About Me
Like all of us, I play many roles in life.
Professionally, it is a true honor to serve as a healer, coach, and teacher. I have been a massage therapist for 32 years. A psycho/spiritual healer for 16 years. A licensed acupuncturist for 10 years. And a certified transformational life coach for 4 years.
And for the last 19 years, I have been on faculty in the Massage Therapy Program at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, MN, helping to prepare other fortunate souls to enter this most honorable profession.
If you'd like to know more about my professional life, click here to read my full resume.
Personally, I am a husband, father, friend, and family member.
While all these roles are important on one level, they do not define me. At my core is Love & kindness; an ocean of compassion and a deep well of wisdom, cultivated over the course of many decades of inner exploration. Of struggle and searching, breakthroughs and healing.
“The One” & The Curious Paradox of Being Human
I am a highly sensitive being. From childhood until this moment, I’ve experienced the world on a deep level. I see things that others cannot see (clairvoyance). I hear voices in my head (clairaudience). I sense things in my gut that in truth I should not know (clairsentience). This has been both a blessing and a challenge, as today’s world is not kind to sensitive souls like me. Even less so in the 60’s when I was growing up. To survive, I denied my sensitive nature. Which is to deny my essence; my very existence. Add to the mix some difficult childhood trauma, and you have a recipe for suffering. A young man in turmoil and in resistance to life itself.
It didn't work. In my 20s, the voices in my head broke through my resistance, and I began to hear them. And this freaked me out. Concerned for my mental health, I sought help, which I gratefully found, in the form of enlightened therapists and healers. I came to learn that I was not losing my mind. The voices were not mine, they were coming from…somewhere else.
So I began to pay attention. I listened. I asked questions. I spent many an hour in dialogue with these friendly voices. They guided me, challenged me, answered my questions, conveyed deep wisdom and perspective on many aspects of my life, and life in general. They are with me now as I teach and when I act as healer and coach. They have been my constant companions for the last 35 years.
A few years ago, I asked the voices what to call them. They said, “We are ‘The One’. Not as in “the chosen one”. As in, “everything that exists is One.” They represent the unity of all things.
Blessed though I was to have a relationship with “The One”, I have kept this aspect of my life hidden, certainly from the world, and sometimes from myself, for I did not want to appear to the world like a oddball. I’m like everyone else~I want to be loved and accepted by the community.
It takes a lot of energy to deny this aspect of my life. To keep myself split in many parts and in resistance to what is. To life itself. I felt stuck with a capital ‘S’, afraid to simply be myself.
But the call of my soul, my essence, the part of me who hears “The One”, did not subside. “Grow,” it exclaimed! “Be yourself, express yourself. Be the Love that you are!”
Caught Between Worlds
So, there I was, caught between my soul’s longing to grow and express itself, and my ever-present human fear. This inner battle of wanting to grow AND demanding to stay the same was grinding my mind to a nub. Thus, I know firsthand the deep pain of feeling stuck. I understand the desperate feeling that I simply must change in order to feel okay in my own skin. And to also feel afraid to change.
This way of being was unsustainable; I had to find a different way to be in life.
So, slowly, over many years, I changed my approach. I am making peace with fear and turning toward my sacred soul as the only true source of the life that I seek. In truth, I am my soul. I am Love (and so is everyone else). When I remember that, it changes everything.
It is not, nor has it ever been, an easy path, this feeling caught between worlds. But I can say in this moment that I am truly and deeply grateful for every moment, for I have grown immeasurably and learned many hard-won truths along the way.
And, the most profound & potent truth that I have learned is this: That the way to the life that I am called to live lies in surrendering to kindness. Quantum Kindness, toward all of me – my brilliance and my limitations, my light and my shadow, my joy and my suffering.
This truth, the truth of “The One”, infuses my work as a healer, coach, and teacher.
Finally, there is a Buddhist philosophy that I cling to; it’s called “The Bombu”. Literally translated, bombu means “foolish being”. It holds that all humans are foolish beings, spiritually blind and stumbling around on Earth. And that we all deserve unconditional compassion. This notion touches and calms me on a level that words cannot express. And so, my fellow bombus, I invite you to join me on this ride called life. Let’s stumble through it together.