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- BlogDear Reader: Welcome to my very first blog! This blog represents the next step of faith in a journey I never could have imagined ten years ago, a path full of unexpected turns, rich discoveries and shared connections—personal connections to some of you who might be reading at this very moment, as well as a larger sense of shared practice, kinship, and brotherhood with many of you whom I will never meet. What I now call “Touch Practice” began as an effort to explore and heal my own body. I thought of it as something I created, something invented or made up, just for me. I slowly realized that while it was profoundly healing for me, it also seemed to have tremendous benefit for others, and so it became something for “we” rather than something just for “me.” I began to think of Touch Practice as a form of partnership. Next, I understood that something I imagined I had created or invented myself actually existed before I found it—Touch Practice is more accurately something I discovered, something I became aware of rather than creating. I came to understand that this aspect of touch has probably existed in an infinite variety…
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News from Touch Practice
2Thank you for the many of you who have written, “Hey! Are you still out there? It’s been a long time since we’ve heard from you!” I am sorry for the many unanswered e-mails and the largely inactive Facebook page over the past year or …
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Appetite and Need
In this weekend’s blog, I want to explore the distance between appetite (what we think we need in order to be well) vs. need (what we actually do need.) These two things are frequently misaligned, sometimes drastically so. Let me give you some examples: Americans …
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Managing Emotional Pain
In the process of holding and sitting with many men, as with my own life, I’ve noticed different approaches for managing emotional pain. Most of us use all of these strategies at one time or another. Each strategy can be effective, or ineffective, depending on …
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Sharpening
“Sharpening” and “softening” are two opposite techniques we can use to steer psychodynamic forces within groups. Both techniques can be applied skillfully or unskillfully to influence or manipulate behavior and experience. “Sharpening” is accomplished by intentionally exaggerating individual differences while minimizing or ignoring what we have …
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Holding people when you can’t touch them
I had a very interesting experience this week attending a reunion of my college fraternity. There were hundreds of guys from many different chapters ranging in age from undergrads through their 70’s from all over the country, but the vast majority of people in attendance …
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Unwanted Opposite Sex Attraction
My friend Lisa struggles with what she calls “unwanted opposite-sex attraction,” and man, has it ever caused her problems in her life. Big problems. Serious problems. Lisa got pregnant when she was 16, and then again when she was 18, with different fathers, neither of …
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Cleared for Approach
I’ve done about a half dozen group workshops for people investigating Touch Practice for the first time. Here’s a question for you: what do you think guys generally find to be the most difficult or challenging moment in a workshop? Obviously, different people might have …
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He’s available!
About a year ago, I drove out to visit my friend Brent. Our plan was we’d go out to dinner somewhere, I’d stay overnight and take off first thing in the morning for a business meeting close by. Brent and I have always had a …
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Memory, Fantasy, Reality, and Time
Eckhart Tolle’s brilliant book The Power of Now argues compellingly that the only thing that really exists, at all, is the thing we experience as “right now,” this moment. I think this book is insightful, and on one level I completely agree with him. The power of being …
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Marriage as a Weapon
This was an interesting week in politics. President Obama shares in an interview that he feels personally supportive of the idea that all people, regardless of gender, should be able to marry. A few days later, Rick Santorum urges Mitt Romney to “step up and …
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