The Genesis of Emergent Bodywork
(the following is an excerpt from The Practical Introduction to Emergent Bodywork Manual which is available for $15 in PDF format and $25 as a hardcopy - email or call for more information)
Before I began training in massage and bodywork I was in school. I attended the Chicago School of Musical Arts at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago where I majored in music composition and orchestral double bass performance. In my last year at Roosevelt I was lucky to receive the Davies-Jackson Studentship which allowed me to study music overseas at St. John's College in the University of Cambridge. It was during my second year there that I began to rediscover myself. I was practicing yoga religiously each day and receiving bodywork regularly. When I returned home from Cambridge I was meant to attend the University of Chicago for graduate studies in composition but found that I could no longer ignore my true calling. I began my massage training that fall.
After becoming certified in massage in the spring of 2001, I knew that I wanted more. The next fall I went off to Boston to begin training in Structural Integration with 30 year Rolfer and visionary anatomist Tom Myers. I was certified in SI the following summer and began practicing in a clinic I co-founded in downtown Oak Park shortly thereafter.
The challenges of running a clinic and managing a staff took their toll on me and though I was having great success in my own practice, I could not continue to devote so much time and energy to the other aspects of the business. I pulled out of the clinic and decided to work out of my home.
It was around this time that I decided to teach a few colleagues of mine what I had learned from Tom. During the course of our training I became increasingly interested in the work of Hugh Milne and Franklyn Sills. Both men were significant players in the craniosacral community and their work opened my eyes to different possibilities. I was particularly interested in the Breath of Life that Franklyn Sills was talking about. Some invasive experiences with a craniosacral practitioner from a different school led me to resonate with his notion of the need for greater psychic and energetic space to allow processes to unfold at their own pace rather than forcing them. This may seem strange considering the fact that Structural Integration is often considered notoriously deep work, but I have found that it is the work in the middle, the stuff that doesn't quite know what it wants to be, that stands to be the most unsettling. It's like having an itch that you can't scratch when people introduce energy into a body that doesn't know how to organize what is being added.
Needless to say, I took refuge in Sills' concepts and after I started to be able to hear the tide for myself, my eyes were opened further. I began referring to my practice casually as the Garden and the Forest. In the garden we plan our impact on the environment and get digging, in the forest we allow the environment to have the impact. In my structural work I was deciding what and how, in the meditative listening at the end of sessions I was tuning into the Breath of Life and allowing it to work its magic. I was so enamored with the tide that I required my students to listen at the end of every session and just hold space.
The polarity had been established: deep tissue work on one end and exceedingly light-handed listening on the other. As with any fulcrum, I was headed towards the middle. The more I meditated, the more I saw the power of the tide and yet I could not get past the fact that there remained something the deeper work was doing that the lighter contact simply could not achieve. It was in August 2005 shortly after the birth of my son that I broke into the first Tidal Expression phase. A couple months later I went into a session with a poor young female client that had no idea what she was in for. I decided to see if the tide could guide me not only in my own self but in my work with others. It was a roller coaster ride. Still learning the language I was all over the place, the work was rapid and unfocused and yet there was some greater truth in it. I was actually making deeper contacts that were in harmony with the tide, rough harmony but harmony nonetheless. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. It took another 6 months to finally feel like I had a fairly calm grip on things. Ever since then the language of the tide has simply become more refined. My work remains myofascial in nature but it has become more osteopathic (closer to the bone) over time. I now incorporate far more client movement into the work and am resolving issues more at the core of where they are expressing.