Pain and I have been old acquaintances since childhood, when it regularly settled in my back and neck. The first time I experienced significant relief came in the 1970s, during my early twenties, by way of Lilias Folan's PBS yoga program. There in my parents' living room, awkwardly contorting myself into positions that felt foreign to my body, I experienced a shift from the tension that had been lodged deep inside of me for as long as I could remember. It would be another dozen years before I learned of the scoliotic curvature in my thoracic spine.

Eventually, I became a certified yoga teacher and massage therapist. I also became a dedicated student of Vipassana meditation, attending retreats whenever I could manage it. I benefitted considerably from living with my family on the Big Island of Hawai'i, a growing nexus for yoga and meditation teachers who regularly came through offering workshops. 

Despite all this, I continued to experience new areas of pain. Many times, I would find myself on the floor in the middle of the night doing "hip opening" stretches while my family slept, hoping for enough relief so I would be able to get back to sleep.

Everything changed in 1994 when I discovered Jean Couch, whose California-based teaching of alignment principles she had learned from Noelle Perez of Paris, transformed my experience of my body. After traveling from Hawai`i to meet Jean for the first time, I found almost immediate relief from all those years of persistent discomfort.

Over the next few years, I studied with Jean whenever possible, as I attempted to weave these revolutionary concepts into my yoga classes—carefully, so as not to alienate or drive away my students. Eventually, I gave up yoga (and stretching) altogether, focusing instead on embodying this "new" way of inhabiting my body, while teaching classes I couldn't quite name yet—classes that would eventually evolve into the natural skeletal alignment approach I've been sharing since.

I began to "see" people as shaped by the skeleton inside of them. I could identify where primary bony structures and weight-bearing joints were off-kilter, and how the tension this caused in muscles kept dysfunctional patterns locked in an ever-recurring vicious cycle. It seemed clear that learning to mimic babies and toddlers allowed our original human design to naturally unfold.

This revelation ignited a passion that has defined my life's direction since. The insight was deceptively simple yet profound: whenever I allowed my skeleton—not my straining muscles (including fascia, tendons, and ligaments, all equally affected by structural misalignment)—to provide me with an aligned framework of support, pain vanished as if by magic and ease took over. My muscles were freed from struggling to compensate for my misaligned bones and stopped their incessant complaining as they returned to their natural state of elasticity. This elasticity is our muscles' optimal state of balance between strength and flexibility, without effort. What was especially exciting, was that this worked equally well for other people, as well.

By 2003, my life took another turn. My life had taken on a state of upheaval triggered by all three of my children being grown and out on their own, I embarked on a solo journey, seeking "insight" into my future path. The first two months of my travels were spent at the Panditarama forest monastery in Myanmar (Burma) where, for sixty-two consecutive days, I sat and walked in meditation, observing my breath and the subtle nuances of my body's alignment. Twenty-two years later, as wordy as I tend to be, I find it difficult to describe this experience.

My other mission on this journey was to seek out those intriguing people I had only seen in photographs, who carry heavy loads on their heads with inexplicable ease. I found many such people, but what surprised me the most were the many elders in their 80s and 90s I encountered, who moved with fluid mobility while actively engaging in all aspects of community life. This was a startling contrast to the shuttered-away experience of aging so prevalent in the U.S.

Having departed westward, I returned home nearly a year later from the east, having completed a full circle around the world.  Since then, I've dedicated myself to a singular mission: finding ways to make these alignment principles accessible to anyone, anywhere who wants to learn this while cobbling together a path for me to support myself in this endeavor.

This path has led me to teach workshops, author books, create illustrations, and produce instructional videos—all skills I had to teach myself along the way. Everything you see online—my courses, videos, even this website—I produced on my own. (This explains the "kitchen table production"-style of my projects, especially videos). While this work can be demanding and sometimes exhausting, it brings profound satisfaction and genuine joy.

For over thirty years now, I've been immersed in this work. What I share isn't a branded "method" or named "technique," a distinction that matters. While I deeply respect all approaches promoting these and similar principles, I've decided to focus on the fundamental alignment concepts, presenting them as independent information that describes how humans evolved to function and move with ease, the same way all other vertebrate species do. I hope that by doing so, these principles might someday be seriously researched and thus integrated into medical education. Medical schools cannot adopt branded methods, regardless of their effectiveness, so I call this Natural Alignment or Natural Posture—without trademarks or proprietary claims. This knowledge belongs to all of us. It's our innate human design. 

I'm driven to make this information accessible to anyone who struggles to feel good while grasping the significance of this and wanting to reclaim their natural movement. 

I also feel a sense of urgency to share these principles with forward-thinking health professionals and a sometimes over-zealous fitness community before those still-living examples of natural human alignment disappear from this Earth altogether. These individuals—mostly from traditional cultures outside the Western world—have no idea their bodies carry profound insights into an innate connection between natural alignment and vibrant health that is rapidly disappearing from our world, as digital screens and cell phones make their way into the lives of even the most remote villagers everywhere. 

Babies and all animals naturally honor their instinctual bond—a visceral, energetic connection—with our living planet. This connection isn't mystical or abstract; it's embodied in the physics of our human design.

The healing we seek—for ourselves, our communities, and our troubled world—begins with a simple remembering. When enough of us reconnect with what our bodies inherently know, we collectively rediscover our place in the natural order. Aligning our physical selves with gravity's powerful flow mirrors the greater alignment we seek with what's true, enhancing our connection with each other and the world that sustains us. We don't just sense our Oneness, we inhabit it.

This isn't philosophy separated from practice. It's as tangible as the feeling of your sitting bones on a chair, as immediate as your spine lengthening upward along your back while sensing roots dropping down that reach deep to connect with the ground beneath you. Each cell in your body carries this wisdom—the potential to touch a deep and peaceful knowing that rests within and ripples outward to everything beyond you.

As Rumi beautifully reminds us: "You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop." Your body's natural alignment is personal and simultaneously part of something immense—a return to harmony that begins with choosing to come home to ourselves.