How it all began

My personal path to health and the development of Life Alignment has been a long process, of which I will give some highlights.  As a child I had a strong awareness of a reality beyond the physical plane.  This intrigued me and I began to pursue a process of discovery of what it was all about.  Somehow life or my inner guidance, whatever one wishes to call it, led me through a series of events that were to mould a direction which, in retrospect, I see as part of my life's purpose.

I spent my first seventeen years in South Africa in a somewhat protected environment.  Feeling a need to challenge my body and soul, I found my way to Israel, where I spent the first six months on a kibbutz, working on the land.   Still needing an intense physically challenging experience, I volunteered to serve in the Israeli army as a paratrooper. Towards the end of my training, and during a particularly harsh manoeuvre, I became critically ill with dysentery, accompanied with intense intestinal symptoms.  After my release from the army, I continued to experience these symptoms, suffering for several hours per day with intense abdominal pains and extreme fatigue.  I searched for an understanding of my condition and hopefully some relief, visiting doctor after doctor.  My efforts were fruitless. 

Following the army, I began my architectural studies and started to eat a healthy diet, hoping that it would make a difference.  Yet, somehow, the healthier I ate the worse I felt, which was somewhat confusing to me.  My bowel was so irritated that anything of a fibrous nature caused intense pain, whereas refined foods caused less discomfort.  I began to accept pain as the norm and was deeply thankful for any pain free periods. 

At the end of my fourth year of study in 1969, I returned to South Africa for a vacation for the first time since my  departure in 1962 and connected with a young woman I had met briefly in Israel.  Within two weeks Merle and I got engaged and three weeks later we were married!  Back in Israel, whilst completing my final year of architectural studies, we began what was to be a very full and productive life together.  In the forty years we have been married, we have never ceased to wonder at the profound sense of purpose that guides and directs us. Our path has taken us into the exploration of diverse spiritual paths and lifestyles, including Zen meditation, Tai Chi, and six years spent in an intentional healing community in Canada. 

After my graduation, we returned to South Africa, and within a few months I was unexpectedly conscripted into the South African army.  So there I was at the age of twenty-seven, a peace-loving individual, with a six week-old daughter, entering my second stint in the military.  Needless to say, army life and food did little to benefit my compromised physical condition.  Yet, somehow, the absurdity of the situation stimulated some deep introspection and a trust that there had to be some purpose for it all.  And so there appeared to be.  

Whilst serving in the Architectural Corp. I met a man who was a devout yogi who was as out of place in the military as I was!  He led me to some interesting reading material and provided me with a sounding board for my developing awareness.  At about the same time, I was guided in a unique way to a married couple who provided us with clear spiritual direction.  I became inspired to connect with my own healing power, for the purpose of healing myself and others.  Not having any knowledge of healing techniques, I had to trust my inner guidance implicitly.  My naïveté was my greatest asset. When I worked on those that came to see me, and they began to arrive in large numbers, I had absolutely no doubt that they would be healed.  The results astounded me and continuously expanded my awareness of the power of vibrational healing.  I was a witness to profound physical and emotional transformation simply through working with an individual's energy field.  I began to realize that these subtle fields which were becoming more real to me, were at the level of cause and that conditions in our physical bodies were merely results of that cause.  I had thought that the energy or auric field was a reflection of the physical body.  I began to see that disease was actually initiated in these subtle fields and slowly permeated the physical, and that as the energy field was cleared, the effect on the physical body was immediate and profound.

I lived a double life for several years, running a successful architectural practice during the day and healing at night. My architectural work supported us financially, which enabled me to offer healing freely, as I was humbled by what was coming through me.  The healing practice developed rapidly and I started to study various healing disciplines. Prominent doctors were referring their more difficult cases to me.  I was connecting with well-known healers around the globe, including Harry Edwards, a famous British healer, and this had a profound influence on me.

In 1976 I was invited to hear a lecture of a world-renowned chiropractor and healer, Dr. William Bahan, who was to change our lives significantly.  Minutes after the lecture we connected deeply, and he invited us to come and study and work with him in the United States, which at the time was synonymous to inviting us to visit the moon!  After studying for two months with Dr. Bahan, learning, amongst other things, a vibrational healing technique called Attunement, which works through the endocrine system, we were invited to spend some time at an educational community in Canada, where we spent the next three years.  Besides coordinating an Attunement practice in the community, I worked as an architect, developing energy- efficient and ecologically sound buildings utilizing solar, wind and other alternative energy sources. This gave me an opportunity to tap into earth energies and become aware of our powerful but delicate relationship with the planet.  I quickly developed an expertise in this field and I found myself lecturing widely on the work we were doing.

The following six months were spent working with the leading architect in energy-efficient buildings.  I had just completed a government-sponsored competition for a solar complex which won first prize and I was offered an enticing opportunity for partnership in the company, when we were once again invited to live in another community.  It seemed that at each time that I was about to become more deeply involved in my architectural work, someone would appear to offer me other choices.  It was clear that architecture was simply a means to fulfilling my purpose in the healing field and life kept reminding me.  

After three additional years in the community, practising and learning vibrational healing, I had a powerful compulsion to initiate a healing centre in the city of Toronto.  So in 1983, with deep trust, we moved into the city and the Natural Health Institute was born.  It included a family of approximately twenty health practitioners, consisting of two holistic medical doctors, a chiropractor, and a host of complementary health disciplines.  I started studying for my B.Sc. in nutrition and it was at this time that I had heard of the seven day tissue Cleansing Program formulated by Dr. V. Irons and Dr. Bernard Jensen.  Impressed with Dr. Jensen's book and the results I had heard of, we took off to a friend's cottage for a week and underwent the detoxifying program.  My body changed completely and I was finally relieved of all digestive symptoms and Merle, who had suffered from chronic asthma since the age of three, has never needed to use an inhaler since.  I came to realize the importance of detoxification as a key to eliminating many adverse physical conditions.  We live in an extremely toxic world and absorb toxins from the air, water and our food.  These toxins accumulate in the fat cells of our bodies and ultimately congest our eliminative organs, create acidity, deplete our bodies of oxygen, and ultimately cause disease.

Having witnessed the dramatic reversal of a multitude of symptoms, I recognized the simplicity of this process. The body has a powerful ability to heal itself, but for it to do so effectively it is necessary to remove the pollution with which it has been overburdened.  For me the important lesson was that the energy systems and physical body were integrated.  In order for true healing to occur through vibrational healing, there needed to be sufficient fuel at the physical level, in the form of nutrients, electrolytes, etc. to carry the energy; the metabolic pathways needed to be opened to accommodate the changes.

Enthusiastic about the results we experienced, we began to offer cleansing and detoxification programs and witnessed equally dramatic results with many others at our magical cottage on a lake outside Toronto, where we ran a cycle of retreats for the next six years.  The word got around about our seven-day cleansing retreats and soon people were coming from all corners of the globe.  We found ourselves travelling to Europe and Israel on a regular basis offering retreats.  Our success, I feel, was a result of the combination of the cleansing, coupled with the energy and emotional balancing that had evolved as a result of the healing work I had done over the years, and the synthesis of the many workshops I had taken.

Since 1973 I had studied a multitude of healing modalities, including massage, reflexology, Body Electronics, Touch for Health, iridology, colon therapy, radionics, homeopathy, acupuncture and Chinese medicine, Total Body Modification, nutrition, Health kinesiology, Educational kinesiology, One Brain and a variety of other kinesiologies. 

In 1991, I was guided to spend several days at the retreat on my own, and in a deep meditative state, I received a map of reflex points on the body and a simple system for balancing them, which was different from anything I had previously done.  Some of the points coincided with other systems, such as Total Body Modification, which is a technique developed by Dr. Victor Frank and taught to chiropractors, but the whole process was completely different. I had yet to test it out.  There had been a good track record for previous inner guidance, so I was quite able to trust that it would indeed work.  On many occasions after doing workshops on healing techniques that were often too complex for my simplicity-loving mind, I would receive a technique that could be done in a much simpler fashion and in a fraction of the time than the one I was struggling with. They always worked. I couldn't wait to try this one out, and when I did I was greatly impressed by the results.

In the fall of 1992, after feeling assured of its success, I felt ready to begin to teach Body Alignment Technique and nervously set a workshop date (I still did not know whether it could be repeated by others).  I was delighted to see that it could be easily duplicated. In fact the results were immediate.  After teaching Module 1 a few times in Toronto, I took off another few days at our retreat and Module 2 came together with more points and procedures.  At this stage I took the show on the road, first to Vancouver then to Hawaii.  The response was great.  When it appeared that the existing Body Alignment Technique students were ready to receive more, Module 3 came together in a similar way.  This comprised a three-day residential experience at our retreat with a small group of experienced students.   

Since October of 1992, I have taught Body Alignment Technique, which currently comprises of five modules, to several thousand people in many countries, to the general public and a large range of health practitioners, including doctors, chiropractors, physiotherapists, psychologists and many complementary practitioners.  The response is increasing exponentially, and it seemed necessary to begin to teach teachers so that more people could learn the technique.

As we move into a new era, there is a need, it seems, to break the genetic patterns so that we are not dragging forward the physical, psychological and emotional patterns of the past. We have convinced ourselves that if our parents and forefathers suffered from certain physical ailments, then we are vulnerable to the same weaknesses.   In Body Alignment, we are demonstrating that some of these patterns may be erased so that we may move forward into new modes of thinking and functioning.  A new dawn of healing is upon us, and we have a choice as to whether or not we participate as a bearer of the dawn.