To be an expert in pain and healing does not come without costs. From the moment I came into this world, I was faced with health challenges, setbacks and traumas.
Born in Israel with multiple health issues including a urinary tract dysfunction and structural deformities that required me to wear full length casts on both legs for my first few months.
The first of my surgeries was at the young age of three after moving to Brooklyn New York with my loving parents. This time it was to repair the urinary tract dysfunction I was born with.
Five years later, I awoke in the middle of the night with this sharp and severe pain in my kidney region and was rushed to emergency surgery to repair yet another urinary tract complication.
Growing up in a traditional Jewish home with a father who insisted I go to yeshiva against my will, I regularly struggled with fitting into my parents and teachers expectations. Always feeling like an outsider and ‘knowing’ that I was ‘different’ made me struggle with feelings of inadequacy. As an empath, I was highly sensitive and this made it a challenge to cope with my day-to-day life.
From age 18-21, my favorite form of self-medicating was escaping in the all-night dance parties of the underground rave and nightclub scene. My love for electronic music and dance fueled these journeys. The dance floor was my savior and movement was my medicine.
While I dabbled and experimented with various drugs during this period, my favorite drug of choice was and still is music, dance and radical self-expression.
You can still find me dancing on stage at clubs from time to time, one of my favorites being House of Yes.
While I don’t condone and support the use of recreational substances, I don’t regret my experiences because they opened me up to the world of spirit, my creative capacity, and my passion for somatic therapy and healing.
In my early 20’s, I was also blessed with a rare and severe neurological pain condition called Cluster Headaches; a debilitating head pain that would send me to the ER on numerous occasions. In fact, this particular illness is considered to be one of the most painful conditions known to medical science and I can attest to that.
After trying just about every treatment in western, eastern and holistic medicine from Imitrex injections to bodywork and even spending time in hyperbaric oxygen chambers, I only found relief from micro-dosing with plant medicine, specifically psilocybin.
Being the son of a successful entrepreneur and NYC jazz club owner, I began to work at my father’s club in the Greenwich Village at a young age and continued to do so till I turned 21, which was when my life was literally turned upside down.
Just when things couldn’t get worse, they did. I suffered a debilitating mental breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
After running away from home, spending over $10k on my credit card of money I didn’t have and literally losing my mind and leaving my body, my supportive yet terrified parents finally convinced me to admit myself into the mental ward at the NY Presbyterian Mental Health clinic.
After spending a little over a week heavily medicated in the hospital, my doctors decided it was time to discharge me when they noticed me teaching group yoga classes to the other patients.
Prior to this episode, I was teaching yoga for a few years in my free time and I believe that part of the reason for my severe energetic imbalance was because I was practicing yoga in excess and was energetically way too open and expansive for my own good. This caused me to leave my reality at the time and enter deeply into another dimension of my mind and the spirit world. My lack of proper training on how to remain grounded during these experiences, was what caused this.
While some other cultures and Native American shamans call this a spiritual awakening, the western world labels it an illness and they treat it like a disease.
During this ‘awakening’, I discovered that I wasn’t living in alignment with my soul purpose and that my mental breakdown was also due to years of verbal abuse, suppressed anger, anxiety, and being unable to fully express myself authentically and express my emotions.
After about a year of dedicating the time and energy to go for weekly bodywork-based psychotherapy sessions using a method called Open Orgonomy, along with designing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, I was finally able to achieve a state of harmony and balance in my life.
In 2007 while lying in bed with lots of time to ponder after a complete rupture to my Achilles tendon during a dance performance, I realized that it was time to make some changes to my work and life. The long hours and high-stress work environment of the restaurant business was toxic for me and if I was going to stay grounded and healthy, I needed to make a career shift and do so quickly.
So I decided to get trained in manual therapy and obtain a degree in health sciences so I could share my healing gifts with the world through my intuitive and caring quality of touch, heightened empathic listening abilities and multiple experiences with pain and suffering.
I have made it my mission to serve others so they too can heal from physical pain and mental/emotional/spiritual disharmonies.
