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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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Getting Rightsized
I think all of us, unless we are very lucky or very insightful or both, probably have had at least one experience of either overestimating or underestimating our “size” relative to the rest of the world. We think of ourselves as more (or less) powerful …
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Love it, Hate it, Meh: Spiritual Practice and Reactive Engagement, part two
2In my last blog, I talked about the predictable phases of almost any spiritual practice, and how the mature phase of spiritual practice often is acquired only after traversing the mountain of fanaticism as well as the valley of profound disenchantment. In response to that …
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How Will It Go?
I’m impressed this week by how difficult it is to show up to our next experience, ANY experience, without having written, in some small way, an advance script of “how it will go.” This happens to me at work all the time. A meeting might …
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Show me where it hurts
Mentally rehearse/imagine these situations happening to you, and pay particular attention to what you feel in your physical body even as you just pretend your way through these hypothetical scenarios: 1. You return to the lot where you parked your car before meeting friends for …
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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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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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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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