The Culminating Work
Wisdom of the Body
Forty-five years of study, arriving at a single practice. Not yoga. Not a martial art. Something older.
Forty-five years of study, arriving at a single practice. Not yoga. Not a martial art. Something older.
Human freedom is about not being mechanical. Wisdom of the Body is, in the end, the discipline of re-learning what was always yours.
People often ask me, when they arrive at a workshop, whether this is yoga or whether it is the internal arts. It is neither. I started teaching it because, after forty-five years of both, what was left when I stopped teaching the schools was this.
It does not belong to a certificate. What it offers is the slow re-inhabiting of the body — its own history, its own intelligence, its old rites. The work weaves a person’s private story together with the long inheritance behind them, and it tries, as honestly as I know how, to restore the passages — between childhood and adulthood, between adulthood and elderhood — that modern life has simply forgotten how to mark.
Everything I know about the body went into it. The Chinese internal arts. The classical yogas of India and some of the older ones of Persia and Egypt. Ten years of Tibetan Buddhist practice. Western osteopathy. And, yes, the old weaponry of Greece, Tibet, and medieval Europe — because a body which has held a weapon understands something a body which has not, does not. Wisdom of the Body is what is left when the scaffolding of those schools is quietly taken away.
Returns the student to the archetypal gestures born in childhood — walking, crawling, reaching, binding, releasing — before the body was trained away from itself.
Draws on the postures and strategies of the animals — crane, bear, monkey, tiger — as encoded in Xing-Yi, Ba-Gua, and the older Celtic and Greek traditions.
Restores the initiatory structure that modern life has lost. Each practitioner moves through stages — the fire, the earth, the emerald — woven through their own biography.
Built on 25 years of study with Robert W. Smith, two years of study with Hung I-Mien in Taipei, 20+ years with Rose Li, 10 years with Tim Geoghegan, and 10 years of Tibetan Buddhism under teachers in both medicine and meditation.
