I’ve been an athlete and a mover all my life. Now, I bring my curiosity, my passion, my experience and my own wisdom to the dance floor.

At 28, I had a near death experience that was followed three weeks later by the birth of my first child. These events taught me how to stay connected to my physical body while living through a liminal space that was personally unprecedented.  I have been teaching and sharing these skills since then. 

I spent my early life as a jock. A competitive hockey player from an early age, I was a kind of macho captain-of-the university-team dude. I revelled in the energy of ice hockey warrior; stick in hand, looking cool and silent. Playing to win, I flourished in a world of men and teams. Then, unable to elevate to pro level, I became a schoolteacher like my father. Having lost my spleen at 16, a perfect storm of stress hit me at 28. My wife was in her ninth month of pregnancy. I was teaching high school we had bought a house and we were renovating, I was acting in and directing a major university play. I was coaching a hockey team of 14-16 year old boys and leading a youth church group. After maintaining this pace for three months, I found myself unconscious in an ambulance on my way to spend 28 days in Intensive Care.

I received the gift of humility on my first day back home at our house in North Hatley, Quebec. I walked up the stairs to my bedroom. My leg muscles hadn’t done anything like that for 4 weeks. I had no muscle tone, no core strength and no callous on the skin of my now baby-smooth feet. The road ahead had become clear and simple….healing.

Awakening from that deep dive, I spent time reading “Who Dies “ by Steven Levine and immersed in the reality of my mortality, my new teacher.

A week after coming home from the hospital, my first child was born and soon after I became the primary caretaker, the ‘House-husband.” In 1980 I, just like John Lennon was a rare bird in the North American culture. The most commonly asked question in response to hearing about my chosen lifestyle:. “Aha….what does your wife do?” I learned about one traditional role of woman and discovered my feminine side.

During those precious 3 years at home with my infant to toddler son, I embarked on a journey inward to discover what I had left behind, first my feet and then the rest of my mass, energy and space. I danced. I catharted. I stood still in the woods and listened to the birds. I immersed myself in the practices and path of 5Rhythms and Gabrielle Roth’s dancing feminine spirit. With practice, I gradually became more comfortable with myself, in both the masculine and the feminine expression. I now existed between the sky and the earth, no matter what else was going on. I felt like I had located myself. This is the practice I wish to share.

From there I co-founded the first 5 rhythms teacher-training course in 1989, and started offering my first classes and workshops. Over the next 40 years, and on three continents, I’ve learned and taught by moving and dancing with people from all walks of life.

At that same time, I also became interested in hands-on bodywork, training first in reflexology and evolving to my certification in Hellerwork Structural Integration. I have placed my hands on thousands of clients by now, in an educational, collaborative healing practice. I’ve been sharing what I’ve needed to learn and learning from what I shared.

My experience as a body-worker has been rich in experiential learning and in collecting “warm data.” As well, the thousands of people with whom I shared dances became mirrors of myself.  Dance floors have been my laboratory for observing embodied and creative spirits in their functional, energetic, emotional and playful expression.

I’m curious, as any social scientist is, about patterns and tendencies. Movement classes and workshops illuminate and nourish my curiosity about shapes and patterns. I’m aware of the traps of thinking there is a “way “ of being. I have compassion for the variety of circumstance, often defined by education and health, of each individual. I feel and see the joy and the pain, the energy and the fatigue, the resistance and the surrender, all through the expansion and contraction of the breathing pulsations of the body.

By having such wise and experienced teachers as Joseph Heller, Gabrielle Roth and most recently Gay and Katie Hendricks, I have received the gift of absorbing their knowledge and mastery of body intelligence, somatic integration and facilitation. Immersing in those teachers’ communities, grounded in playful evolution, I’ve learned to transform my own stories and my body.

Now I bring my curiosity, my passion, my experience and my own wisdom to the dance floor and to my one-on-one coaching. My teaching style is an invitation and an expression of self-love and of beingness; through moving, sensing and feeling.