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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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The neighborhood bully
4I hate bullies. I have no tolerance for them whatsoever. I have neither time nor patience for them and I am not willing to make any space for them in my life. One of the most powerful, and relatively recent, discoveries in my spiritual journey …
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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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Disappointing Me
Sometimes I find myself disappointing, and most of the time, I deal with that by not paying much attention to it. But in the spirit of Touch Practice (breathe, lean into the edge, accept all the parts of your experience) I decided to lean into …
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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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Walks between Worlds
I have learned everything I know about Touch Practice by practicing, by holding men. Hundreds of men. Hundreds of different men. Very, very different men. Some of the men I hold are conservative Republicans. Some are liberal Democrats. Some of the men I hold are …
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Ritual As a Container for Experience
The power of a cup of coffee in the morning (specifically, the caffeine it contains) doesn’t work quite the way many of us assume it does. In a non-habitual drinker, the caffeine in a cup of coffee certainly has a powerful physiological effect, raising blood …
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Body Language
One of the ways we defend ourselves against hurt is by taking things we experience in the body and intellectualizing them, turning them into thinking, stories, or talking, so that we can get away from the discomfort of feeling them. One of the techniques we …
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The Descent into Hell
Now there’s a catchy little title for a Spring blog. Got your attention? I’m mindful this weekend that it’s Easter. I am struck by one version of the resurrection story (enshrined in later revisions of what is now known as the Apostles’ Creed) that in …
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