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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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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
4Now 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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Rubbed raw
I rekindled one of the big loves of my life this week, a kind of “first love” I’d neglected and forgotten about for many months, a love that made me feel happy and healthy and well on so many levels. I’m talking about massage: plain …
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More than meets the eye
In the course of spending hundreds of hours learning how bodies work and how we communicate with physical (non-verbal) language, I have learned a great deal about eye contact. And what I have learned contradicts virtually everything that I always understood about eye contact. I …
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To weep with those who weep
Touch 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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