“Josh is pure magic.
He is keenly observant, broadly knowledgable, and deeply compassionate. He finds emotions caught up in the way the body moves and brings gentle attention and insight to the process of working with body / mind / spirit. In the wake of our session, I found it easier to access a flow state in both my work and personal life. ”
“My soul feels like it got a powerwash.
No joke, I was in 5 years of therapy, 2 times a week. After working with you for only a few months, I have seen profound benefits and worth more than I paid for all of that (previous) therapy.”
“I’ve worked with Josh on and off for several years for different issues. I usually come to him with some mysterious body pains, and he’s quickly unwinding my body and emotions through a process of observation, movement, exercises, breath, and sometimes laughter and crying.
It is hard to put a title on Josh’s practice; he brings a lifetime of experience, body knowledge, and practice, but his gift is reintroducing one to an ancient intuitive dance that frees the body from pain.”
“I first came to see Josh on the recommendation of a structural integration therapist, who I’d seen to address some low-back hip pain. She said that while her practice focused more on structural fascial, and Neurovascular techniques to help the body align, his involved “movement and a lot of other really cool things that are hard to describe,” and would be a good compliment to the work we were doing. The mark of a really good healer of any stripe is a level of honesty about the limitations of their own practice and a readiness both to refer out and also let you know when your work with them is done. I’ll come back to this in a bit.
When we set up a phone call I expected it to be about the nature of my back and hip pain, which it was in part, but only for the first few minutes. An hour later, I had told him about my life, my work, my insomnia, marriage, my children, my stomach pain, the story of my family of origin, my fears, my mother’s war stories that haunted my dreams and lived in my body, my father wound. Worth noting, I am a journalist by trade and am usually the one who stealthily extracts people’s stories without their ever even realizing it, and without ever revealing much about myself. He asked a few pointed questions but didn’t talk much and didn’t use the kind of predictable dimestore therapist- or lazy healer-speak to which I had grown allergic. When we had our first session, he had me do things like stand on one foot and touch various points in a radius with one hand and then the other. He watched how I moved, twisted, balanced, folded, or as the case may be, didn’t. He also watched my body compensated for its taxed parts. While Josh spent a lot of years studying movement practices, postural alignment and functional range conditioning, he has also engaged in a multi-decade odyssey of both formal and informal healing and spiritual modalities that include ancient breathwork, taoism, Greek philosophy, meditation, ontology, shamanism, kundalini, Zen, etc., you won’t hear a shred of dogma or spiritual patois coming from him. Nor will he ever repeat any set of movements from one session to the next. His work is at once psycho-spiritual and somatic, rooted in a deep mechanical and intuitive knowledge of the body. It’s also utterly original. By simply looking at your face, stance, positioning of and weight on your feet, head, shoulders, hips, he reads the multitudes–and improvises mixing from a seemingly disparate set of toolboxes like an artist who combines paint with words or the musician who dares to lay 18th century classical music over hip-hop. In the year and a half that we worked together, he put me in positions that tested the outer edges of my physical and psychic comfort zones, pushing me beyond my well-honed defenses and fear-based operating system and into my body, heels, hips, and eventually my heart.
He does the patient work of following the pain and coaxing its story out of the body. Though never denying its existence, he has helped me change my relationship to the pain from something to be conquered or fixed to something to be honored, mourned, and moved through.
When we come to recognize a soul teacher, we know to trust them when we feel the ring of our own internal truth. At some point Josh let me know that our work would coming to an end as it has in recent months. He said he was done holding up a mirror to my own integrity as I had become my own inner teacher.
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