Sandy Lake Alberta is not necessarily the place you’d expect to run into an ex-aeronautical engineer and reiki master who teaches life skills for Northern Lakes College. Especially not one who spent a decade in a Hare Krishna agricultural community as a subsistence farmer.
Yet such a fellow is J.D. Szezepaniak, who has been there, done that and could write a book about it. His resumé is not standard stuff – not by a long shot.
J.D. stands for ‘Janbavan Das’, which ought to tell you something. More on that later, but let’s start at the beginning.
The current Sandy Lake resident stopped in Slave Lake recently on his way home to Sandy Lake from Atikameg, where he is currently teaching life skills to a group. Over a Tim Horton’s coffee, he shared some of his life and philosophy.
Joachim Szezepaniak (yes, it’s a Polish name, but his family has been German for generations) grew up in Hamburg, West Germany, trained as an aeronautical engineer and worked in that field for 14 years. At some point he began to yearn for more elbow room. Canada was looking for skilled tradesmen, as always, and in 1982 he moved to Calgary with his young family.
“That (aeronautical engineering) was my ticket to Canada,” he says.
Oddly enough, he never worked in his trade again. A friend in Calgary gave him a job as a ceramic tile setter and he spent six years doing that, while at the same time developing a business as an outdoor guide – mainly for European tourists. It also grew to where he was organizing outdoor get-togethers for big companies.
Eventually, he says, it got to be more headache than fun.
“I had too many bosses,” he says. “At the end I was just sitting in an office.”
This is where the story takes a really unusual turn.
“The idea came into my head to move to Australia,” he says, admitting that even to him the notion seemed hard to justify. He argued with himself, but the urge remained. So he sold the business and went to Australia – alone and not knowing what he should do when he got there – but apparently feeling some purpose was behind it.
Australia didn’t hold any answers, but on a side trip to New Zealand, he encountered the Hare Krishnas. The religious group – which follows a version of Hinduism – impressed him most when he visited their farm.
“I saw how they lived,” he says. “I was really intrigued.”
How they lived was quite simply – a subsistence lifestyle with a focus on spirituality and taking care of the basic needs and not much else. While there, he learned that such agricultural communities existed in Canada as well.
“I was told they were starting a farm near Ashcroft (in B.C.).”
Not long after, he and his family moved to that farm, and for the next 10 years, J.D. devoted himself to making it work. Initiation into the group meant taking a new name, and his became Janbavan Das. Janbavan means ‘king of the bears’ and das means ‘servant’.
‘Simple living, high thinking’ was the motto of the place. That included, obviously, lots of hard work and also plenty of praying in the form of chanting – somewhat the equivalent of life in a Christian monastery. There were also four main prohibitions in the Hare Krishna life: intoxication, fish/meat/eggs, gambling and illicit sex.
J.D. says 20 – 25 families lived there like that, working the land mainly without the aid of machines. They fancied themselves ‘permaculturalists’, meaning something along the lines of farming without depleting the land. When they started, there was about an inch of topsoil on the land. By careful husbandry, they were able to build it up to over a foot of topsoil in a few years.
J.D.’s engineering background came in very handy – making things work, fixing things, building things. He converted an old generator to work on cooking oil, and used it to power an essential welder. A chainsaw was the only other machine he allowed himself. Without both those mechanical aids, collecting enough firewood for the winter would have been nearly impossible, he says. Unless, as an oldtimer advised him, he had about a dozen kids. You won’t make it otherwise, the fellow told him.
The simple living and high thinking appealed to J.D. but other aspects of organized religion did not.
“The philosophy for me works,” he says. “I still live like that.”
Eventually, however, power struggles and such wore out the charm of the place for him. He says he had also grown apart from his wife, and as their kids were mostly grown up, he decided in about 1998 to leave. He did so with no plan and no money.
“I had no clue what I was doing,” he says. “For the first time in my life I was out of everything.”
The temporary solution was to apply for welfare, in the course of which he was required to take a short life skills course. He liked what he saw and it gave him the idea he might be good as a life skills instructor. One nine-month course later, and he had the qualification. After some work in “recovery houses” near Vancouver, the Northern Lakes College job came up. He moved north and east in 2000, and continues that work today.
“It’s exciting!” he says. “There’s a great reward at the end of the program, to see the changes of those that make it to the end. That’s fantastic.”
The instructor’s job takes him to communities all over the Northern Lakes College service region. The sessions are three months long, and often keep him away from home during the week.
Besides that, he’s started a business, called ‘Creative Mindscaping’, which offers communication and interpersonal skills instruction to professionals. It’s exciting work too, he says, particularly because the people who attend, “want to be there.”
J.D. says he’s looking for a good facility to hold such workshops on weekends, and would be happy to hear from anyone with any ideas. Is that all? No, indeed.
“I’m a reiki master,” he says.
Reiki is a traditional Japanese healing art that deserves its own article. As a master, J.D. is qualified to teach other people “who want to learn how to do it.” Some he’s taught have carried on to become masters in their own right, he says.
J.D. resides with his partner on a piece of property on Sandy Lake, where he strives to incorporate the simple living and high thinking way of life. He sums it up with the acronym ‘HOPHAMS’, which stands for ‘humble, open, patient, honest, attentive, moderate, simple.’
“That’s the ethical code I live by,” he says.

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