In the last week, I have lost two people who I consider to be some of the greatest teachers I have had.  

The first was Gabrielle Roth, creator and teacher of a dance modality called 5 Rhythms and the other was Dr. John Upledger, the man whose institute brought the healing power of craniosacral therapy to many thousands, of people around the world.

The world has lost two incredible creators and innovators.
What I learned through these individuals have directly or indirectly impacted my life, my practice, and by extension, every single person I touch, treat, love, and interact with.  
I found craniosacral therapy in 1999, and now have advanced training in it. I started my career doing CST, before I found brain gym.  Through it I saw how much the body stores memories and pain in the tissues and how to release it.  I started practicing 5 Rhythms when I was introduced to it in 2005 after moving to NY.  It taught me so much about myself and how I show up in relationships and how to move through difficult emotions using my body as a roadmap.

On the tribute pages that have popped up on facebook in honor of Gabrielle and Dr. John, so many people from all parts of the globe share stories about how their work has changed the course of their lives for the better, even though in most instances, they never met these people in person. 

In thinking of them, I feel a sense of loss and a quiet void, but it has also inspired me to think more deeply about my purpose and how to best make use of my time here on earth......to live more fully, with more love, more connection, and greater purpose.

What are the principles that guide your daily life?

As you go through your daily life, are you aware of the impact you're having, directly or indirectly, on the people around you?  Do you think your life will leave the world a better place for your children?  Do you live your life constantly working towards what you believe in, or do you plan for great things that you want to do "someday"?

As if picking up on my internal thoughts, the speaker at a conference this weekend said, 
“I know this is kind of morbid, perhaps, but when I am losing focus and feel distracted by social media, etc. I think about how the moment I was born, the clock started ticking until the day I die.”

Perhaps it is morbid, but it is the truth, and each one of us has the same fate, but we also have the unique power and ability to do what you want with our lives.
As H. Jackson Brown Jr. says,
“Don’t say you don’t have enough time.  You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Theresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein”.  

The thing is, sometimes we don't always have the tools or internal resources to move ourselves forward even when we work hard.  Luckily, there are people like Dr. John, and Gabrielle, who struggled themselves to find an answer to an internal challenge, and created things that we can now all benefit from.   

If you have chronic fatigue, pain, or other physical ailments that get in the way of doing all that you want to do, check out the gifts of craniosacral therapy made widely known and available by Dr. John Upledger.  You can contact me or I have a number of therapists that I myself go to if you want those numbers.  If you are not in the NYC area, or you have family members/loved ones you think would benefit from this, you can also visit this directory and find a practitioner in their area.  
Life is too short to live in pain.

If you are feeling creatively stuck, desiring to move your body, or want to dance but don’t want to go to a structured class where you have to memorize steps and feel overwhelmed, check out the moving meditation that is also fun, by Gabrielle Roth.  There are classes almost every day of the week in NYC.  And if you are not in the area, you can also google 5 Rhythms by city/state/country.
Life it too short not to dance.

Finally, if you have challenges with time management, procrastination, focusing, organizing, communicating(both listening and speaking), clarifying your purpose/vision/goal, etc. then Brain Gym will help you to understand and move forward in your life with ease.
Life is too short to get bogged down with the silly stuff. 
 
Make the most of your life and your time! 
Come do Brain Gym so you can focus and create the results you want!

PROOF OF HEAVEN
Here is an interesting article about a neurologist, coming from a family of neurologists, who has his world and mind literally blown open when his brain shuts off and he travels to a place beyond conscious reality.

I've had glimpses of these moments through my meditative, ceremonial, healing and experimental days and find these moments when we come in touch with this enveloping and reassuring truth, it brings a relief that is beyond description.

Enjoy the article and leave your comments below!

Posture is a subtle yet very powerful way we convey our true selves to the world.  
What does your posture say about you?  
Have you ever tried to change your posture by thought?  How successful was it? 
Most of the time you can do it if you are thinking about it, but as soon as you start to focus on something, you lose it.  

Brain Gym is a simple, effective, and long lasting way to change your posture very quickly and efficiently.
I had a man show up at one of my classes.  He was in his early 60's, tall, hunched over, with stiff knees.  He stood up for his introduction to say with a drawl, "I'm here in this Brain Gym class because I want to make my transitions in dance better".
Looking at this man and his posture, it was a wonder to imagine him dancing.  In a room full of therapists who usually show up to my classes to learn techniques to "fix" kids, he was an anomaly.
He was wanting to learn how to smoothly transition from one move to another, but all I noticed that he kept consciously fixing his posture and unlocking his knees all the time.
He would also tune out completely sometimes and after a long stretch of me speaking or teaching a concept, he would raise his hand and say, "I didn't get that whole last section you talked about, can you say it again?".
The second time he did this, I burst out laughing because the timing of it was so funny, but I asked him to come up and be a demonstration model for a brain balancing sequence on focus.

As a little background, Brain Gym focuses on the body and it's tendencies in movement and posture to see what is going on in the body.  Not in every single case, but poor posture can be related to a breakdown in focus(how your brain stem is talking to the cortex).

So he came up and I had him go through a process called 3 Dimension Repatterning, when he was lying on the floor.

I was busy talking about the process and leading him through, and was hoping to help his focus at least a little bit for being able to listen and understand what was going on in class.  What I did not expect was what happened next.

He stood up and I heard all of the therapists in the room gasp.  He stood up and his back was completely straight.  You could also see that his knees were looser and more relaxed.  
Everyone watched in awe as he walked back to his seat.
He did not ask again for me to repeat anything else in class.  AND he also achieved his goal of more easily transitioning in his dancing.  His comment at the end of the workshop was, "I came here to work on my dancing, but I did not expect to also leave with better posture."

I found this TED talk given by a social scientist who studies posture and has come up with a quick way to change it to change your life.  I like it because it goes much in line with using the body and movement to change the brain and behavior.

I hope that you enjoy and please leave your comments in the section below.