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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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Working with Aversion
4In Exploring the Energy of Infatuation, I write about ways of working with attraction. We generally don’t need much encouragement to engage attraction, because we naturally seem to move towards things we like. This week, I want to write about the possibilities that open up when …
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Is Touch Practice related to other forms of Body Work?
Since I’ve become more public about the work of Touch Practice, I’m met at least a dozen people, and become aware of many more, who are working in similar ways: using physical touch to bless and heal physical bodies. Some of my closest cousins seem …
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A Thank You To Soldiers
It is fair to say that every time I share Touch Practice with another man, it is a life-changing experience for me. It’s not possible to hold someone for an hour and not be deeply touched (pardon the pun) on every level. But some of …
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Men are Animals! Packing Behavior and Puppy Piles
One of the most profound influences on our behavior as men is not something we think about very often, because it is hardwired into us on a deeper level of the brain. Humans, like dogs, wolves, apes, zebras, and many other mammals, experience “packing instinct.” …
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Out of my Mind: The Limits of Talk Therapy
One of the greatest moments of my life occurred on a Thursday evening when, at the end of a yoga class during the shavasana period, I, quite literally, went out of my mind. That is, I felt my own sense of self fall down out …
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Touch as a Spiritual Practice?
People sometimes ask why I don’t accept money for Touch Practice, or why I don’t “market” it more aggressively. Sometimes men who would like me to hold them will ask me what my “type” is. My reply is “I don’t have a ‘type’. The people …
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Hanging Out In The Stretch
Touch Practice is essentially a yogic practice. We encounter each other in a way that creates a stretch (also called “edge” in yoga) and we sit with that stretch, breathing into it together, until it softens and takes us somewhere new, unexpected, and often, revelatory. …
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Celebrating The Love of Brothers
This week’s blog comes to you live from a retreat center in upstate New York, where I’m spending the weekend with a group of extraordinary men, clearing brush, preparing cabins for the summer season and celebrating brotherhood. Something I can’t help but notice whenever I spend …
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Men, Vulnerability, and Safety
I’ve been thinking about the complicated relationship we men have to vulnerability. When vulnerability is overly visible or too demonstrative in someone, we tend to frame such a person as “needy,” a condition that few find attractive in themselves or others. If vulnerability is not …
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