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Stephen BE was raised in a military family, and, like all military families, he traveled extensively without being able to point to any one location as home. A “military brat,” Stephen graduated high school from a military college prep school in Baltimore, Maryland, and accepted an appointment to the US Air Force Academy. After completing two years at the USAFA, Stephen transferred to the University of Colorado, where he branched out into parapsychology, Transcendental Meditation, and Silva Mind Control. He graduated with a degree in psychology and was accepted to the famous Humanistic Psychology graduate program of the University of West Georgia, where he studied with Mike Arons, Jim Klee (a research partner with Abraham Maslow), Horace Stewart, Jim Thomas, and other early notables in the field, before expanding into the consciousness studies of Ken Keyes, Jr. He later attended the National College of Naturopathic Medicine, now known as the National University of Natural Medicine.

While in graduate school in Carrollton, Stephen founded a crisis intervention center that grew within a year to a 24/7 telephone crisis line and outreach service, with over 100 volunteer counselors that he recruited and trained. Later, he accepted the Training Director position of the even larger Baton Rouge Crisis Intervention Center at Louisiana State University. Then in Portland, while attending medical school, he was hired at the Metro Crisis Intervention Center and was stationed and assigned all crisis duties of Washington County Mental Health.

From there, he was recruited for the Program Director position at Colorado West Mental Health Center in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he hired and trained several dozen psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health workers to serve those with chronic mental illness, and generally performing the administrative duties of a several million dollar public program that answered to the county, the state, and the federal governments, as well as the political action organizations for those with mental illness. He was recognized as the Mental Health Professional of the Year in 1986.

Stephen went into private psychotherapy practice with Donna BE in 1988, and together they founded BEing There Enlightenment Systems in 1990. They were both licensed as Professional Counselors in Colorado in 1991, just after the licensing law was enacted. For over thirty years, Stephen and Donna BE have provided counseling for individuals and couples, created a series of 16 retreats, opened several websites, have written seven books, and have served over 10,000 clients. The philosophy behind all of their services is described a little more thoroughly on this website and even more thoroughly in Feeling Your Way Along, their primary book.

Stephen stopped providing counseling services about ten years ago to focus full-time on writing and expanding the BEing There menu of services and explore more deeply into psycho-spiritual experience and how it affects the realization of greater consciousness. In addition to his administrative duties, Stephen facilitates a weekly discussion group on Spirituality & Consciousness.

Stephen and Donna built a new 4,000 square foot facility in Grand Junction that opened in 2017 so that BEing There could include more therapists and provide an array of group counseling opportunities, opening up the BEing There philosophy to more than just individual clients.