My Story

I was a typical athlete in high school, participating in baseball, football, track and field (pole-vaulting), and cross-country. Stretching was haphazard and inconsequential to my performance, it seemed.

A few years after high school, I was rear-ended in a car accident and thrown out of the car. The car was totaled. With the resiliency of youth I gave my bruised lower back not much thought, and went on with my life.

Shortly after this I was loading trucks for a living and, after 6 months or so of this labor, my back went suddenly and violently into spasm. X-rays and a mylogram (shooting dye into the spinal fluid to then photograph abnormalities in the disks) showed a herniated disk between L4-5 which was pressing on enough nerves to make walking, bending, lifting, and moving much in general, painful and all but impossible.

One and a half years of futile therapy, cortisone shots, and debilitating pain went by. Now the doctors wanted to perform the surgery that would make me all better. My intuition, and the knowledge of my sister's unsuccessful attempt to cure her back pain with surgery, kept them at bay.

Rolfing (a method of deep, often painful, myofascial manipulation which attempts to restructure the body to a more functional alignment) helped change my posture, taking enough pressure off the disk to allow me to feel semi-functional. This feeling of lessened pain came and went over the years and I treated my back like a problem child.

I moved to California, got work in a health food store, and you guessed it, loaded and unloaded a produce truck for my job. Most times I was functional but I often found myself flat on my back, out of commission. Since bodywork seemed to be a key component to my welfare and ability to function. I began and graduated from a 1000 hour massage therapist / holistic health practitioner training course.

I wound up learning and practicing the Rolfing method, and later, had the good fortune to find as a teacher and mentor, a woman healer from India who changed my life and introduced me to a methodology of "melting" the myofascial web of the body, shifting muscle, bone, cells, and everything in between, to create shifts on every level: physical, emotional, and spiritual. This awareness led to my waking up to the magic and mystery of movement.

Teaching myself tightrope and tightwire walking during this period of my life was to have major implications in my life, and far-reaching repercussions in my understanding of the body that I never imagined at the time. Learning how to walk on a rope strung between trees gave me startling insights about balance, body mechanics, posture, flexibility, and movement in general. Teaching others to walk on a rope strengthened my beliefs and turned my theories and intuitions about movement into irrefutable proofs.

Armed with the technology of this magical and mysterious bodywork (which I've named Evolutionä) and the power of balance work to complement it, I proceeded to work with people in pain. Even with all of this at my disposal I became aware of a missing aspect of staying free from pain. You see, no matter how much change I was able to facilitate during sessions there was always the ever-present specter of Entropy: reversion to old habits, patterns of posture and movement, and aging.

Enter Flextasy!®. Each time I would release a piece, or pieces, of the skeleton the person would inevitably exclaim, "Wow! That feels great! I didn't even know it could move that way! How long will it stay like that?" and I would answer, "As long as you move it." And they say, "Move it how?" And I would show them and say, "like this and like this and like this".

Over time I became aware of all the significant ways the many joints and hinges lose mobility and how they ought to be able to move. I catalogued these movements and they grew into the Flextasy!® routine, which is the diagnosis of the condition of your body structure and the treatment of it rolled into one.

My own pain has become manageable, and often inconsequential, through my regular practice of the Flextasy!® routine. I now know from my direct experience, and from the experience of working with thousands of others in chronic pain, that no surgery, medication, bodywork, or anything else "done to you" will ever keep you out of pain or create any lasting change.

What is absolutely necessary is the daily maintenance of the structure, which will keep the muscles lengthened and organized and the joints and hinges of the skeleton decompressed and mobile. Only you can do this for yourself.

Flextasy!® is a roadmap for those who are lost, confused, and in pain. With it I am now very much more flexible than I was in high school over 30 years ago. It has taught me about my body and it will teach you about yours. Like brushing your teeth it can, and should, become a regular part of your life and is capable of delivering to you the flexible, pain-free body you so rightly desire and deserve. (see Flextasy! the Functional Flexibility System®)