I have always been passionate about astronomy. When I was nine years old I saw an ad in a magazine for a 3-inch reflecting telescope for $29.95. I had to have it. I bugged my parents, took all of my money, and searched the house for every nickel and dime I could find until I scraped up enough money to buy it. After my telescope arrived, I went out every night looking at the stars, planets, nebulae, and galaxies. By the time I was in seventh grade I had bought three telescopes, each better than the last. The last one was beautiful: its white tube was 4 1/2 feet long, it had a 6-inch mirror, stood on a solid pedestal, and had an electric drive to help track the stars. Although it weighed 40 pounds, I carried it in and out on every clear night for years. My dream was to work with the 200-inch telescope at Mt. Palomar Observatory

I planned to spend the rest of my life doing astronomy until I got to college and discovered that professional astronomy did not focus on the wonder and awe of the heavens. My college courses focused on theoretical physics and mathematics, which seemed divorced from the real world that I wanted to understand.

A very fast runner, I joined the track team beginning in the fourth grade. In high school I was a sprinter and lettered in track, a prestigious athletic award that allowed me to wear a special jacket. I qualified to compete at the state track meet in my senior year, where our relay team placed third. This started a lifetime habit of running for 20-25 minutes every day. When I do not run, I can feel the difference. Running is a great form of meditation for me. It clears my mind and helps keep me in touch with my body.

I grew up in Boise, Idaho, a town of 50,000 people. Boise had only one bookstore and I felt very constrained. The library had almost no books on astronomy. I had limited resources to help me make sense out of the world. The closest large city was Portland, Oregon, which was over 400 miles away. Although I was just a kid, I knew that I was missing out on a lot of experiences. Nothing challenged me. Frequently I could think faster than my teachers. I wanted more than this. I believed that adults should help show me the way. The adults in my life were not interested in education, or in mentoring me. They spent most of their time drinking and talking about things that didn’t interest me, like hunting, and their World War II experiences.

I started reading science fiction books to help me understand the world. I read over two hundred books. They were full of new ideas and new ways of looking at the world. My favorite book, which I read many times, was Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. It was about a person who had been raised by Martians who were more advanced than humans. He brought a new perspective to the out-of-control human culture that eventually allowed people to live in peace.

When I was offered a scholarship to Columbia College in New York City, I jumped for it, but I had to talk my parents into it. My mother was supportive, but my father did not want me to go until he found out that it was prestigious to go there.

After a 2 1/2 day train ride, I arrived in New York City. It was marvelous to be in such a mecca of human energy; everything felt so alive. And, for the first time I was intellectually challenged. I spent four years experiencing everything I could: Broadway plays, concerts at Lincoln Center, Shakespeare in the Park, the subways at rush hour, 5th Avenue at 5 pm, the Metropolitan Museum, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and best of all, the great diversity of people. It was such a rich experience.

The most important event of my college years occurred in 1968. Columbia students protested the war in Vietnam, and they shut down the campus and occupied five campus buildings. I was fascinated by the response of the college, the police, and even the New York Times writers. They were at a complete loss. Because of their inability to handle anything out of the ordinary, I realized for the first time at the core of my being that just because a person was in charge, they did not necessarily have the answers, and they might not know any more than I did. My own experiences and what the New York Times wrote appeared to relate to completely different events, and the New York Times was the paper of record! What a shock this was to my system. I learned I could no longer trust what I read without having some experiential way to check the story.

I had assumed that my professors would know more than I did and would be my mentors. However, they did not always have the answers, and this taught me to trust only my own perception of the world and the answers that came from that perception. It started me on a quest that led to the development of the New Equations work -- a quest to make sense of what it meant to be a human being living in the 20th (and now the 21st) century.

Even though I had given up my desire to be an astronomer, I still believed that science would give me my answers. I wanted to be a scientist and use science as a tool to help answer my questions. I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in Biology at the University of California in San Diego. It was a great school. The professors treated the graduate students as equals, as apprentice scientists, which was highly unusual in a Ph.D. program. I got a chance to work closely with the professors and see what they knew. For me, becoming a scientist meant that I would develop such a good understanding of the world that I would be able to intelligently question and consider any problem or piece of research. I expected that science would give me a way to perceive the world more clearly. I was very disappointed because only one professor was able to provide this. Since most of the professors could not provide this kind of clarity, it did not feel productive for me to stay. I left to work at Linus Pauling’s laboratory after getting my Master’s Degree.

Linus Pauling has the distinction of being the only recipient of two unshared Nobel Prizes and probably deserved a third for his work on the structure of DNA. He was also a SoulType 5, though I didn’t know that at the time. It was such a pleasure to work for someone with his presence, who treated being alive with such equanimity. He became a powerful role model for me because of both his ability to intelligently question the world and the way he could so effectively share what he knew with others.

I also began to study the martial art Aikido and the body-healing discipline called the Feldenkrais Method®. Both of these were key elements that helped me along my path. They each gave me experiences that helped me develop my body so that I could perceive the world more clearly. Looking back, I see that because my teachers in both of these disciplines were SoulType 8s, they were the perfect people to help me find an effortless way to use my body (Feldenkrais) and become aligned with my soul (Aikido).

Aikido teaches students to blend with an attacker so that their energy can be redirected without using force. After my first class, I knew that Aikido was going to be an important and alive path for me. A few months later my teacher, Robert Nadeau, gave me my first soul-to-soul experience while he was throwing me. From the outside it looked like he picked me up and slammed me into the mat, but from the inside it felt like he gently picked me up, time stood still, and then he placed me on the mat as carefully as he would his newborn baby. It was such a powerful, ecstatic, and timeless experience that I became determined to learn how to do this myself. I feel that soul-to-soul engagement is the true purpose of Aikido. 

The Feldenkrais Method® works with the intelligence of the nervous system to teach the body new movement patterns, so that the body can both heal itself and improve its performance. My first encounter with Moshe Feldenkrais was when I took my four-year-old daughter (from my first marriage) for a private session with him. She had mild Cerebral Palsy. I watched him gently move her body. That night, for the first time in her life, she slept with her arms down by her side instead of with her hands clenched up near her neck. I was hooked. I trained with him and became a practitioner of his work.

In the Feldenkrais training program we spent an extensive amount of time doing what the students called “rolling around on the floor.” We were exploring every aspect of how we moved. In the process of doing this I gained a deep experiential knowledge of my body. We were taught to move without force. Every class made me feel good. My body felt freer and movement became easier. The changes were so profound with each summer’s training that it took months for my body to integrate the new way of being.

During the Feldenkrais training I discovered that my neck was very limited in its ability to turn left and right. I looked at my mother’s hospital records and saw that I had been a breech delivery and forceps were used. This must be when the injury occurred. The problem was not easily visible to the untrained eye, and neither I nor my parents were aware of it, although my mother remembers that as a baby I would not sleep on my stomach with my head turned to the left. It explained to me why I had not been able to be a rough-and-tumble kid, and avoided activities like football. I was like an older person who had to be cautious about what he did.

As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I supported and gently moved each client’s body in order to create new movement patterns. There is no formula; I learned how to feel my way through each movement and be sensitive to how the person responded. I learned to be with their point of view, which I found easier to do when I synchronized my breathing with theirs. I practiced this for years until I learned how to be with another person without projecting myself onto them.

In 1986, a woman that I was dating took me to a workshop on "Soulmates." It was given by a channeled being who said his name was Ramtha. He communicated through the body of a woman named J.Z. Knight. Ramtha loved the feeling of being in a body and walking on the Earth. He seemed happiest when he took us on a hike in the desert. At one of the workshops I attended he stood and watched someone blow bubbles for ten minutes. I saw delight in his face as he watched each bubble float through the air and pop. He gave me a new perspective on how precious it is to be alive in a body.

Ramtha is one of three beings of the Light who have come to assist me over the years. Whenever I think of them, I can draw their presence to me. They nurture my body. They never come with demands and their presence always feels positive.

The day after I got back from the Soulmates workshop, I met Barbara twice, first at the physical therapy clinic where I worked, and second later in the evening at the home of an ex-girlfriend. I did not think anything of our meeting at the time, but a year later when we were dating, I remembered the circumstances of our meeting. Wow! Maybe there is something to this idea of Soulmates :-)

I had been looking for someone to be with who was willing to take the risks I was willing to take. There was an instant in time when I knew that Barbara was that person. We were driving back from an outing at the beach, talking about a back problem that she had been having. The way she said “I am going to fix my back” made me realize that she was serious about finding a better way of being in the world. Two years later we were married.

Although I had wonderful soul-to-soul experiences in Aikido, I was frustrated that I could not take those experiences into the world. At the moment of an Aikido throw, pure magic happened, but I could not recreate that magic in my daily life. I did not know how to be as present, aware, and alive in life as I had learned to be in the moment of a throw. I was always looking for a context to explain my experiences so I could recreate them.

I was no longer on a solitary journey; Barbara had joined me. We were able to talk at length about what was important to us and where we were going. We started a physical therapy clinic to practice the Feldenkrais® and Aston Patterning® modalities. We were frustrated that we could not be successful with everyone who came to see us. We knew that we had very powerful tools and in order to more effectively use them, we looked for deeper and better ways of relating to our clients. One of the things that we were exploring was the Enneagram, which puts a person into one of nine categories based on a fixation that limits them. We created a new interpretation of the Enneagram diagram that focused on what made people strong and happy, which we found useful.  Our system helped us relate to our clients and helped them become stronger. We realized that to fill out our nine-part system, we needed to interview and work with the people in each category. We formed a study group to do this.

At a conference Barbara and I saw the movie, "Meetings with Remarkable Men," a story about G.I. Gurdjieff, a teacher who used the Enneagram, that showed beautiful dances he is purported to have choreographed. We were fascinated by the dances and watched them over and over again. Their spiritual quality led us to wonder if movement might play a part in the work we were doing with people in our study group.

We were very excited about showing the dances to our study group. After showing the dances twice, on the spot I tried an exercise I learned in Aikido. One at a time, I put my hand on the upper chest of each student to create some resistance and then asked them to walk forward. Knowing nothing about the exercise, they each struggled. The students, who had no martial arts training, did not do the exercise “correctly.” At a certain point, when one of the students was having a particularly hard time with the exercise, my understanding of the world disintegrated and reformed! The students seemed to be using their bodies differently based on the way that we had categorized them. This realization jolted my body and I had a moment of pure joy. I searched my memory and concluded that if my assessment was accurate, then this information was unknown in the world, and I had discovered something new.

I waited for our next study group with great anticipation. Again, I started without a plan. First, I worked with Barbara. We met hand to hand and I instructed her to resist my push. I began by slowly and gradually pushing harder and harder. Suddenly a force came out of Barbara that flung me across the room. Everyone was shocked. I recognized the feeling that was surging through my body as the same ecstatic feeling I had when doing a soul-to-soul Aikido throw. I had finally recreated the magic outside of the Aikido dojo!

Every time I stand in front of a person and draw out their soul, I get that same ecstatic feeling. First I must center and prepare myself. Then I must go into the unknown, which always makes me feel like I am jumping off of a cliff because I never know how to work with the new soul in front of me. I have to trust that my soul will show me the way. Unless my mind interferes, it happens. When their body aligns with their soul, the person in front of me turns from ordinary to extraordinary, which anyone who is watching can witness. I feel privileged to have had so many of these intensely wonderful and fulfilling experiences. I know that most people long for this kind of relationship. It is my goal to change this, so that anyone, any time, can re-create this experience for themselves, and for humanity.