I was the last of six kids, and the only boy. My father is a psychologist and was a Chaplain in the Air Force, and my mother was a nurse. My parents were involved in marriage and family therapy, and with five girls, our home environment was full of emotion and lots of dialogue about it. This therapeutic environment shaped us, and the desire to be of service to people is strong in our family. All of us are in healthcare, counseling, hospice or service industries.
I started studying nutrition 30 years ago, trying to get rid of significant acne. I began detox cleanse after a hair analysis showed heavy metals above desirable levels. I started supplementation at that point, and made it a regular part of my life. I began reducing animal protein and fat and moving toward fresh and raw foods. Over a period of years I became more restrictive, ultimately becoming vegetarian, then vegan. More on that later.
At about 20, I moved to northern California to jump into the “Wholistic Health” movement (this was long before anyone dared call it Alternative Medicine). I studied various approaches (nutrition, Chinese medicine, herbology) and ultimately moved to Maui to study with a Naturopathic Doctor by the name of John Ray. I lived in a community of his students following a strict nutritional regimen, continuous psychological self examination, and spiritual study for a couple of years. I have to credit Dr. Ray for much of my understanding of the body, and how we hold our history in our tissues. It is really the basis of my work, and I owe him and my other “Body Electronics” compatriots my gratitude. Those were enlightening times.
I moved back to the real world (Texas), to get my feet back on the ground. I hoped to find a wife and start a family. Following the advice of my mother, who had become a massage therapist after her nursing career, I entered massage school. She thought it would fit into my interests, and that I “might meet a nice girl there”. She was right on both counts, and that was the beginning of my career and my marriage.
I have always been a thinker, a philosophical type. My interests, from an early age included the study of religions, spirituality, and psychology. All of these pursuits were natural to a dreamer type, who could find hope for finding meaning in life, or relief from the pain of life, through these pursuits of mystical or other-worldy planes.
By contrast, this new phase was grounding, and physical. I had a structure which was gaunt from my “clean” diet. At the urging of my wife’s midwife, who thought it would be beneficial to our child in utero, we began to eat some chicken and fish. We had both been vegetarian for many years, and had some reservations, but we introduced other animal products over time, with good results. I have come to believe that my years as a vegetarian gave me relief from my meloncholy by suppressing my brain function, but at a price. I believe that inadequate levels of amino acids (proteins) robbed my body of the precursors to important neurotransmitters, and reduced my muscle mass. I believe I was suppressing my anxieties, but also, unfortunately my brain and muscular function overall.
Receiving massage work regularly in school woke me up to my body, and started me on the path of unwinding the physical and energetic blockages I hold. This process started with my massage training, and proceeded slowly, but took a big jump when I started yoga six years ago. I had played tennis on and off all my life, and had been a distance runner, but had never really learned to use my body until I started Yoga. It was so uncomfortable at first to do yoga. It wasn’t that I was that out of shape, I had always been active and fairly flexible. It is hard to describe the angst that yoga stirred up in me. I now know that it was firing areas of my brain (amygdala, basal ganglia) which are involved in fight or flight responses (stress). Over time, with much gnashing of teeth, I have re-wired my brain to function with less anxiety and my historically habitual depression is gone (as long as I do yoga).
There have been times that I wondered if all my years of searching were waisted. but I know that it all has led me here. I no longer look for comfort exclusively in the external world of things, or in the intellectual world of ideas, but mostly in flesh and bone. It boils down for me to a practice of being in the present moment, which requires physical self-awareness, and a continual process of unwinding what is accumulating in the body. This for me is the path to peace and spiritual enlightenment, and the basis of my work with others, such as it is.