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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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Keeping Fire
4I grew up in a house that was heated by wood fires, one upstairs and one downstairs. My dad was the keeper of those fires until I became old enough to gradually take over that role. I’ve tended, literally, thousands of fires as I was …
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Appetite and Need
In this weekend’s blog, I want to explore the distance between appetite (what we think we need in order to be well) vs. need (what we actually do need.) These two things are frequently misaligned, sometimes drastically so. Let me give you some examples: Americans …
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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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Suffering as a bad habit (Part One)
When I was a child, I had a number of rather intense friendships–and I liked intense friendships. There was something about closeness I thrived on, something about emotional intimacy which was meaningful to me. It made me feel fully alive and fully connected. Fairly early …
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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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Managing Emotional Pain
In the process of holding and sitting with many men, as with my own life, I’ve noticed different approaches for managing emotional pain. Most of us use all of these strategies at one time or another. Each strategy can be effective, or ineffective, depending on …
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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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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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