About Allen

I have spent most of my life looking at the body as the one vehicle we have for getting free — and I have come, slowly, to believe the warrior and the healer are two halves of the same conversation. That is the short version. What follows is a little longer.

I started in a Tae Kwon Do / Moo Duk Kwan studio in Georgia in 1970, at age eleven. I received my yellow belt in 1973, at twelve. I was an American boy with an English war-bride mother, and I think I went looking for something orderly. At sixteen I walked into the house of Robert W. Smith — the man who, more than any other, brought Tai Chi to the West in the 1960s and 70s — and I remained his student for twenty-five years. We wrote Hsing-I and Ba-Gua together for Tuttle. I was, to put it plainly, very lucky.

In 1982 I went to Taipei to study with Hung I-Mien— two years between ’82 and ’84, the first in public class, the second as a live-in student in his house — the internal arts in the early mornings, Mandarin at the Mandarin Daily News mid-morning, teaching English in the afternoons. What came down to me in that household is a traditional Chinese lineage which is — and I do not say this lightly — vanishingly rare in the West. From those beginnings the work widened: to Judo and Kendo, to Western fencing at the Atlanta Fencing Academy, to the Greek hoplite shield and spear (on which I have written for the University of Dublin’s Anthropology Department), to the reconstructed weapons of Tibet and to medieval armour — which has kept me coming back to the Royal Armoury at Leeds since 1999.

There were other teachers too. Rose Li (Li Shou-tien) — a friend of Smith’s and one of the great custodians of the Internal Arts in the West — I first met in Manchester in 1976. Her Ba-gua followed me through England for more than twenty years, and for six months in 1980 I attended her class near King’s Cross while I was in medical school in London. And Tim Geoghegan — Irishman from Leitrim, world wrestler, osteopath, yogi, circus strongman, and student of Western magic and medicine — who said to me once, almost in passing, everything you find in Asia, the mysticism of nature and the human insight and wisdom, you can find in the West, but it is among the Celts. I drove between Atlanta and Black Mountain, North Carolina to see him for ten years.

All of this ran alongside another life. I trained as a physiotherapy technician at Athens General Hospital in Georgia, as an orthopaedic technician, as a certified massage therapist, and at twenty I attended the British School of Osteopathy. I worked for many years with Corporate Sports Atlanta. I taught physical education for a decade at a Waldorf school to children between six and eighteen, which may have been the most honest work I have ever done. I appraised rare books. I even made three-dimensional groundwater maps for a season. The body, I found, has more than one grammar.

I studied Tibetan Buddhism formally for ten years and was appointed Gecku — disciplinarian of the sangha, a role which looks different from the inside than the outside. Through that work, beginning in 1997, I began to accompany His Holiness the Dalai Lama as part of his personal security. Over the years this quiet side of the work has included Deepak Chopra, Robert Bly, James Hillman, Ralph Nader, Andrew Young, Richard Gere. Bodyguarding, when you actually do it, is a study in attention. The body is simply how you do the watching.

These days the work lives in three currents which, from where I stand now, have started to look like the same river. The Chinese internal arts. Yoga in its classical Indian, Persian and Egyptian forms. And what I have come to call Wisdom of the Body — the harvest, if you like, of forty-five years. I teach it in workshops and in private lessons to therapists, school teachers, martial artists, yogis, and to those who are working their way back from trauma. If any of that is your territory, you are welcome to write to me.