2009 has been very good to me, and before the clock strikes 12 tomorrow night I wanted to send you all a brief shout out of gratitude for all your support this year. Spot the ways you helped me (and you) to thrive this year:

1. You read Practice Building 101 and/or the blog and sent me delicious emails to let me know how much it helped you. Spectacular words like “lifesaver” and “THANK YOU” (yes, in all caps), and “joyous” were used, which made me feel like my work is worth something, and that is pretty much the best feeling ever.

2. You emailed me to tell me how delighted you were to find The Well Practice after Googling the words “HARO” and “gyrotonic” together. This may be the funniest search engine word combo to lead to my door thus far.

3. You embraced me as your Rolfer in New Haven thereby giving me good news to report on the blog from the ‘practice building in a crap economy’ front. This had the additional perk of saving me from having to report that I was a failure. Whew.

4. You shared my writing with someone you know who could benefit from it and sung The Well Practice’s praises. (Most recently big thanks to Burton Kent of Acupuncture Clinic Marketing. I finally solved the mystery of where all the new acupuncturists were coming from when one of your readers emailed me and told me you’d shared a link with your list. Thanks!)

5. You (Jenn Givler, Honora Wolfe, and Dan Clements and Tara Gignac) wrote fab guest posts!

6. You are one of the following people whose work inspired the hell out and kept me moving forward. Huge thanks to Seth Godin, Lissa Boles, Chris Guillebeau, Jonathan Fields, Havi Brooks, Naomi Dunford, Hugh MacLeod, Melissa Pierce, and Vanessa Scotto (who is amazing even if her website isn’t link-able yet).

7. You turned one year old on October 17th! (You being my blog)

8. You sat across from me over Indian food, or a latte, or in a park, or over the phone, and poured your heart out about what you really needed to be happy in your practice.

9. You gave me this nifty “thank you as a list” idea in your charming Christmas card.

10. You don’t know this, because I haven’t bared my soul to most of you in a moody cafe or anything, but you helped me climb out of the rubble of a very, very challenging 2008 by showing up here and caring about what I had to offer. Thank you.

And last but not least, here were the top posts of the year:

Feeling Grateful (and Hearing Voices)

Un-Guru

Non-Sensical Panic Attacks

Kicking it Off On the Cheap

Practicing Radical Generosity

Why Does the Word “Networking” Make Us All Want to Shower With A Brillo Pad?

Happy New Years! Sending you all lots of love and happy practice wishes for 2010!

* It’s long, I know, but I’m baring my soul here people. Feel free to print it out to save you from screen-staring.

Flash back about thirteen years ago and you’d find me pretty beat down physically. I had a jaw that was completely locked shut and chronic pain in my spine and head that was severe enough that I spent some days focusing simply on getting out of bed. Ugh, I still remember the recurring nightmare that someone had bolted a thick, heavy, steel helmet into my skull and I was fruitlessly trying to find a way to pry it off, unable to even lift my head from the weight and pain of it. These were not my brightest hours.

All this pain and body yuckiness had been (most likely) caused by a birth injury, so I had grown up with some form of chronic pain and seizures since childhood. As a child all the doctors I went to simply scratched their heads, finding it hard to believe that a child could have chronic pain. “Growing pains” they’d say. Seizures they could believe and I was endlessly tested and medicated, but the pain didn’t factor in for them. My family and I didn’t know that there was anywhere to turn other than conventional medicine, so there were a lot of years spent with head scratching MDs.

I don’t mean to turn this into a mythical story- I wasn’t born with a debilitating disease that I had to struggle with. Many are, and I don’t mean to boo hoo my situation into something bigger than it was. I was simply born with a glitch.

Because this glitch had always been with me, it took me until I was this broken, at age twenty-two, to realize that not everyone was feeling the way I was. My pain wasn’t normal. Something was off.

I went the only route I knew how to take and found a doctor who specialized in Temporal Mandibular Joint Dysfunction. He was a part of a new clinic out of Tufts Dental Hospital in Boston that was treating severe TMJ without surgery.

Meeting Dr. Murad Padamsee changed my life (and you thought I’d be bashing the docs… nah, they’re lifesavers too). He changed my life not only because he helped me to get my jaw open again- and without sharp pointy instruments and a titanium jaw replacement, yay!- but also because he realized that complete healing has to take into consideration the whole patient.

Because my pain wasn’t improving, he sent me off on a quest to find some good bodywork (other than a vague idea about massage, I didn’t really know what he meant) and meditation classes. That he saw the whole of me, and sent me off to find the things that would help, was profound.

I contacted Joe Wheatley, a Rolfing practitioner, feeling nervous and seriously fatalistic. I had spent more than a year now traveling an hour each way from Providence to Boston to see specialists three to four days per week, and this was on top of college and a part time job. I was ridiculously exhausted and didn’t have it in me to undertake a new quest. I wanted to get better. Now.

I remember telling Joe on the phone that I was truly at the end of my rope and that if he didn’t think he could help me that he really should just let me know so that I could find someone who could. Joe and I are friends now, so I can tell you that the man loves a challenge. He just told me to come on in for one session, and that if I didn’t feel any result at all, he wouldn’t take money from me. That felt like a pretty solid deal, so off I went into the wilderness of Rhode Island for my very first Rolfing session.

After that session I not only paid Joe, but I felt quite sure that if he had required that I sign over my first born child in order to could continue the work, I would have (fortunately no such deal was struck- my firstborn is pretty dang cute).

I could turn my head to the right for the first time in years and I felt my pain reduce by an astonishing degree with just that one session. Joe and this magical Rolfing stuff had found a way to take the steel helmet off, which was pretty freaking euphoric for me.

I knew that day that I could be free and the words that my mind kept screaming to me as I drove home were, “Why the hell didn’t I know this existed before!!” A lifetime spent trying to ignore the pain when there was help for me all along seemed ridiculous. There’s nothing that pisses me off more than needless suffering. It’s, well, needless.

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in my local yoga studio, Fresh Yoga, in their wide-open and gorgeously light filled space. I was one of about twenty students who had shown up for a workshop on how Alexander Technique can be incorporated into one’s yoga practice.

I sat on my mat and watched Rachel, my Alexander teacher, work with the first student in front of the class. As she worked I watched the student light up and have that series of a-has that we can all have when we find a way to be more happily inhabiting our bodies. She got giddy and looked like she might cry for joy. I know this moment well.

As I watched this woman light up a wave of extreme gratitude washed through me. It was actually kind of shocking in how intense it was. It was like this physical warmth that ran right through me and said loudly (yes, I’m hearing voices now), “Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting me serve this community.”

In many ways, that “why the hell didn’t I know this existed before!!” voice has never gone away. I want more people to have that giddy, cry for joy moment that this student was having in the Alexander workshop and that I had after my first Rolfing session (and many times since). To steal a favorite Alan Keightley quote from my friend Chris Guillebeau, “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.”

I became a Rolfing practitioner nine years ago because I wanted to contribute to the number of a-ha moments going around. In recent years, I decided that if I can help more wellness providers to give more people that moment- then the word will spread in a much bigger way and there will be less of the maddening needless suffering.

That decision led me here, to the creation of The Well Practice.

So this Thanksgiving I’m thankful for a birth injury, chronic pain, all the people and work that led me out of it and into a whole new world.

And mostly thank you to all of you. Thanks for doing the work that you do and spreading more a-has and healing goodness around. It’s needed. Keep it up.

What are you feeling grateful for as we roll into Thanksgiving?

My dear friend and colleague, Lissa Boles from True Callings, has recently been interviewing me as an associate faculty member for her True Callings Tribe*.

In our most recent chat she and I were talking about how I got into Rolfing and my experience trying to grow my first practice. Yes, trying to grow not growing. As most of you know, it was three years of stumbling blindly into brick walls. I’ve always talked about the cause of this clusterf*ck as the result of my total lack of knowledge about how to grow my practice. Which is true. However, what Lissa illuminated for me is that something else had gone missing in those years- my Why.

Because I had had such a profound healing experience with Rolfing as a client, when I went to school to study it, my number one, super potent Why was clear: people don’t need to suffer so much- and I want to do the thing that taught me that lesson and helped me to heal. (it’s worth noting that this is the same Why that has me teaching practice building- maybe we all just have one over-arching Why?)

However, once I got out of school and was faced with the fact that there weren’t lines of clients waiting for my services (hard to believe they weren’t shoving fistfuls of bills into my hands just to experience this thing with the wonderful name Rolfing), my Why became a stranger. Suddenly my panicked subconscious was whispering a new Why in my ear: “I need to figure out some way to convince people to pay me so that I can do this thing I love.” Um, yuck. Desperation + manipulation + self-loathing = no clients.

When I, in my new-grad-strapped-for-cash-lost-in-space state, believed that this was my Why, I went running from it. How could I possibly follow through on a Why that I was so averse to? And so I didn’t try to convince people to pay me to do the thing I loved. I hid. I hoped people would somehow find me and benefit from my work. Did that work out? Not so much.

When I moved to Brooklyn to start from scratch (after 3 years of hiding out and scraping by in Napa) I got busy and decided not to hide anymore. As many of you reading along know, this is when I fell in love with practice building and it all clicked. However, my conversation with Lissa reminded me that the decision to take action on growing my practice started with re-framing my Why.

After the move, I was surveying what my options would be if I didn’t make a change- another 3 years of silently suffering, another place where I had to work 4 part-time jobs on top of my Rolfing practice, another 3 years barely making ends meet- I got pissed. And when I got pissed the booming voice of my true Why came yelling out at me, “Heeeeeeeeey! Listen up you self-loathing, pain in my ass! (my inner Why can be kind of a pain in my ass) You’re offering people a gift for Gods sake, not asking them to do you a favor!” And with that it was like someone had flipped the light switch on. What if the Rolfer who had helped me- or the myriad of wellness practitioners who had saved my bacon since then- had never gotten it together to get the word out about their practices? Think of how I would have missed out. Which begged the question- who might be missing out because I’m not putting myself out there? Getting my Why back was the rocket fuel behind the whole thing. Once I had that, and I started taking action, it was 3 months to a full practice. In 3 months I accomplished what I never could in the previous 3 years.

What’s your true Why? Are there any false Why’s floating around in your beliefs?

*The True Callings Tribe is Lissa’s way to share insights from people who are living what she calls the ‘callings led life’ in other words- those of us who are both crazy enough and wise enough to live the life that follows that inner voice. If you want to listen to the full interview I had with her, you can find it here.  

So here’s the deal my fair readers- I was just about to sign myself up for a blog critique from the lovely Chris G, when he posted a contest to win the aforementioned critique, and a bunch of other fabulousness connected with the Social Media Success Summit. So this entry is to let you and Chris Garrett know why I want to nab the prize and bring back all the juicy info to you.

*Side note: It’s an amazing teacher line up and the delightful part is that you don’t have to travel- yahoo! Go forth and check it out- it’s a great opportunity to learn a boatload about social media. Without further ado- here’s my why me:

Before I found Rolfing, I was a sunk ship; A total wreck. Some of you know the whole story already, and for the sake of keeping the recap short, I can say simply that pre-Rolfing I was dealing with 22 years of chronic pain (I’d had a birth injury, not so fun), a jaw that was locked shut, doctors telling me I’d have to accept that I would be eating soft food for the rest of my life, and just general 92-year-old in a 22-year-old’s body unpleasantness.

Then I had the great good fortune to have my conventional medical doctor tell me that I had to get into meditation classes and someone’s bodywork office stat.

What!?! I’d had no idea that there were these other options. Because my wonky-ness had started with a birth injury, I’d had a lifetime of doctors generally scratching their heads at my chronic pain and other symptoms. But now there was this whole world of other options for getting well. Needless to say, after one session of Rolfing I knew my life had dramatically changed. I’ve been (mostly- I’m still human) pain-free and happily eating solid food for 12 years now.

But the thing that’s stuck with me most from my experience is this: why oh why didn’t I f@#*ing know that there was this whole world of other options sooner. Since my Rolfing hallelujah experience, I’ve been equally delighted with the discovery of many other genius modalities- homeopathy, Shiatsu, acupuncture, yoga, Gyrotonic- I could go on since I’m a wellness junkie… But each time I go back to that same initial reaction: more people need to know this exists.

The trouble is, there’s an art to letting the world know that something exists, and we wellness providers are trained only to be technicians. Then we’re pushed out into the world where we’re asked to be small business owners and tribe leaders. And yet, our schools give us little to no (or worse, incorrect) information on how to spread the word and sustain ourselves. 50% of acupuncturists are no longer in practice at the 5 year mark. The average career span of a massage therapist is 18 months. Are we flakes? Dim bulbs? No. We’re missing the foundational element that allows us to share our skills.

These days, I find myself in the incredibly happy position to be acting as a translator between the marketing world and the wellness world. I’ve fallen deeply in love with both for the same reason: you can change people’s lives.

While the word marketing often gives people an icky vibe in the wellness world (we need a new word!)- when its powers are used for good and not evil you can spread the ideas that matter; The ones that can change the world. We’re at an incredibly exciting time in history where suddenly it’s no longer the mega-corporations who have the only access to marketing platforms. It’s not a ‘who has the most dollars wins’ game anymore. Technology is rapidly evolving and gives every individual equal opportunity to create their own platform and spread their own ideas. The Social Media Success Summit is exactly the place where we can all learn how to use the tools that are at our fingertips, just waiting to be put to use for the higher good. I get goose bumps every time I think of what this means for the world- we’re on the cusp of some serious big-ness here.

This blog is my way to do my part to make sure that more people know these options in healing exist. For people to hear about them- wellness providers need to have thriving practices. Winning the grand prize for the Social Media Success Summit would fuel my passion and expand my toolkit so that I can help more of my wellness peeps get out there and connect to the people who need them. And for all of you blog readers out there who are working to grow your practice- get thee to the Summit- and enter this same contest to win for yourself!

Those of you familiar with my bio know that I was a Rolfing practitioner from 2000 to 2008, and that these days most of my time is spent raising my sweet boy and writing about my own adventures in practice building. My practices- in Napa and Sonoma, CA and in Brooklyn, NY- were built from scratch having moved to both of these cities without contacts, clients, or office space (or savings or trust fund- so I couldn’t afford to dawdle). It was the old throw a dart at a map, show up, and make it work routine. By throwing myself into the fire this way I learned a tremendous amount about practice building and even fell in love with it. My practice building experiences are the inspiration that led me to start this blog and to write my book.

But here’s the thing: what that means is that the last practice I started from scratch was in Brooklyn in 2004. The world has changed A LOT since 2004. There are huge upsides, thanks mainly to technology: Yelp! Wordpress! Zazzle! And one downside of note: the punishing economy. It’s occuring to me that to kick back and reflect from the perspective of the good ‘ol days is not the most authentic way to write this blog or to publish my book. I need to be out there with all ya’ll making it happen.

That brings me to the experiment: I just so happen to have moved to another new city where I don’t know anyone who isn’t family: New Haven, CT. I’m going to kick off a brand spanking new practice and write here about what exactly I do that both does and doesn’t work for me. Think of me as your very own guinea pig and read along to avoid my mistakes and copy my successes. I have the benefit of knowing how to grow a practice quickly, but the knowledge I’ve gained is my only upside. Everything else is starting from step one: I need office space, a website, business cards, and all the other uber important things that will get the word out about why the good people of New Haven should invest in Rolfing in a down economy.

Follow along with the blog posts and we’ll learn together! Click the shiny RSS button and subscribe so you don’t miss any of the ups and downs- I’ll be posting twice a week.

*side note: I just read The Think Big Manifesto and my brain was exploding with great ideas through the whole thing. It’s a good read if you’re interested in making a big impact by way of being totally authentic. Gotta love that.