This is an article about finding one's passion and the success, failure, miracles, growth, confidence, and trepidation that go along with it. In other words, it's about the yin and yang of life. Or in my own symbolic interpretation, my journey to become a Practitioner and Instructor of the BodyTalk System.
 
I found BodyTalk in 2003 while living in the Cayman Islands. It was a miracle of sorts right from the start. I received a call at 8:00 at night from a friend who was starting out adding BodyTalk to her practice. She said she was going to an introductory speech about something that another dear friend was involved in. I was upset my other friend had not told me about the event but, wanting to support her, I jumped in my car and drove to the other side of the island even though I would arrive in the middle of her talk. I opened the door expecting my friend to be in front of a few people and to my surprise there were about 45 people listening to a tall, blonde German BodyTalk Instructor, Dr. Marita Roussey (Marita Kufe, at the time). You see, her trip had been paid for and she'd been brought down to Grand Cayman due to the miraculous change in the allergies of a little girl who'd had only two BodyTalk sessions in Marita's Florida office.

The whole subject of BodyTalk and the ability to ask the body what its priorities are and the techniques to quicken the body's natural innate healing ability struck me right between the eyes. I immediately asked how I could learn this BodyTalk "thing." I don't know if you've ever had this feeling ... I couldn't wait the two months until Dr. Kufe came back to teach what was then called Module 1 (the first part of BodyTalk Fundamentals). So I flew to Florida, rented a car and stayed in a hotel for a week. On fire, I signed up for Module 2, flew, rented and stayed in another location all during the two months before Dr. Kufe was to return to Grand Cayman.
 
I learned that the International BodyTalk Association held regular Conferences, so I went to my first one in order to "interview" as many practitioners and instructors as possible. I asked for their best cases, their most problematic cases, their prices, their hardships and their wins using the BodyTalk System.
 
After a category 5 hurricane wiped my husband's and my house from existence, I took the advice of a small piece of paper found on our beach (backyard). It was an angel card that said "Transformation," so we plugged along. Indeed, this is an article about perseverance--not just for me, but as a message for us all. Perhaps our classes aren't big enough, perhaps our home base is not large enough, perhaps we don't even know how to let people know we exist, or perhaps we doubt our ability ... I mean we are human, so this all comes with the territory.
 
Being homeless, we ended up over the next two years going all the way to Thailand and then circling back and living in a room at my senior instructor, Dr. Kufe's house for five months. This is where I trained as a BodyTalk instructor and volunteered at the IBA office. I was going strong. I then moved back to Grand Cayman, set up the first BodyTalk Fundamentals seminar in Scotland and then went to Ireland to do the same. There were the challenges of having to put out brochures while walking in the snow and having the coordinators turn on you, but it was all just part of the yin and yang balance to the wonderful students and the breakthroughs we had in class. Then there was the BodyTalk Access class in Grand Cayman with 52 students, and the class down in Abaco where we had to take a little boat from the island we lived to the island where the seminar was held. I was even invited to teach Access at the Miami National BodyTalk Forum and had a wonderful class of 38 students, the oldest person being 92. So many of these students wanted to go onto Fundamentals. It was fantastic. I was really on a roll now! ...
 
Then, as it happens, life takes over again. A mystery involving my husband's job meant we "had" to leave the island of Grand Cayman. We went all the way to the place where my husband had roots--Greece. So, I type this article today from a 20-mile-long "island of longevity," the ancient "healing island" of Ikaria. Ikaria is one of the world's five Blue Zones--a term coined in a 2005 National Geographic article for the regions of the world where people live much longer than average.
 
My successes with The BodyTalk System keep me going, although oftentimes it feels like limping along. As many of us have surely done, I've flown to another city (for me, Athens, to open up Greece to BodyTalk), advertised, taught, and then had trouble following up due to being in a different location. (Feeling a bit like a hamster at this point.) Just when I feel I can't keep putting the money, time and effort into the system, I'll have a blow-away case and, once again, will be overcome with the brilliance of BodyTalk and my luck to have run into the system that John Veltheim has put together.
 
Sometimes I feel I am going beyond expectations. For instance, I went to Athens to do an intro night. On the way, while standing on the train, my wallet (with money, identification and credit card) was pick-pocketed. This was quite a situation in a foreign city where I did not speak the language. However, I'm hooked on bringing these amazing tools into other people's lives, and I'm so grateful to have this bag of tools as part of me. When I think of the amazing clients and situations that have been helped by BodyTalk, it keeps me going. There was the woman who was sexually abused (tied by her wrists to a bed) as a 4-year-old who had nightmares for 41 years and 17 suicide attempts; after ONE 10-minute session, she didn't have another nightmare and the burning in her wrist was gone. Then there was the doctor who was very skeptical in class; I made him my demo client and after finding the exact bacterial issue in his toe, he was blown away and became my best student. Then there was the brain-damaged little girl who had been out of school for three months and went back the day after her BodyTalk session. This list goes on ... and on and on ... and I keep plugging on ... knowing SHIFT happens. Hope you will as well.