Hi!

I'm excited about meeting you soon, and exploring your great unfolding. I wanted to send over this to you before we meet, to prime you for this life-altering process. This will support you in getting into a receptive state for the work, so that our precious time together is not eaten up by me fumbling to explain what we are doing. Though part of the work always involves re-education, I've found myself repeating the same things countless times, so I wanted to give you this now, to make sure you get the clearest version possible.

The Buddha once stood up to give a sermon, and instead of using words, he merely stood in silence, twirling a flower between his thumb and index finger. Most of the attendees were confused, but one disciple got the message. At this unfolding, a smile swept across his face. He was regarded as the first disciple of Zen Buddhism (Chan in the Chinese tradition).

This story illustrates the difference between conceptualizing and experiencing.

I bring this story up because it has some parallels to what we'll be doing. While most systems work at the surface, or at the level of what you do, we will be working at the level of being... of what you are. Being is something that cannot be articulated, it can only be experienced. What Buddha was doing was illustrating this with a flower.

My approaches are the most effective  that I know of for touching the core of your true self, and clearing any obstructions to that. Though I don't use flowers, I do call one of my models Bloom.

For this to make sense, you knowing a little bit more about my story may support.

Broken-hearted, penniless, exhausted, and sick, I nearly gave up the ghost... twice. Life had other plans. At what seemed like the most inopportune moment, I was 'enlightened' on a beach in Northern California.

In around 2005, I was walking down a beach with my father, lugging a vintage, wind up 16mm film camera in my arm... my newfangled dreams of being a filmmaker were very fresh. I'd decided, as usual, to take the more difficult path by using a wind up film camera, in a world where digital had already taken over almost entirely. It seemed right, somehow.

My father and I were talking generally, I don't remember what about, and a beautiful young woman ran by us in a hoodie and sneakers. She ran from behind us, off into the distance in front of us. Thoughts of legacy flashed in my mind so quickly that I couldn't grasp them. I was aware that both my father and I were seeing this woman through our own lens; from our own loneliness, with our own longing. I felt the distance between us. For me, this fantasy was perhaps a possibility, and for him, perhaps not.

As she ran into the distance, her sneakers left footprints in the sand. Suddenly, a wave washed in and swept them away, and I was completely overtaken by a feeling of completeness. There was no legacy, there was only being. I'd never die, I thought. I was experiencing life from some 'eternal' vantage. The writings of mystics across the ages suddenly made experiential sense. The film camera, which represented vain ambitions, and illusion, was really just a silly diversion, or a distraction, and now I felt nothing but dead weight. The film career existed solely for the ego; it was not real. All that was real was already there with us; the elements, human interaction, the rush of the life force. I nearly dropped the camera into the brine.

I didn't know how to contain the experience, it was so foreign... so intense. Pure joy trilling through a body that had been mired in semi-depression for decades. I was truly free in the moment, and I've never forgotten the visceral reality of that freedom. My essence, whatever that was, had surfaced. As Gurdjieff put it, when you enter the spiritual path, 'doors open that you never knew existed.' I also didn't know how to share it with my father, who may or may not have noticed the shift in my way of being.

Some years later, circa 2008, I'd slowly sunken into painful patterns again. I was drifting out in the Pacific ocean, to get some cherished respite from a painful relationship with a woman who had self diagnosed her own 'borderline personality disorder', when I was hurtled against the ocean floor, breaking my neck. When I crawled out of the water, I no longer believed in accidents. I nearly died, and something about the preciousness of life was crystalized in me. I decided at that moment to live, which naturally inspired me to reflect deeply on what the hell I'd been doing before.

Interestingly, in certain schools of shamanism, a blow to the head is often considered the highest or the most direct call to the shamanic path. Though I don't identify myself with any particular tradition, I sometimes feel a kinship with the lineage less shamans out there. It's also interesting that an impact to the skull of my father some years later may have catalyzed his mental disorder.

As I worked to heal the bone, I found that the thread ran deep; much deeper than I had ever dared to imagine. I enrolled in a holistic healing and bodywork school, thinking I might become a massage therapist or something, after years of struggling as a gifted, impoverished artist. The massage career was not to be. When I touched people, their deepest emotions surfaced for release. While this paved the way for invaluable healing, it wasn't what people were expecting when they laid down for a Swedish massage. So my training took another direction, and I began an apprenticeship with some eccentric masters around healing trauma somatically, from birth to death. They were mystical in nature, these women, completely untethered by the bounds of reality. Unlike them, I seemed to be able to enter those realms, while remaining grounded in the moment... to venture outside of linear time while living in the world. I also began, or continued, a very deliberate apprenticeship with life and, particularly, with suffering and heartbreak.

During these trainings, I experienced pieces of myself for the first time. I remember, In particular, when I felt my feet for the first time. I was around 30 years old. I looked down, after a practitioner was touching my feet, and I felt the blood coursing through them, and the warmth. They looked like different feet, and yet I knew they'd always been mine. This was another mystical experience; the experience of physical completeness. I began to reclaim my body from the fragmentations I'd picked up along the way.

When I experienced my body as the gateway to the deepest healing possible, everything else fell into place. I did further training in hypnotherapy, various forms of coaching and consulting, radical dietary cleansing, and I read widely, even obsessively... many books per week on every conceivable topic that revolved around the concept of 'life enhancement'. Often books that were rare or discontinued. I found that I was had somehow began gathering information at odds with the world around. A spark was kindled in me that broke into raging fire.

I began supporting people in healing their deepest traumas. I  moved to new towns and offered consultations to demonstrate the process, regardless of any ability to pay. So I tested and refined the process on all sorts of people... all sorts of traumas and diseases, with great success, always guaranteeing the work.  I believe that one of the things that set me apart was that I always went in with the conviction that anything could be healed. This is part of my constitution. It has a specific point of origin in my life, which I may share later. The only things that get in the way are stories and beliefs. Sometimes, my belief that a pattern can shift is so strong, that my faith becomes contagious, passes onto the client, and erodes any other beliefs.

In 2013, I took part in a Vipassana silent retreat in Northern California. This is purported to be the original teaching of the Buddha, wherein one simply scans the body, again and again, for days at a time, without speaking, making eye contact with another, reading, or any digital contraptions. During those 10 days, mystical experiences came at me in waves. I saw inexplicable memories, and various otherworldly phenomena. All of this came from doing nothing other than focusing on the body. It was as lush as any landscape I'd ever heard about from any other modality, including psychedelics. For me, this was profound; I realized that the body was the gateway to the rapture. That the kingdom of god truly was inside of you, as Jesus was reported to have said, along with other mystics. There was no need for esoteric ritual, or complicated doctrines. Just sitting with the body was enough.

I walked out of the experience feeling like I'd been hit by a train. Another layer of illusion had been jostled loose. I remember that after that experience, screens were overstimulating  and social media nauseated me. This went on for months. As I rode my motorcycle, it felt like I was experiencing the world in slow motion.  It took a little time to integrate the experience. Once I did, I brought a deeper level of understanding to the work.

As I worked on clients around this time, a few happened to have been avid meditation practitioners for many years, and they said the the work was like a crash course in spiritual attainment, because they attained more than they did through many meditation retreats, though meditation is certain useful and informs this work.

Some have referred to this process as 'hacking' enlightenment, though it isn't that exactly, if hacking implies some sort of shortcut. It is simply an extreme focus on the things that really matter, in a world where few focus on that. How we are using our body and mind in any given moment create our reality. We need to relearn how to stand, how to walk, how to speak, in such a way that we are freed from the burden of our earliest patterns. Only then are we truly free to meet the moment with our whole body, and to create what we came here to create.

While a relationship pattern, or a trauma, or sometime a disease often become the gateways to the work, clients often experience layers of awakening, just as I have. I find this beautiful, and fascinating. Is it some of my experience that is transmitted through the experience, or some of my understanding? I can't exactly answer that, though we can speculate.

We'll begin with a conversation, by speaking around your core issues, and seeing what arises. While this sounds like a meandering path, it isn't. You may carry intentions, and those may get set aside as we delve into what is truly important. Sometimes, a client comes to me ready to discuss a parent, for instance, we we start talking about anger at a landscaper, or some other seemingly random event, and this links back to the parent in a startling away. Oh, I thought I was angry at the mailman, but I am actually still angry at my father.

All patterns are manifestations of this kind of unresolved emotional energy congested in the system somewhere. We're going to discover where you're carrying yours, and release it. You cannot meander, because I can see where your essence is shining through, and, regardless of the topic, once I see it, I'm going to hone in on it and demonstrate it to you. In this way, a client once said I 'mirrored her distortions back to her in a compassionate way.'

The way I can serve you best is by  using our time together to support you in getting from where you are to where you need to be, within the shortest time frames possible. Sometimes, this means processing something you hadn't considered relevant, or surfacing unconscious memories. I can say that, if I keep coming back to a topic, it is probably relevant. I become utterly committed to finding your essence and demonstrating it to you, so that you can experience it directly.

As you tell the story, your body gives you away. The mouth lies constantly; the body never lies. I've trained myself across various apprenticeships to read the subtleties, from the toes up to the crown of the head.

The conversation sets the context, and surfaces what we are truly working on. Once we lay the groundwork, prepare the soil, as it were, we can begin the process of aligning the body. Congestion, physical or emotional, throws the body out of alignment. I've developed a system of holistic postural analysis, which is a series of adjustments coupled with certain phrases, that often bring up unconscious memories for processing. If you're kinked somewhere, the consciousness is flowing around that kink, and we need it to flow through, so we can reconnect to the original stimulus, sometimes a trauma, and process that.

In my mind, life is about losing our self and then finding it again. This is not an aberration, at least in this world. No one bypasses it. So, instead of pushing against that process, I encourage you to embrace it, and retell your story, so that your life is a progression of events building to the place where you are.

This is entirely conceptual, I realize, and the only way to convert what is conceptual into something real is at the level of experience; that is, by passing git through your instrument for experiencing life... through the body.

We will soon proceed to an exploration of the body that is unlike anything you've ever experienced. I'll say that this is a great passion of mine, and it is often very challenging. I'll be bringing your attention to ways of being that you've never considered before, because if it manifests in your body unconsciously, it's manifesting in your life. For instance, your body tenses up and you 'go somewhere' in your mind', you do this in other areas of life as well. It showing up in certain positions in the physical body correlates to different meanings, and I'll let you know what those are.

I realized something startling as I engaged in this process. Everything I'd learned about the body and consciousness was wrong or incomplete. Shifting some of what I thought I knew created space for healing. I was able to heal not only my body, but my relationships, my depression, my limiting stories, etc.

I'll be the first to tell you that healing is a process. There are layers. For me, there are still things to heal, and perhaps there always will be, though I can say without hesitation, that my life looks completely different than when I started, and old patterns seem so far away now that I laugh lightly when I look back.

Because shifting the stories, or what we believe about the body, or the mind, or consciousness itself created so many benefits for me, I also use our time together as a process of de education and, eventually, re education. So I'll introduce you to what I call transformational anatomy, and other paradigms that have proven useful to many clients. You can decide if they are useful to you as well.

You'll walk out of the space altered in some way, though in what way won't always be exactly clear right away. Some people see colors more brightly, or they feel more love flowing through their bodies, or they're more aware of their sensations, or people come up to them and treat them differently. Recently, I performed one of these conversations in a park, and our whole discussion was about the loss of innocence during a childhood in a war torn country in the Middle East. As the client walked away from the meeting, some children ran up and asked if he wanted to play soccer. A startling energetic shift.

You'll likely notice your variant of the story, after we shift tremendous amounts of energy, and redirect dis-empowering stories physically. You may need to go through a period of integration that is sometimes uncomfortable.

I'll send you details on that. After that, the next level of awareness shows up; your level of being is generally heightened. You get to experience living beyond one or more of the stories that used to hold you back, or at least you'll get to experience a hyper-sensitivity to your own stories, where they used to run under the surface before. This is fundamental.

The patterns, while painful, over time become our comfort zone. We need to re-frame that, through a process, and introduce alternatives that nurture you and honor your essence.

At first, the new patterns may seem extremely uncomfortable. Fortunately, we use an embodied process that no one else uses, which will give you a direct experience of the new pattern, rather than simply imagining it. Eventually, you'll notice that the old, familiar pattern is no longer comfortable; suddenly it is unbearable. Life shifts in the clearing.

The more open you can remain during the process, the more you can get out of it. Try to quiet the mind, so that what you were not able to a access earlier is able to surface. Even if you've tried something a thousand times, we can shift it in just minutes or hours, using an original technique that shatters patterns, by approaching the from various angles at the same time.

I introduce these strategies in layers. We need to progress according to your own level of readiness, so that the results are lasting.

One client was experiencing difficulty in relationships. Men were unavailable. Through touch and conversation, we traced this back to her inner critic wreaking havoc. As we shifted that, the voice softened, and she noticed suddenly she was able to hear the quiet, compassionate voice of her core self, which had been drowned out before. It is not always so straightforward. She also experienced an archetypal memory during the course of our work together, a past life memory, perhaps, which we needed to process. She was shot in the old west, and as she lied in the dust, her lungs filled up with blood, and she died to her old self... her old ways of being.

After that, the critical voice was less alluring. It made less sense. Within weeks of our work together, she experienced dramatic results that we hadn't even considered; her hair and fingernails began growing like crazy. As she began to allow self love, her body was suddenly able to take in nourishment. A lifelong eating disorder fell away. A few months later, she met a man she loved deeply, and they moved away, and she started a new career. All after some deep healing work on her feet and belly.

It doesn't always proceed this dramatically, though it often does.

Another woman was able to heal a lifelong relationship pattern of not loving fully, when I tugged at her arm gently, and it released a torrent of tears and memories of not grieving her father when he died. Her father used to tug her by that arm as they crossed the street, and that shoulder was adversely impacting her love life. Soon after the release, she married in joy, the man she'd been hesitating about for years.

I tell these stories, and there are many others, just so you can get a sense of how interconnected it all is, and to begin to open to the possibilities that are available to you. Don't compare this to anything else; it is unlike anything else. There are modalities that operate at the fringes of what we do, and there are teachers that talk about what we'll do as a concept, which is valuable... and limiting.

Most of the clients I've worked with have been women, because when I put out the call, women are often more drawn to the work. They seem to intuit the necessity of working through the body to access lasting transformation. As men, we are educated away from the body. Once I saw that women were more drawn, I sent the message to women. There is a benefit in the sense that broken trust in the masculine is healed, at least in part, by my playing the role of the male, touching the body without an agenda, and supporting in healing. Almost always, this manifests as huge relationship shifts outside of the process.

Lately, more and more men have been drawn to the work, though their level of readiness depends upon a few factors. Usually, in the throes of a tremendous heartbreak or a trauma, readiness is heightened. We reach that state where 'I'll try anything!' In that way, trauma becomes the portal to awakening, according to ancient Tibetan traditions.

It's critical that I maintain my integrity during this process. Women and men are often placed in vulnerable positions for the healing, because these are the positions that the body needs to pass through to access unresolved emotions. If I were to somehow break trust, the issues would be multiplied instead of healed. So I take this as my sacred charge.

The work is in part the modality, and in part my own energetic, which has been informed by my own experiences. I become a fierce guardian of innocence, that innocence that is never tarnished, regardless of what we've gone through, and my life path is spent in service to this. I become a fearless companion, utterly committed to guiding you into the shadows, or wherever you need to go to to reach the next level of living.

I've considered training others in this path, and taking on an apprentice, and I haven't yet for a few reasons; I have yet to cross paths with the right candidates... those who can continually hold this kind of space.

So in other words, wherever we elect to meet, you're entering the deepest healing space of your life. What will you create?

Welcome to Philomela. Welcome to the unfolding.