Clinical Formation
His clinical formation spans forty-five years and an estimated eighty thousand patient visits. He holds a Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine from SAMRA University and a clinical Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine from Emperor's College.
The deepest clinical education of his career came through an eight-year mentorship with Drs. John H. F. Shen and Leon Hammer in the Menghe-Ding family lineage of internal medicine, one of the great surviving pulse traditions of classical Chinese medicine. He received spiritual transmission from Dr. Shen at Shen's passing in 2000. His specialization in pulse diagnosis, sustained over thirty years across three family lineages, is the clinical spine of his practice and his scholarship.
Academic Medicine
His academic formation in medicine is equally exacting. He holds a Master of Academic Medicine from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, and a PhD in Transformative Inquiry from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
As President of the Academy of Oriental Medicine at Austin from 2005 to 2015, he led the institution through regional accreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (a designation reserved for mainstream universities and rarely achieved by schools of East Asian medicine) and established its Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine program. Across his career he developed three accredited doctoral programs and organized three Institutional Review Boards, building the research infrastructure that East Asian medicine required for integration into mainstream academic medicine.
As President of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, he appointed the United States representatives to the World Health Organization and worked directly on the final terminology sets that made classical Chinese medical language intelligible to WHO physicians, a contribution to the ICD-11 traditional medicine classifications that stands as an act of closure for the field. He subsequently stepped down from the AAAOM presidency as a gesture of goodwill to facilitate the cooperative merger of two conflicted national associations, placing the long-term health of the profession above institutional position.
Medical Astrology
Morris has practiced medical astrology since 1977, working across Hellenistic, Medieval, Renaissance, Jyotiṣa, Uranian, Cosmobiology, and Vibrational systems. He is certified in Traditional Medical Astrology and Vibrational Astrology. His book Cycles in Medical Astrology distills more than four decades of clinical observation of celestial pattern in the therapeutic encounter.
He serves as Director of Education, faculty member, and member of the Board of Governors at Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences, where he coordinates the Mind, Body, and Spirit certificate programs and has been instrumental in developing the academic infrastructure of astrological education in North America.
Music: The First Profession
Music was his first profession. He toured as a drummer with jazz organist Terrel Prude, playing supper clubs and after-hours sessions where players from the orbits of the 5th Dimension, Marvin Gaye, and Miles Davis sat in alongside Lawrence Welk's musicians after their televised commitments ended for the night: at the LA Hilton, everyone in the same room, on their own time. He majored in music at Los Angeles Valley College, studying percussion with Mitch Peters of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and worked with Chuck Flores, Bill Green, Dick Grove, and Lad McIntosh, the core of West Coast jazz pedagogy. In 1983 he studied synthesis with Malcolm Cecil, co-creator of TONTO, the largest analog synthesizer ever built.
The Helios recordings (Helios Rising and Helios Attunement, produced in the mid-1980s) were clinical instruments from the outset, compositions for acupuncture rooms and healing environments that found their way to birth doulas and death doulas. He performed flute on volumes one and three of Steve Roach's landmark Quiet Music trilogy. His wind lineage deepened through rāga study with Indrajit Banerjee of the Maihar gharana and bānsurī transmission from Jay Thakkar, whose lineage runs through Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia.
At sixty-eight he took up the duduk and the saxophone, performing publicly with Arcane Garden at Starbelly Jam and Gratitude Fest. He operates the Kootenay Sound Healing Centre with his wife Theresa, where current practice includes interspecies electroacoustic sound art using plant bioelectrical instruments and planetary sound triptychs built on the frequency research of Hans Cousto.
Books
His books include Neoclassical Pulse Diagnosis, Li Shi-Zhen Pulse Studies, Transformation, Cycles in Medical Astrology, and Reiki: Hands That Heal. He is co-author of Pulse Studies, second edition (People's Medical Publishing House). The Sky Medicine series includes Book of Dreams (Vol. IX) and Evidence Ecology: Science and Astrology (Vol. XIV), both in print now (Book of Dreams on Amazon; Evidence Ecology on Amazon).
His wider bibliography is collected on Amazon Author Central.
He lives and works on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake, British Columbia.