I have been doing bodywork since 1993. I had previously bought the few bodywork books that I could find in the bookstore, and I was always practicing on friends, so eventually I signed up with the Santa Barbara School of Massage. I was a bit worried that my friends had been telling me I was good at bodywork just to be nice, but once I got in school and could feel that very few of my fellow students seemed to be able to interact with a knowing touch, I realized that although techniques can be taught, the ability to read tissue and sense what it is asking for is not as easy to teach. There were a couple other students who I used to team up with despite the fact that we were constantly being told to change partners, because after all of us had teamed up with the other students, we felt that we needed to work together to get the most out of our classes. 

Once school was over, we still met up once a week for several months to refine our skills. After that, I worked with two different mentors for a couple of years in addition to continuing to take courses and read about more techniques. I have never stopped learning because I have never stopped being fascinated by how working with the body can support health and alleviate suffering.

Since I have a body too, I understand what it is like to deal with pain or limitations and I also know what it is like to spend years solving a mysterious pain issue that started in my shoulder when I was 16 years old and was not resolved until I was 37. The last five years or so, I used to be awake every other night due to the pain which was not so bad during the day, and then every other night I would sleep pretty well because I was so tired from being up most of the previous night.

I did a ton of yoga, including a period of a couple years where I did three hours of yoga five days a week. I went to over a dozen acupuncturists, and received amazing bodywork from at least forty practitioners, and yet it took 21 years for my problem to be solved when I happened to be paired up with someone from out of town at a bodywork workshop and it was only on the third and final day of the workshop, when the other practitioner was very frustrated with not being able to solve the problem with his own methods that he was open to trying something I wanted to do, but was unable to do on myself. Once he understood what I wanted, he was into it and it did solve my problem, which was a huge relief to me because at that point I had been helping others solve their mysterious pain issues while still living with my own pain.