Apprenticeship-centered Learning – A Family Tradition Continues

2010-03-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

My mother, Shari Sunshine, has been a massage therapist and teacher for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Some of my earliest memories are of her gentle hands, always knowing exactly where to touch. She still has the habit of reaching out draw tension from my neck while she’s sitting next to me at the dinner table. Being raised in an environment where intelligent, intuitive touch was used as much or more than soothing words, I didn’t know how fortunate and unusual my circumstances were until I began teaching massage, years later. Then, I discovered that we live in a touch-deprived society, where the language of the body is thought of something as strange or magical, if it is thought of at all. It is because of my own long apprenticeship that I find the language of the body to be completely natural, and that is why I have created a massage school that emphasizes apprenticeship-centered learning.

My family’s connection to apprenticeship-centered learning links us with some of the most influential and well-known therapists and therapies in the world. When I was nine years old, I traveled to Jerusalem, Israel, to visit my mother, who was studying with a man named Shlomo Efrat. Efrat had been an apprentice to the famous Moshe Feldenkrais, a man who revolutionized our understanding of the connection between mind and body. At the time, Feldenkrais was in a coma. Efrat, being later in the years himself, had gone out to find someone who he could teach what he knew, before he was also too old to pass on the knowledge. My mother was running the Jerusalem Center for the Healing Arts at the time, and after a brief meeting with her, Efrat decided she was the right person to carry the lineage. Nearly every day for two years, Efrat would come to my mother’s house to teach her Feldenkrais’ work. During my summer visits to Israel when I was 9 and 10 years old, I would sit and watch them work. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning.

I remember my mother had a wicker chair in the corner of her treatment room, and I would sit there for hours at a time, watching her work with clients. One client commented that I would sit and stare, with my mouth open and my hands resting palms up on my lap, as if I was trying to absorb everything that was going on. What a strange child I was! But it did sink in, and I became a fan of the new bodywork methods that my mother was using. While other kids were out goofing around, I would often attend my mother’s movement classes, lying on the floor with the adults, learning how the human body works. Years later, when I began to formally study massage and bodywork, I already knew all of the floor movement exercises and hands-on routines that my mother was teaching. It was not just that it all came naturally to me, it was also that I had been studying it for my whole life.

I remember many of the teachers who were around during my childhood. Pierre Panetier, one of the fathers of Polarity Therapy, stayed with us in our house one summer, inspiring everyone in the co-operative household to drink disgusting concoctions of lemon juice, olive oil and cayenne pepper. I liked the sweet licorice tea that they used to wash down the sour concoction! Arthur Lincoln Pauls, the creator of Ortho-Bionomy® also stayed with us, though I found out later he preferred whiskey! The work of those two remarkable men, along with many other teachers, permeates the work that I do now, and is passed on to all of my students.

When my mother started the Ashland Massage Institute in the early 90’s, she and the other teachers built all of the massage tables by hand. When the school was up and running, my mom once called me in to Anatomy class and I stood on one of those handmade massage tables so the students could study my lean, defined gymnast’s muscles. There have been massage tables and massage students in my life for as long as I can remember. I think about that time now, as I teach Anatomy to the students at the Arcata School of Massage, but I don’t stand on the massage tables anymore! My daughter Raven, however, is always a volunteer for a Rose Mud Treatment in the Spa class at ASM...

In addition to bringing me into contact with bodywork teachers and students, my mother also frequently introduced me to spiritual teachers and practitioners from all over the world. In Israel, I remember being awestruck with sacred wonder as I watched hundreds of Muslim men pray together in the Old City of Jerusalem, and I distinctly remember feeling very special when someone gave me a pressed flower in a place they say Jesus once stood. One of my fondest memories was of a time when my mom invited me to attend a special ritual being performed by an old Mongolian monk. During the meditation that he led, I was guided out of my body, and my consciousness merged with space. I found the visualization to be effortless, like watching a movie in my mind. When the ceremony was over, I asked with wonder, “That was about dying, wasn’t it?” My mom just laughed. It was what they call a “direct mind transmission” of a traditional death transformation ritual – one that I’ll never forget.

When I was in high school, I discovered my mother’s bookshelf and it changed the course of my life dramatically. On it I found a treasury of books on meditation and healing, ranging from ancient Tibetan texts to modern works written by people channeling angels. I read voraciously, as I’d finally found books that made sense to me. The poetry and philosophy that I had been reading before suddenly seemed like people’s shallow, cerebral ideas, whereas the authors my mother read seemed to be speaking about natural truths, already existent in the world, just waiting to be discovered.

The first book I read was a collection of stories about Jack Kornfield’s journey to a monastery the forest of Eastern Thailand where the monks still live in exactly the way the Buddha lived. I was transfixed, and told my mom, “I want to go there.” She said, “Why don’t we go to India and Nepal while we’re at it!” True to her word, shortly after I graduated from high school, my mother took me on the first of three six-month pilgrimages to Asia. That first trip and those that followed formed the basis of my formal apprenticeship with my mother and her teachers in Asia.

On the first trip, I mimicked Kornfield’s journey to Eastern Thailand. I sat and ate with in the ancient way, swept dirt paths, and carried water. In that environment, I discovered how quiet the mind can be. After Thailand, we traveled to a small village of Tibetan refugees in Nepal where my mother had served as the “doctor,” years before. It was there, in those mountains, with those people, that I felt more at home than ever before. Next, we went to Southern India to spend time with Sai Baba, one of the foremost teachers of traditional Hindu spirituality in India. There, I was given a series of profound dreams – dreams that still influence my life today. And, for the final leg of our journey, we traveled to Northern India, to the home of the Dalai Lama of Tibet and a large refugee community. On that trip and those that followed over the years, I sat for hundreds of hours listening to discourses by His Holiness and other teachers on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and meditation, slowly building the foundation of mindfulness and compassion that Shari teaches as the basis of all healing work.

After three consecutive six month trips to Asia to study healing and meditation, and several years of practicing bodywork informally on my friends and family, I traveled through the United States and Europe on a teaching tour with my mother, where I began to apply what I’d learned. It was then that latent knowledge gained from all of those years of observation and immersion in the healing arts began to rise to the surface. One afternoon while working with a classroom full of students in Bergen, Norway, I put my hands on a student’s neck, and within a few seconds, she burst into tears of relief. Like a dam had broken, one student after another began to weep sweet tears of relief. I had discovered the essence of the work that my mother was teaching – loving-kindness – and from that moment forward, I have never been the same.

A few years later, I began teaching bodywork with Shari on Maui, Hawaii. We called the work we were teaching “Syntropy Insight Bodywork.” Syntropy began as an integration of meditation, Healing Chi Kung, the body movements taught by Moshe Feldenkrais, Orhto-Bionomy®, and our own insights developed from so many years of study and practice. As the years passed, Syntropy developed into its own distinct bodywork modality – no longer a hodgepodge of this and that. While its foundations are in the lineage of the many styles of healing that we’ve studied, Syntropy is now a unique bodywork method that practitioners worldwide use with great joy and success.

While I was studying Lomi Lomi Traditional Hawaiian massage on Maui in 2002, a car hit me while I was walking along the side of the road. I suffered debilitating nerve damage and severe pain, unlike anything I can describe with words. All of my activity came to a standstill for about seven months and I became a gaunt, depressed man, unable to walk more than a few limping steps… until I decided to travel to Brazil to seek the services of a faith healer called John of God, who works with thousands of people each year, free of charge. After just two weeks there, I was pain free and hiking in the hills! When I returned to Maui, I finished my apprenticeship in Lomi Lomi and immediately began working as a massage therapist in a Chiropractic office with renewed enthusiasm. From that experience, I learned that anything is possible, even “miracles.”

And, time marched on. Eventually, I began to see that if we wanted pass on the tradition of apprenticeship-centered learning, and for our students to be able to learn the whole breadth of the work, there needed to be a context for people to study longer than just a ten-day intensive format we were using in our Syntropy classes. Also, I noticed that in many massage schools students were learning techniques and attitudes that were counter-productive to their own physical health. As much as we were teaching something new in our Syntropy classes, we also found ourselves un-teaching our students’ bad habits. It was time to open a massage school that would take students on a unique journey of learning and discovery from the very beginning. In 2004, I moved to Arcata, California and opened the Arcata School of Massage as a way to bring together all that I have learned as a student, client, and teacher.

I developed the curriculum at the Arcata School of Massage to offer apprenticeship-centered, hands-on education that not only meets state and national certification requirements, but also fulfills the deeper, more important need for an educational environment that nurtures the soul. The students who study at ASM are those who are inspired to be of service to all people, from all walks of life. While the training is based in meditation and self-awareness, there is also a strong emphasis on becoming a therapist who integrates well into the mainstream professional environment. To become massage professionals who can integrate the science of massage and bodywork into the sacred intention to serve others and create peace, our students study a broad range of subjects, from Business to Hot Stone Massage, from Musculoskeletal Anatomy to the pathways of life force through the body from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The Arcata School of Massage is a community of healers, teachers and students who understand that learning to give massage is as much about understanding oneself as it is about learning techniques. At ASM, we strive to produce massage therapists who not only have the skills and professional qualities to succeed in the competitive marketplace, but also the self-awareness and insight that makes working as a therapist a fulfilling personal experience.

I continue to learn and grow as a therapist and teacher. During my time as the Director of ASM, I have carefully studied the student experience, observing what works and what doesn’t. My goal has always been to create a learning environment where it is possible for our faculty to pass on the essence of effective bodywork, so that our students become confident, capable therapists with the tools they need to succeed and evolve as professionals. The result of our work at ASM has been remarkable. With each class that graduates, I see that what we are teaching and the way we teach is truly unique, very effective, and very special. Because of the history of apprenticeship-centered learning in my family, and because of the curiosity that I still bring into my work, the quality educational experience that we are able to provide at ASM is something that is not available in the “mainstream” massage school format. Students who choose ASM do so they want to study in small groups of highly dedicated students with mentors who teach from life experience. While your time with us is short compared to the long life you have ahead of you, it is my hope that it becomes one wonderful story among many in your learning journey. I am very happy to be able to include you in that tradition.