An Excerpt from My Book

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I have been making good progress in writing my book, "Doing Your Work" lately. Here is an excerpt from this morning's writing:

What Does It Mean to Heal?

You are reading this book because you want to heal something in yourself and in your life. I want to discuss with you what the goals of personal healing mean to me, and how the holistic tools presented in this book will support you in that process.

The broadest and most useful definition of what it means to heal is: to become a whole person. Let’s play with language for a moment, because it’s important to understand the truths underlying the healing journey I am presenting you. The adjective whole is an absolute adjective, meaning that it cannot be modified into a lesser, relative state. So this means that you can’t be a basically whole person. A fairly whole person. A somewhat whole person. You can be in the process of becoming a whole person; still, you are either whole, or you’re not.

This may seem like a picky semantic distinction, but the state of wholeness I am going to model for you does indeed rest on clear, objective milestones, qualities and results in your skills and experience as a person. One of the greatest challenges in our work to become whole is that we not dilute or compromise what our wholeness requires. Holding on to that pure definition of wholeness is a way of maintaining a lifeline, a sane reference when confronting dysfunctional patterns in ourselves and others.

And when this undiluted model of wholeness becomes the shared goal in our relationships, we enter into an entirely new world of cooperative learning that makes the restoration of successful love possible.

And as you will see later in the book, the distinction of the idea of what the word whole means becomes profoundly important, because it defines the most challenging aspects of the healing journey on primal and cognitive levels. It clearly illuminates the places where most people get stuck or stop in their healing journey.

Learning and applying the language of healing is one of the essential tools in Doing Your Work.

Original Innocence Returns

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I have not written anything here for quite some time, the reason being that 2008 was a profound and challenging process for me. I needed to pull back and observe what was going on in America – and humanity – leading up to the election. My heart was not into writing or trying to contribute into a culture that seemed determined to create a massive failure of love, common sense, and expansive intelligence.

My work, my writing, and the work that we are all doing to heal depends on there being enough love and heart presence in life to make this work worthwhile. Throughout the last eight years, and the last four especially, I have watched the world in which I came of age — I was there at the beginning of the Human Potential Movement in Palo Alto in the 70's — gradually disappear in the collective heart.

I watched a dark, shadowy presence insinuate itself into America. It lived in the strategy of demonization that lay in the heart of the Republican political agenda, fueled by a force that has controlled America since the very beginning, and that force is shame.

Shame lives in the idea of Original Sin. It was brought over to America in the religious beliefs of the original settlers in the form of Puritanism. It has remained buried deep in the American psyche, acting out in wave after wave of disconnected and heartless aggression such as the Native American Genocide or the slaughter of American workers on the frontier protesting against the unfair practices of the mine owners, or the gunning down of students at Kent State during the Vietnam War.

Shame speaks in many voices: Do as I say, not as I do. Children should be seen and not heard. You want something to cry about? I'll give you something to cry about.

Most recently, it spoke through Dick Cheney's statement that if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, it is legal. Shame justifies the abuse of power without being held to any accountability.

Shame cannot create healthy relationships. It has to control, and create an illusion of intelligence in which it is never really vulnerable. Shame slowly starves the heart, eroding the confidence of love one moment at a time, relentless in its need to be right, to never be exposed. Ultimately, shame always forces things to fail through a tremendous ignorance of what it takes to nurture life.

And that brings us to the present moment in America.


I have always experienced, and thus believed in, the Original Innocence of our souls. It was the dream inside the Human Potential Movement to liberate our hearts and souls from the dark guilts and inhibitions that came from generations of shame, to celebrate sexuality and spirituality, to embrace diversity and to challenge the sweeping dysfunctions of the American Family and to create a psychology based on love.

We live now in a renewed culture in which these goals mean something again within America. As a people, we chose to reject the Politics of Shame that emerged so blatantly in the last eight years. So let us learn now, more than ever, how to confront and bring healing to the forces of shame. Let us become smart about shame and thus lose our fear of it and the failure it creates.

Let us live from our Original Innocence.

The Doing Your Work Blog Begins

Welcome to the Doing Your Work weblog. I am an Integrative Breathwork Facilitator and Life Skills Coach with 21 years of experience, and will be writing here about the complex, challenging and beautiful process of emotional and spiritual healing.

Why the name Doing Your Work? Because when one begins to confront a life that isn't working as well as it needs to, when you undertake the journey into reactive emotions and stuck patterns, when learning to respond to your own experience at a whole new level becomes a deep necessity — it is a challenge. It takes work to get to the core of where our wounded self is waiting inside for us to find them, respond to them and nurture them.

So many people wish that there was a quick and easy one-shot thing they could do to be a whole and happy person. And the truth is that real emotional and spiritual healing is a lifelong path, an acceptance of a commitment to being conscious and always willing to work on things that come up in our lives.


Real emotional and spiritual healing work in our time means challenging the deeply rooted patterns of sacrifice and compromise that formed the model of love for previous generations, but now no longer serve us.

Real emotional and spiritual healing work means getting very uncomfortable at first in challenging denial and c0-dependency in our relationships, our families, our professions and our world.

Real emotional and spiritual healing work means having the courage to change, and in changing bring up repressed emotions in ourselves and others, and risk what we are all trained to avoid: grief.

Real emotional and spiritual healing work means reconstructing our internal and external boundaries, so that we honor ourselves and our needs while lovingly challenging the people in our lives to create healthy boundaries for themselves.

Ultimately, the real goal of all this healing work means creating a heart path through which your Light comes forward and brings loving change into your world.


The work in Doing Your Work is to confront. Confront ourselves, each other, the past, the present, and all the patterns that hold us back from being free, whole people.

And I will give you the most direct truth I can about the emotional imbalances that most people experience in their lives: they originate in the grief of having to confront our parents and our family systems.

There is a lot of ground to cover once you really start to Do Your Work. For many of us who seek a truly transformed experience of love, intimacy and creative expression it means building a whole new model of what relationship and family is really all about.

The good news is that the compassion, acceptance, freedom from dependency and transformation of grief that comes from Doing Your Work is an amazing place in which to arrive.


So join me in the journey of Doing Your Work, the ongoing process of lovingly confronting what must change and how to do it successfully.