What I offer is the accumulated residue of long formation in several body traditions. What enters the treatment room is what these lineages have taught me about listening, about touching, and about letting a body find its own way back toward rest.
My education began at age five, in the rooms of Vancouver BC Children’s Hospital. I injured my right eye playing with a joycopter, causing a total hyphema — my right eye filled completely with blood. In the midst of haematology and ophthalmology, I was taught how the surgical and biomedical paradigm views the human person.
Tuina is closer to Chinese osteopathy than to massage. It is a complete system rooted in the internal martial arts. My training and certification in the taiwanese lineage of jin shou tuina comes through the Montreal Gongfu Research Center, a member school of the NATSTA. I learned from Ethan Murchie, who received it from Vince Black, direct student of Master Xu Hongji. In this frame the body is hydraulic. Pain is often a blockage, a rock in the river, that prevents qi from irrigating the tissue. We move around it. We use leverage, fulcrums, and alignment to open the channel so the current can resume.
If tuina clears the river, craniosacral therapy listens to the current. The practice is gentle and subterranean. While formalized as osteopathy by Andrew Taylor Still, its roots lie in the Shawnee and Cherokee traditions of doctoring. Still lived among the Shawnee and described the foundation of his work as a state of quiet observation with no thoughts, where the soul takes on a receptive attitude. He did not invent this from nothing; he built on Indigenous practices already present among the people of Missouri. The work is to listen to the subtle rhythmic pulsation of the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the central nervous system. When a body has been under chronic stress, this rhythm becomes jagged or faint. Through light touch and stillness, I offer a non-invasive presence and wait for the tissue to speak, for the still point where the nervous system shifts from vigilance to rest. Deep repair happens there, in quiet observation.
Marma works the junctures where tissue, vessel, and current meet. My training came through Premnath Gurukal in Trivandrum, Kerala, South India. A combination of online study and residential intensive. Marma means vital point, and marmani live where several kinds of tissue cross, and where the pulse of that crossing can be felt by a hand that has learned to wait. The work is precise. A thumb finds the hollow where muscle meets bone meets the edge of a vessel, and the body responds with a shift in the wider terrain. Tuina opens the river. Craniosacral listens to the current. Marma tends the gates of the watershed. I use it when the body needs negotiation at a specific place that governs a larger territory.
You are the expert on your own sensation. My practice in somatic education draws on years of practice with professionals of the Feldenkrais Method of Awareness Through Movement, the Alexander Technique, and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, including my training with Diffusion Focusing in the relational approach. These disciplines, along with my practice of somatic communication and contact improvisation with Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, and many others, guide you to listen to the felt sense, those vague bodily signals that live below the level of words. We move from “I have a pain” to “I am sensing a tightness that feels like…” Drawing on the Alexander Technique, we replace the judgment of “my neck is bad” with the inquiry of “how am I holding myself against gravity?” The body is an open question.
My own daily practice is qigong. I trained first at the Montreal Gongfu Research Center under Ethan Murchie. My inquiry since has been supported by Julie Liu, Master Zhang Mingliang, Olivier Meunier, Marie-Claude Rodrigue, and Corey Hess. My main qigong practice is Zhan Zhuang, standing like a tree, and silk reeling. These disciplines teach me how to inhabit my body from the inside out. They turn me into a student of my own whole body in relation with the wider ecology around it.
Ayurveda entered my life as a necessity before it became a study. I train through the Académie Québécoise d’Ayurveda, where I also serve as Adjunct Director. This is a living tradition. I am a student first, and I bring twenty-five years of navigating autoimmunity in my own body to every consultation. My study of Siddha marma with Premnath Gurukal in Kerala deepened my understanding of the body’s subtle terrain.
Affiliations:
- Adjunct Director, Académie Québécoise d’Ayurveda.
- Member, Association Québécoise des Thérapeutes Naturels (AQTN).
- Diploma in Tuina and Chinese Physical Culture, Montreal Gongfu Research Center.
- Ayurvedic Practitioner, ongoing formation, Académie Québécoise d’Ayurveda.