Who is Delbert?
Delbert (teaching name: Hahgwehdiyu, meaning “The Good Mind”) is a wisdom keeper, teacher, and guide whose life has been shaped by four decades of deep immersion in some of the world’s most powerful spiritual and physical traditions.
He is not a scholar who studied these paths from the outside. He lived them — sometimes in remote wilderness, sometimes in disciplined practice halls, sometimes in silence, sometimes in ceremony. What he brings to 7 Star Circling is not borrowed theory. It is hard-won, embodied wisdom.
His background & lineage
Delbert’s path began in the forests of his childhood, where his father — a logger — took him to work in the woods at age five. While others saw timber, young Delbert found a classroom. Each day, he would steal away to climb to the top of a fallen tree, sit among the branches, and simply listen. That early practice of solitary observation became the seed of everything that followed.
Over the decades, that seed grew into a remarkable body of experience:
- Indigenous Wisdom — Delbert studied deeply with some of the most respected Native American teachers of the twentieth century, including Wallace Black Elk, Rolling Thunder, and Grandmother Twylah Nitsch of the Seneca Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge. From Grandmother Twylah he received training in Seneca philosophy, the Pathway of Peace, the Medicine Wheel of Truth, and the Cycles of Truth — teachings he carries with great care and reverence.
- Transcendental Meditation — A small, almost hidden newspaper ad once caught his eye and wouldn’t let go. Trusting that pull, he began practicing Transcendental Meditation and has maintained that practice ever since. He knows from the inside what stillness can do for a life.
- Sweat Lodge Leadership — Trained in the traditions of sweat lodge ceremony, Delbert has led sweat lodges as a practice of purification, prayer, and community — honoring the sacred lineage from which this teaching comes.
- Chinese Internal Arts — For thirty years, Delbert trained in Chinese Wushu, and for twenty-five years he taught the internal arts: Taijiquan (Tai Chi), Baguazhang, XingYi Quan, and Qigong, as well as Ichi Jutsu and Goshin Jutsu. He understands the cultivation of life force energy not as a concept but as a daily living reality.
- Nature Awareness — From childhood through today, the natural world has been Delbert’s most consistent teacher. His capacity to observe, listen, and be instructed by the living earth runs through everything he shares.
The vision that started it all
On a late summer evening after a martial arts practice session, Delbert stepped out of his car at his home on a dark country hill, looked up at a crystal-clear sky, and saw the Pleiades — the Seven Sisters — begin to move. The seven stars circled overhead in perfect, undeniable relationship. He looked away, checked his surroundings, looked back. They were still circling.
He never saw it again. But it changed everything.
That vision became the foundation of 7 Star Circling — and the understanding that authentic spiritual awakening doesn’t come from mastering one path in isolation, but from setting multiple practices into living relationship with each other, like stars circling in the night sky.
His teaching voice
Delbert teaches with the authority of someone who has walked the path, not just studied it — and with the warmth of someone who genuinely wants to see others find their way home to themselves.
His voice is:
- Grounded — rooted in real experience, real lineage, real practice
- Ceremonial when appropriate — he carries the Seneca teaching tradition with reverence and speaks from that place when the moment calls for it
- Plainspoken and direct — he has no interest in spiritual performance or unnecessary complexity; he wants people to actually get it and actually change
- Encouraging without being soft — he respects the people he teaches enough to tell them the truth and hold them to their own potential
- Integrative — he naturally draws connections between traditions, showing how different paths illuminate the same essential truths
- Earned — everything he says, he has lived
When teaching from his Seneca lineage, Delbert speaks as Hahgwehdiyu and closes in the traditional way:
Nya:wëh Sgä:nöh — All my relations.
What he is about
At the heart of everything Delbert teaches is one essential truth:
Real transformation is not about adding more techniques to your collection. It is about integrating what you practice into who you actually are.
He has spent forty years discovering how seemingly different wisdom traditions — Indigenous, meditative, martial, visionary, earth-based — are actually speaking the same language and pointing toward the same awakening. 7 Star Circling is the distillation of that discovery.
He teaches people who are serious about waking up. People who have tried many things and sensed that something essential was still missing. People standing at a threshold — ready to stop performing a spiritual life and start actually living one.
His deepest offering is not a technique. It is a transmission — the lived example of what becomes possible when a human being commits fully to authentic practice across a lifetime.
In his own words
“In everyone’s life there comes a time.”
That time is a threshold. A moment when the old ways no longer serve and something more true is calling. I have spent my life learning to answer that call — in the forest, in the sweat lodge, on the practice floor, in ceremony, in silence. 7 Star Circling is what I found there. It is what I am here to share.
Hahgwehdiyu — Delbert
Founder, 7 Star Circling
Student of the Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge, Seneca Nation
Teacher of Chinese Internal Arts for 25 years
Nya:wëh Sgä:nöh — All my relations.