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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 World of Grindr and Scruff
3Back when I first started exploring what I sheepishly called “my hugging thing” (there’s an interesting story if you don’t know it) I tried to find hugging partners using Craigslist ads. That was actually reasonably productive, although if you’ve ever done anything at all through …
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Fear, Part Two: Feeling it
I want to follow up today on two recent blog topics–one about bullying, the other about fear–by reporting one of the most interesting and useful spiritual journeys I have taken in perhaps the past five years. The very simple exercise that I engaged was, “what …
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Fallow Ground
Those of you who follow me closely may have noticed a drop-off in the frequency of my blog posts as of late. There’s a lot of my life energy being redirected into a new home, new location, new job, all of it requiring a certain …
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Suffering as a bad habit (Part Two)
In last week’s blog I wrote about my childhood discovery that sharing wounding can be one of the ways people become close to each other. I became attached to this particular aspect of self-disclosure and honed it into a fine art during the first part …
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Making It Personal
Something that has been inspiring, rewarding and educational for me these past few weeks is hearing from people who have experienced Touch Practice, either individually or in a workshop, who have then gone on to establish their own practice in one form or another. I …
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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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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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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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