Did you come here wondering if I could help you with your lower back pain, your bum shoulder, your tension headaches, your indigestion?  Alright, then, let’s cut to the chase.  The answer is an emphatic “maybe.”  Sorry, to get a more definitive answer, you’ll have to read on (or cheat and scroll down to the other bold parts).

Understanding that we are not separate from our world—no matter how persistent and widespread the collective delusion that says we are—we recognize that the healing of self and world are always, necessarily one.  Accordingly, we take up our work, as presented to us by physical illness, injury and limitation, emotional and mental habits that diminish our joy and presence in the world, and deep ancestral ruts that condition our ability to imagine who and where we are and what is possible here.  We take up our work as a labor of love, knowing that as we do so, we reweave ourselves and our world. 

This task is deeper than we think.  Individually and especially collectively, we are at the end of the time when we could persuade ourselves that more or better thinking of the same old kind would suffice to address what ails us.  Of course our thinking, along with the rest of us, cries out for remaking.  But so much of what makes us suffer now is an excessive reliance upon mental explanations and strategies.  For many generations now our culture has been like the proverbial carpenter who only has a hammer and thus sees everything as a nail.  We’ve hammered ourselves into a right mess, in any area we choose to examine.

Ourselves and the world call out for a re-membering of other ways of knowing and being, perceiving and doing.  Observing the gaping wounds in the flesh of Mother Earth, observing the pollution staining the purity of Her atmosphere, the poisons defiling the waters, the source of all life, we perceive a need for an absolutely thoroughgoing shift.  Observing our own increasingly frantic, flat and fearful lives, we recognize that we need change at the densest, most earthy levels.  "Think different" is not nearly enough.  We need to be different, right down to the ways we eat, walk, and chew gum.

In fact, some of us have known for a long time and many others are now realizing, that Earth is already well into a profound transformation and that we humans will inevitably be transformed in the process.  What form the transformation of our species, our peculiar brand of consciousness, will take seems to be very much in question.  But we suspect, since so many traditions, so many fields of learning are telling us so, that our attention and intention—and our skill in translating these into action—matter. 

How do we assist at the birth of our new world?  How can we flower into our fullest selves so that we set seeds of beauty and wisdom, love and courage, compassion and skill that may sprout someday in that new world?  How can we best embody our longing, our need, for the new world to be one that our children, and all future beings, will be delighted to inherit?  My work is centered on these challenges.

This sounds like a grand project, and it is.  Who said life shouldn’t be inspiring? Who said healing had to be a drag?  This midwifing work is powerful, significant and ecstatic; it’s also as ordinary, arduous and messy as, well, giving birth. 

To put it another way, this reweaving of self and world we’re after is both wildly imaginative and incredibly repetitive.  It is as simple in its complexity as cooking dinner, raising a child, or tending a garden.  Like them, this healing work inevitably involves mistakes and frustrations, as well as varying quantities of tears, sweat, and laughter, and blood.  To be excellent, it requires all the attention, steadfastness, sensitivity, and playfulness as we can muster—and more, always more.

Everywhere on Planet Earth, cooking dinner or tending a garden requires some tools, but different people use different tools.  Reweaving Planet Earth with our embodied selves likewise calls for tools, and different healers—that means you as well as me—have affinities for different ones.  Some of the tools in my kit  have more-or-less recognizable names and come with credentials.  These include chiropractic, Feldenkrais Somatic Education, Awareness Through The Body, and herbal medicine.  Others I have given significant study and practice include meditation, yoga asana, astrology, and, most recently, sound healing. Then there are subtle skills that words like “intuition,” “somatic empathy,” “mediumship,” or “shamanism” can point to but cannot fully describe, not to mention that often-underrated compost called “well-digested life experience.”

Along with lots of others these days, I’m rediscovering the “elusive obvious” (thank you, Moshe Feldenkrais): the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.  The tools we use in our healing don’t heal us any more than the loom weaves the blanket or the stirrup hoe makes the garden.  So too with our names and credentials for healing work: they can be useful, sometimes even powerful, but they’re definitely not the whole enchildada. 

If compelled to describe my practice in one word, I would say “listening.”  I practice listening with and to as many facets of my soma as possible.  I practice listening widely and deeply to the people I work with, to the land where I live and work, to the Earth and the Heavens, to the ancestors and other subtle presences who constantly pervade us.  The listening, when it’s good, guides me to the right tools and the right way of employing them in the moment.  My work looks different with different people and with the same people on different days.

Nonetheless, there are dominant themes.  Movement as life, life as movement, to paraphrase Feldenkrais, is something I engage with every day.  Noticing how we move and allowing changes in how we move in the world is a powerful practice.  It’s good for everything from alleviating back pain to sensing how the back pain may be woven with our fear, our rage, our grief, our apathy.  It’s good for perceiving how we inherited those ways of feeling, walking, standing, and breathing (or not) from our ancestors, and for remembering that we are still free, right here, right now.

Movement is life, life is movement.  Moving deeper into our own experience of moving on, in, as this Earth, we can travel to the subtlest and the densest dimensions of being.  Moving still deeper, into the Source that is the beginning and the end of desire, the beginning and the end of breath, of body, and of Earth, we receive again and again the gift of letting go, of being free of all binding form.  Then somehow, from those silent, fathomlessly deep waters, movement arises, form joyously erupts.  We begin again, meeting and remembering ourselves as She Who Constantly Transforms and He Who Is Eternal Stillness.  Or is it She Who Is Eternal Stillness and He Who Constantly Transforms?  Or Ze Who Refuses To Be Trapped In Any Binaries Whatsoever? As the young ones say, “Whaaaat-eveeer!” Let’s not get hung up on these words when we’re moving toward remembering ourselves and all our relations as the fruits of Creation’s outrageous dance, Creation's ecstatic love-making.

So, to come back around on the spiral, if you’re still wondering if I can help you with your back pain, your bum shoulder, your tension headaches, your indigestion—the answer is “no” if you want me to treat you as if any of your complaints, especially the chronic ones, are "things" we can treat mechanically.  The answer is “no” if all you want is for me to “fix” or "reboot" you periodically so those pesky symptoms don’t bother you too much, and especially "no" if you want me to fix you as quickly (not to mention as conveniently and cheaply) as possible.  It’s not that a quickie isn’t both necessary and satisfying from time to time.   It’s that I’m not primarily about shutting symptoms up (not even “holistically”), I’m about listening to them.  But if a quick fix was what you really wanted, you wouldn’t have read this far, would you? 

So—the answer's a joyous “yes!” if what you’re up for is diving into the wreck, as poet Adrienne Rich writes.  The truth is, I not only want to listen to your symptoms, I want to dive into “the full catastrophe” (thanks, Jon Kabat-Zinn) of them with you.  I want to be beside you to watch, cheer, groan sympathetically, make suggestions, and help with the heavy lifting as you uncover right there, in the last place you imagined to find it, the buried treasure you are.  

What, after all that you still want more?  More concrete information, more details, or a quick synopsis?  Sheesh, you're a tough customer!  Click on the following links for more information about various aspects of my practice, or just scroll on down, (but remember, there's no link for the wild card, for the mystery, for magic, or for love):