It was 1967, the "Summer of Love," I was studying Indian music in Berkeley, California at the American Society for the Eastern Arts. One of my classmates was the obscure, brilliant guitarist, Robbie Basho. One morning I arrived early and Basho was standing on the front porch.
Read MoreThese days I read the massage magazines and I see one ad after another, article after article touting answers - how you resolve neck pain, how such-and-such modality is so powerful, how you can easily be a business success. You know what? I'm sick of answers.
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I’ve heard it said that 60% of healing is the environment. What can we do, as teachers and therapists, to make a learning environment healing?
Read MoreI was doing a session on a radiologist and couldn’t resist asking him about the many wondrous things he’d seen through MRI’s, etc. I asked him, of everything he’d seen, what had he found most fascinating?
Read MoreMay this wrestle and dance we do with dis-ease, with dis-position, and with destiny help people smile with joy at the music they can make of their lives. Having been an artist, working first in music, then in bodywork, for now for over 50 years, I have met many wrestlers – clients wrestling with their lives, students, teachers, and therapists.
Read MoreThe practice of creating “memory palaces” was first recorded around the time of Cicero. Remember, before printing, the primary way to remember events and to achieve learning was to use one’s memory. So, naturally, methods to enhance memory were invented.
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Today we began a new class at my school. Something our Co-Director, John Conway, said at the orientation introduced an idea that I had never quite as precisely verbalized.
He was beginning to guide the new students in an exchange of brief shoulder massages with one student standing behind another seated in a chair. He was talking about what to do as we stood there, even before we put our hands on.
Read MoreBecause we are raised within an educational system excessively focused on mental skills - reading, math, and memorizing facts – we come to identify overly much with the mind. This leads to a profound imbalance; our energy gets upwardly displaced, particularly toward the brain. Thus, the greatest energy imbalance in many people is too much attention, too much energy in the upper half of the person and too little in the lower half.
Read MoreTrue story. Over 30 years ago, when I was just getting to know the person who I later married, Julie Harper, we spent an afternoon walking through an art museum here in Austin, Texas. I already had a very positive sense of her – she was funny, smart, pretty, interesting and kind.
Read MoreTime is what we are made of – in addition, of course to space. Ida Rolf noted “gravity is the therapist” – meaning we derive the sense of balance from our relationship to gravity in space. To say that “time is the therapist” is equally true. Of course we already say “Time is the great healer” – meaning superficially that, given the right amount of time, things will tend to heal themselves.