusive person is most often themselves a victim of early childhood abuse, humiliation, and neglect and that this betrayal of intimacy creates a foundation for violence. If the absence of nurturing is a major contributor to patterns of violence, then feeling safe, physical affection and play in early childhood will help prevent violence. It was upon these simple observations that Michael founded Touch the Future in 1987, a nonprofit learning design center.

As a documentary filmmaker Michael has traveled extensively researching sensitive issues: domestic violence and rape, the impact of media on learning, cultural and human development, the nature of intelligence, holistic learning models, the changing family, prenatal learning, creativity and peak performance. For decades Michael has gathered and published interviews with more than fifty researchers, scientists, authors and performance specialists, including extensive works with renowned physicist David Bohm, J. Krishnamurti, Ashley Montagu and Joseph Chilton Pearce. Working closely with Pearce and performance specialists, Michael developed a revolutionary parenting and coaching model that applies the psychology of optimum experience, what athletes call The Zone, to parenting and to education.

Magical Parent – Magical Child, the Optimum Learning Relationship, a book written in collaboration with Pearce, offers this model of peak performance and optimum learning to parents, preschool, Head Start, and child care providers, public educators and amateur athletic coaches. Michael has presented these and related works at national and international conferences in the United States, Eastern Europe, The Netherlands, in India and the United Kingdom.

The mission of Touch The Future is to promote Optimum Learning Relationships between adults and children. A five-year exploration of optimum states of learning, wellness, and peak performance led to a revolutionary parenting and coaching model the authors call The Intelligence of Play. Touch the Future’s top agenda is to provide a lasting foundation for Pearce’s legacy and to extend this model for Optimum Learning Relationships to specific populations: preschool, Head Start, and child care providers, public education, and amateur athletics.

“It is possible to create a new world by transforming ourselves and modeling that for our children. The intellect can’t save us. Something else is needed. What athletes call the zone, researchers call flow and children call play, transforms the present by breaking patterns that have enslaved humanity for millennia. Authentic play, with its empathy, care, sensitivity, wonder and affection is the only force strong enough to bring about the change we know is needed, now. To understand this force we need to rediscover what authentic play feels like, in the mind and the body.”

WRITER

Magical Parent Web

Magical Parent, Magical Child, with the iconic Joseph Chilton Pearce

This book began with a simple insight; The Future Is Now. If I am aggressive or kind today chances are I will be the same way tomorrow and my children will be too. If I want to bring about real change, a new pattern or possibility, a baby step forward in evolution it must take place now, this moment. By changing how I think, feel and act – now – I create a different next moment. If I don’t change now – I will be tomorrow what I am today.

Learn More

Playful Wisdon

Playful Wisdom, A Father’s Adventure

Playful Wisdom transforms the experience of being a father, as many mother’s know, into a deep and profound state of constant learning and growth. Being a father today is not easy. The growth that occurs during the critical early years happens so fast and the changes are so profound that we can barely keep up. Fathers are often dazed by the blast. If we blink it is over and that moment will never repeat itself again.

Learn More

Jcp Book

The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce, Astonishing Capacities and Self-Inflicted Limitations

Most of human existence is habitual, sleep walking in a dream cast by culture. Excluded from this semi-alert state are vast fields of insight and meaning that exist beyond these limited borders. Being habitual, reflexive and mechanical, our sleep-walking appears in the dream as normal and necessary, no reason here to wake up. Drugged by our lazy habits of mind, we comfortably repeat tomorrow what we did yesterday, mother and daughter, father and son, calling this conditioning parenting and education. While great technological innovations were being made, human beings remained stuck, like a wagon wheel in deep, sticky mud, repeating. Joe recognized and rebelled against this life-wasting pattern early.

Learn More

Always Awakening

Always Awakening: Buddha’s Realization, Krishnamurti’s Insights

The word Buddha means “awakened one” or “the enlightened one.” This title refers to one who perceives directly the illusory, limited, and conflicted nature of reality common to humanity, and the false identity formed on this misguided foundation. With this awakening, everything changes; without it, nothing changes. Awakening therefore is and has been humanity’s greatest challenge. Without comparison, Always Awakening explores how this insight was addressed 2,500 years ago by Gautama Siddhartha, and in a contemporary context, language, and metaphor by Krishnamurti.

Learn More

Uf Cover

Unconditionally Free

Unconditionally Free is a sweeping overview of the life and insights of J. Krishnamurti. A unique format follows a timeline from 1850 to the speaker’s death in 1986. Selections of J. Krishnamurti’s talks and dialogues, decade after decade, beginning in the 1920’s, are followed by rare descriptions and explorations by Krishnamurti of what this ‘other’ way of living feels like, as a direct experience. We end by offering a map of the teachings, not as content, but as style, form and function. It becomes clear turning the pages: to change the world, before it is too late, each of us must bring about our own inner-revolution.
This total transformation is not the product of thought, time or methods. It is a change in the very root of human consciousness, in the state of the mind and heart, and from that, its content. Unconditionally Free brings this possibility closer, clearer and more urgent than it has ever been. This is the moment.

Learn More

FILMMAKER

As a documentary film maker Michael has interviewed hundreds of remarkable human beings.

“I consider everyone a teacher. Some I call mentors because the trust, respect and friendship we develop becomes a constant source of life-changing insight and inspiration. Joseph Chilton Pearce and I have such a relationship. There are others…”

Michael has compiled hundreds of hours of in-depth personal interviews focusing on the themes and issues that are most important to you; pregnancy, birth, bonding, parenting, the origins of love and violence, athletics, optimum states of learning and performance, expanding human potential and amazing capacities and self-infected limitations.

Wisdom never goes out of date. View a collection of Michael’s personal interviews on Touch The Future

BLOG

Expanding Human Potential by Supporting Those Who Care For Children

Michael’s Blog >