"If you know what you are doing, you can do what you want." ~ Moshe Feldenkrais

About Listening Touch

At my office, I offer traditional-style Bowen treatments except that I work with people one on one, rather than the more common format of seeing several people in the same room. All sessions are not alike, and I closely tailor your appointment to your needs. I do my best to find you exactly where you are, to meet you with compassion, and to offer powerful solutions for the symptoms you bring to the table.

In addition to your Bowen session, we might discuss structural or postural tips, or go over exercises that will help you to sit or stand in more efficient, less pain producing ways. Given my background in movement dynamics, it is my hope that this extra information will make the difference between future re-injury due to sheer force of habit, and pain that no longer has reason to exist.

Ideally, after a course of Bowen sessions, clients go on to participate in my Feldenkrais movement awarenss classes. It is my fervent hope that once you are more comfortable, you will consider these classes to keep moving, and moving smart. Examples abound of ways that these gentle explorations apply to everyday life. Once lessons become wired into the nervous system, movement is freer, people are more coordinated, and they feel a vitality that comes from deep within.

How I Got To Where I Am Now

When I moved to the Southwest in 1982, I fell in love not only with Prescott but with making pottery as a way to create a handmade life. As I threw myself wholeheartedly into the studio, I developed an appreciation for the details of form. But more importantly, I learned how to listen through my hands. After having been taught to live in my head as a child, a whole new sensory vocabulary began to take shape.

Many people who wind up in the healing arts come to their work from having walked and sometimes clawed their ways from injury back to health. I am no different. After years of lifting heavy boxes of pottery from studio to craft show to shop, I began to suffer from severe low back pain and sciatica. My once productive life ground to a halt. As many do, I spent those first three years feeling helpless to improve my situation. As many have also learned, however, pain can provide an elegant motivation for seeking new alternatives. Eventually, I began a course of inquiry that continues to hone what I value most about life: health, awareness, connection, joy.

In 1996, I began an extensive training in the Feldenkrais Method (www.feldenkrais.com) at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. At first, I attended for sheer pain relief. As my studies progressed, I became profoundly affected by the power that can be conveyed through sensitive talk and touch. Eventually this led me to give up handling clay for the challenge of touching whole lives.

During those years of exploring movement patterns and developing hands-on skill with clients, my pain diminished. To speak of pain going away, though, downplays the tremendous expansiveness that came of opening my world to a new way of being. With myself.

I understand that, for some of us, pain is fundamentally a cry for change. The body is wise. Usually, discomfort expresses an underlying need for real rest, for increased self care, and for greater self awareness. Giving these needs their due, the body has a chance to heal. I am not alone in having discovered that this dreaded journey out of pain actually leads to a renewal of the 360 degree self.

Culturally, we are taught to think of ourselves mechanically as things to "fix" so that we can get back to "normal". This neglects the true gift of healing. I want to live in a world brimming with skilled practitioners--professionals who will encourage us all to listen through pain and limitation, to connect with the vitality that is asking to be expressed.

Enter Bowen Therapy.

Awareness is wonderful, but nearly anyone in pain will tell you that getting out of pain is their top priority. One afternoon in 2002, I watched a practitioner demonstrate Bowen moves on a bruised tailbone. These ten short minutes changed the course of my life--an observer would probably have seen the lightening bolt strike! It was immediately obvious that this gentle technique communicates very quickly—through the nervous system--with the musculo-skeletal system. That fit my previous training and passion--plus it affects every single other system of the body!

Within two weeks of that initial demonstration, I began a training program which was affiliated with the respected Bowenwork Academy of Australia (www.bowenwork.com). I rapidly discovered an astounding range of complaints that can be helped through Bowen Therapy. Not only did clients find quick relief of low back pain, or neck and shoulder restrictions, but with a few tools in my hands I was rapidly able to help clients with long-standing digestive, menstrual, and respiratory problems. Just to name a few.

Knowing firsthand of the importance of getting straight to the point when a client is in distress, I continue to revel in the speed and precision with which Bowen Therapy can affect a vast multitude of health complaints.

Today, at my clinic in Prescott, Arizona, I use a Bowen system of healing grounded in Feldenkrais principles of touch and movement awareness. I continue to hone my skills, having completed Advanced Level Bowenwork trainings with Ossie and Elaine Rentsch, as well as every other course I can get my hands on. I am also a graduate of Northern Arizona Massage Therapy Institute, and of a four year guild certified Feldenkrais Training with Delman/Questel Associates.

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." ~John Gardner