Coming up on the birthday of my dear friend and teacher, Bob King.
Rest in peace, Bob. ..
Heart-Head Fulcrum - The most dangerous disconnect is that of the heart and head. “The heart’s so far from the head it doesn’t even know there is a head.” - Dr. Elvin Semrad
Read MoreSpirit derives from (s)peis- "to blow" (source also of Old Church Slavonic pisto "to play on the flute").
Read MoreWe recently celebrated the holidays and millions of people opened their boxes. They looked inside with excitement. In a figurative sense I’ve begun to be as interested in “boxes” as in their contents. The box contains the “present.” It holds these treasures that we invest with feelings.
Read MoreIt is not the educational intention but it is the meeting which is educationally fruitful…..
Read MoreIt all comes down to touch - the need to receive and give it.
Read MoreJohn Berger, simply defined his primary question as “does this work help or encourage people to know and claim their social rights?”…how might that relate to massage?
Read MoreTouch and music connect to the deepest parts of us….
Read MoreJennifer Grant asks on the FB page Massage Therapists "Thoughts on Thixotropy? If Fascia reverts back to its original state are we fighting a losing battle ?" Useful question!….Some of my thoughts
Useful question!
Read MoreWhen we do bodywork, our hands assume various positions. The more highly we regard the miraculous abilities, structure, and even linguistic capacities of the hands, the more meaningful and sacred our hands, their expression, and our work may feel.
Read MoreIt 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.