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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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To weep with those who weep
5Touch Practice is a practice of sitting with others–and ourselves–as we are, holding space for whatever we happen to be experiencing in the moment. When we have the support of someone else helping us to hold that space, it allows us to become conscious of …
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Connecting the Dots: 2012 Group Workshops and Retreats
I’m going to take a break this week from writing about specific topics, because so much of my energy is focused on developing Touch Practice workshops in various places. While I will always have a special place in my heart for one-on-one work, our group …
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Holding the Kid
I want to write today about my experiences in Touch Practice where I have sensed that somehow, instead of holding the adult man I sat down with at the beginning of the hour, I have suddenly accessed a younger, earlier part of that person. I …
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Partnering Each Other: Building Workshops
During the past two years, I’ve taught Touch Practice workshops ranging from a simple 2-hour introductory session for eight, all the way up to full weekend retreats for 24 men. While I am still committed to individual work, teaching groups of men about Touch Practice …
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Beyond Belief: Part One
This topic is too thick and thorny for one blog post, so I’ll be addressing it in several parts over the next weeks. We men believe many different, and conflicting, things about sexual orientation. Some men believe that to be oriented towards anything other than women …
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To Begin Again
Here we are again, on the edge of another year. As I wrote in my last blog, “staying well,” “maintaining” or “hanging in there” are all utterly unnatural states of being. As I look around the Earth, things are either growing or dying; days are …
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Safety through separation, safety through connection
Following up on last week’s post—how boundaries work to create safety—here’s a case where “the opposite of a truth is also true.” One of the first things we learn to do to create safety is separate ourselves: we build walls, erect boundaries, withdraw. For those …
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How boundaries keep us safe
In various sorts of body work ranging from clinical, therapeutic massage through even the most erotic types of exchange, an explicit agreement about boundaries—where and how we will and won’t touch or be touched—is one of the ways we create a sense of safety for …
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Follow the Breath
You may have heard the saying that we should never form too firm an impression about someone else without first “walking a mile in their shoes” in order to understand their reality. Well, there’s an even better way to try to get in touch with …
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The Puppy Body
We tend to think of time in a linear way, although science suggests that time doesn’t really exist the way we construe it. Because we’re finite beings in this physical body, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, we see ourselves as existing on …
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