Fascial Therapy Institute Australia - FTIA, 27 Sands Boulevard, Torquay (2026)

04/09/2026

In the next few weeks I'll be starting my new Fascial Therapy Webinar series that I had run with my esteemed colleague Craig Smith at Club Physio which we called Core Connections, whose untimely passing in January, has many of us still grieving him.

This is a new process for me as I'm going to use Riverside as my platform. If your interested in any of my webinars could you please PM me and let me know and privately if you wish leave your email address, so that I can compile an up to date database for those interested.

Initially there will be a live and replay availability, with differing price structure once I figure out how all this will work.
As always thank you for all your support through the years.

30/08/2026

The Words We Haven't Found Yet:
Fascia, Evidence, and What Happens Under My Hands

I want to describe something I do most weeks before I say anything else about research or philosophy, because it is where this whole piece actually starts for me.

A client lies on their side. I hold the knee and the ankle and roll the leg slowly forward and back, searching for the position where the hip finds its own greatest ease. When I find it, I stop, simply hold, and continue to track and perceive stillness or motion through my felt sense. And yet the whole hip, knee and ankle complex begins to change under my hands — softens, deloads, settles into something different than what I started with.

Sometimes I feel pulsation. Sometimes fuzziness. Sometimes absence, especially when palpating the tibia or femur itself, at the condyles or along the shaft. Sometimes the bone feels icy cold. All of this is a daily occurrence. None of it is out of the ordinary, and yet it is, isn’t it? What I feel is often called illusion, or pareidolia — the mind finding a pattern where none exists. To me it is not imaginary. It is real.

People often cannot find words for what they feel while this is happening. They describe warmth, or a sense of flow, or simply say they don’t know how to explain it. Something shifts. I did not manufacture that shift. I positioned the tissue and waited, and the change arrived on its own terms.

This happens often enough, and predictably enough, that I trust it. What I have never been comfortable with is the next question clients sometimes bring me: they want that shift to be an emotional release, specifically — they arrive believing their fascia is holding a trauma, and they want me to release it. I have to tell them that is not how it works. I cannot conjure an emotional release. When one happens, it is authentic and spontaneous, and it announces itself in the body, not in a story I supply: a change in breathing, rapid eye movement, a fasciculation, a pulse you can suddenly feel at the carotid, a sudomotor response — the skin's own involuntary reaction. Those are autonomic phenomena, arising from a real state change in the tissue. They are not something I produce on request, and I will not pretend to a client that I can.

What the Research Has Been Confirming

I have spent this year reading two very different bodies of writing that, without knowing it, have been confirming what my hands already told me.

One is a live argument between anatomists. In 2026, Neumann and colleagues published a paper in Clinical Anatomy defending a strict, traditional definition of fascia — fibrous membranous sheets, classifiable within the body's existing anatomical systems. Nemetz, Stecco, Schleip and colleagues replied that this cannot hold, because fascia behaves as a continuous, body-wide network that resists the clean boundaries dissection has always imposed on it. I recognise both sides of that argument in my own hands. What I feel under the knee and ankle is never an isolated sheet. It is continuous with everything around it, and it changes as a whole.

The other is a run of careful writing correcting how practitioners explain what touch does. Mechanotransduction — real, established biology describing how cells respond to mechanical cues — keeps getting stretched into claims about tissue repair the cell studies never demonstrated. Neuroplasticity, the nervous system's ordinary capacity to adapt, keeps getting inflated from “the brain changes in response to touch” into “massage rewires the brain.” And the felt sense of a fascial release keeps getting treated as proof that tissue itself has changed, when the more honest reading is that something changed in what the person felt — which is real, and matters, and is not the same claim.

I recognise this correction too, because it is the same discipline I already practise with clients who want an emotional release I cannot supply. Don’t claim the mechanism. Describe what you actually observed.

A third voice pushes further still. John Sharkey, in a 2026 paper titled Fascia Is Not a System, argues that fascia fails to meet the formal anatomical criteria for a system at all — not because it is fragmented, but because it is a continuum that underlies the very idea of separate systems in the first place. Development, on this reading, does not begin with the cardiovascular system and the nervous system as distinct entities that fascia later connects. It begins with continuity, out of which those systems are later described and named. Sharkey's argument is the most radical of the three, and it is the one that comes closest to what I feel with my hands: not a system among systems, but the ground the systems were carved out of.

What Recovery Taught Me About Not Knowing

In June this year I was hospitalised and became, for a while, as weak as a kitten. Recovering from that, I noticed something in myself I still cannot fully account for: a deepening of perception.

A sense — I use that word carefully — that surviving something extreme had triggered some kind of energetic recalibration.
I do not know if that is true. It may be exactly what it sounds like. It may also be a story I have built to make sense of a mind that, after serious illness, simply had the noise stripped out of it and started noticing what was already there to be noticed. I hold both of those possibilities at once, and I have decided I do not need to resolve which one is correct in order to trust what I am now doing with my hands. That not-knowing, held without needing to force an answer, is itself the thing I want this piece to be about.

I will admit something else here, because this piece has asked everyone else to be honest about their claims and it would be a poor argument if it were not equally honest about mine. I notice a pull in myself toward frameworks that would settle this more comfortably than it wants to be settled — toward language borrowed from physics, toward theories of subtle fields and energetic memory that promise a mechanism waiting behind what I feel under my hands. That pull is not always led by evidence. It is led by something in me that wants the felt sense of threshold to have an explanation available to it. I do not think the honest response is to suppress that pull, and I do not think the honest response is to indulge it as though it were established. The honest response is to notice it, name it here, and keep holding it apart from what I can actually claim to know.

It is easy to read the recovery story as a digression from the anatomists and the evidence-writers. I don’t think it is one. They are all practising the same discipline from different directions — staying with what is actually observed, resisting the pull to close the gap with a story that feels satisfying but outruns the evidence. Mine happens to be a story about my own hands and my own recovery rather than about a cell culture or a cadaver. The discipline required is identical.

Language for What I Already Do

Maurice Merleau-Ponty gives me language for something I have felt at the table for decades without a name for it: the difference between the corps objectif, the body as object — the body of dissection, of Neumann's careful definitions — and the corps vécu, the lived body, the body a person actually inhabits and feels from the inside. When I hold that hip in stillness and wait, I am not acting on an object. Touch, Merleau-Ponty noticed, is always double: the hand that senses is, in the same moment, aware of itself sensing. That doubling is exactly what a client is registering when they cannot find the words for what is happening — they are not confused. They are accurately describing something mechanistic vocabulary was never built to hold.

Henri Bortoft's distinction between a counterfeit whole — reassembled afterward from its parts, which is really just the parts wearing a disguise — and an authentic whole, present from the start and never built by addition, describes precisely why I cannot treat the hip, the knee and the ankle as three things I am separately adjusting. What changes under my hands changes as one thing, or it does not really change at all.

Martin Buber's distinction between I-It and I-Thou gives me the cleanest account yet of the line I already draw with clients who want a manufactured release. I-It is the register of assessing and using — necessary, and most of clinical language lives there. I-Thou is the register of meeting rather than knowing about: something arising between two people that belongs to neither one alone, and cannot be produced to order. That is exactly why I tell clients I cannot conjure their release. It was never mine to produce.

The Words We Are Still Looking For.

None of this settles the vocabulary question, and I am wary of anyone — myself included — who proposes a tidy replacement and calls it finished. I am part of an ongoing effort among colleagues to find language for fascia and touch that does not default to mechanism — words that hold the felt, lived experience of a session without either overclaiming a hidden mechanism or dismissing what clients report simply because it resists measurement. We have not landed on that vocabulary yet. I am not sure a single vocabulary is even the right goal. What feels more honest is testing candidate words against what actually happens at the table, the way I have had to test “release”, “threshold” and “acceptance” against decades of hands-on experience before I trusted any of them.

What I can offer with confidence is this: the softening I feel under my hands is real. The fact that neither I nor the current research can fully explain why does not make it less real — it makes the explaining a separate, ongoing piece of work from the doing. My recovery this year taught me to hold that gap without needing to close it prematurely. That, I think, is what acceptance actually means in this work — not passivity, but the discipline of staying present to what is happening without insisting it have meaning, or any comprehensible rationale, before it makes sense to that person's own experience.

Steven Goldstein
Director, Fascial Therapy Institute Australia
fascialrelease.com

24/08/2026

FT5 The Psoas — Deep Front Line: Diaphragm, Thorax & Pelvis
Two-Day Practical Masterclass with Steven Goldstein | October 24–25, 2026 | Ocean Grove, Victoria

The psoas isn't just a hip flexor. It's the muscle that runs from the last rib and lumbar spine down through the pelvis to the top of the femur (thigh bone) — and increasingly, it's understood as a relational structure, wired into breathing, the viscera and the nervous system, not an isolated mover.

In this two-day practical masterclass, join Steven Goldstein to explore the psoas through the lens of the Deep Front Line — the body's deepest myofascial (muscle-and-connective-tissue) pathway — and its relationship to the diaphragm, thorax and pelvis. Drawing on Liz Koch's work on the psoas as the body's "messenger," alongside osteopathic and visceral manual therapy approaches, this course blends clear biomechanical technique with a fuller, embodied view of this remarkable muscle.

Over two days you'll:
● Build core Fascial Therapy skills — ease and bind assessment (finding the direction tissue moves most freely, to guide treatment) and tensegrity-based technique
● Trace the Deep Front Line from foot to jaw, with hands-on work at key stations along the way
● Explore the diaphragm–psoas–viscera relationship, including how breathing mechanics influence psoas tone
● Practice visceral techniques for the colon and abdominal viscera, including rebound/recoil and Toldt's fascia release
● Learn practical assessment tools — Thomas Test variations, joint centration, and reactive muscle relationships from TMJ to pelvis
● Consider the somato-emotional dimension of psoas holding patterns and diaphragmatic breathing

Suitable for remedial massage therapists, myotherapists, osteopaths and physiotherapists wanting a deeper, more relational approach to core and pelvic work.

📍 Ocean Grove, Victoria 📅 October 24–25, 2026 💬 PM me for details

19/08/2026

FASCIAL THERAPY INSTITUTE AUSTRALIA
Sciatica Series — Part 1 of 3

As I ponder and update to my FT2 NFM Neurofascial Mobilisation Masterclass, I pondered cases of sciatica that are tricky at best.
One such is described below. If this interests you to learn more, please PM me and I'm looking at September or October to deliver this masterclass in Ocean Grove, Victoria.

Sciatica That Won't Resolve? Meet the Triple Crush.

Most sciatic pain gets treated as a single problem with a single cause: a disc, a tight piriformis, a pinched nerve root. Sometimes that's exactly what it is. But when the leg pain won't fully settle no matter how precisely you treat that one site, it's worth asking a different question — not “where is the compression?” but “how many compressions?”

What double crush actually means

The double crush concept was first described by Upton and McComas in 1973. Their observation was simple but far-reaching: a nerve that is already mildly irritated at one point along its length becomes far more vulnerable to irritation at a second point further along — even when that second point, on its own, wouldn't normally cause a problem. The nerve is a single continuous structure carrying its own blood supply and axonal transport (the internal system that moves nutrients and proteins along the length of the nerve fibre) the whole way from spinal cord to foot. A mild restriction near the top can lower the nerve's tolerance everywhere below it.

For the sciatic nerve, that means a person can have a mild, almost silent, irritation at the lumbar nerve root (where the nerve exits the spine) that isn't causing much on its own — but which primes the nerve to become symptomatic when it also meets restriction at the piriformis (a deep hip rotator muscle the sciatic nerve passes under or, in some people, through). Neither site alone explains the picture. Together, they do. And with the sciatic nerve, there's a third layer to add — because at some point along its length, it stops being one nerve.

The bifurcation: why this can become a triple crush

The sciatic nerve is really two nerves travelling in a shared sheath: the tibial and common peroneal (fibular) divisions. They usually separate at the apex of the popliteal fossa (the diamond-shaped hollow at the back of the knee), though in a meaningful number of people that split happens much higher — sometimes within the pelvis, occasionally with one division passing through piriformis itself while the other passes beneath it. That variant is worth knowing about on its own, separate from double crush, because it changes what a piriformis-related entrapment can look like.

Once the nerve has split, each branch runs on to its own separate vulnerable point further down the leg. The common peroneal nerve wraps laterally around the neck of the fibula, just below and outside the knee, where it sits close to the surface — the classic fibular tunnel entrapment site. From there it supplies the front and outside of the lower leg and the top of the foot. The tibial nerve continues down the back of the leg and passes through the tarsal tunnel, on the inside of the ankle behind the medial malleolus (the bony bump on the inner ankle), supplying the sole of the foot.

Put those two facts together and a sciatic presentation can genuinely be a triple crush rather than a double one: irritation at the lumbar root, a proximal restriction at piriformis or the bifurcation itself, and a distal entrapment on whichever branch is more involved — fibular head for the peroneal division, tarsal tunnel for the tibial division. Three sites, one continuous nerve, cumulative effect.

Next in this series: once the nerve has split into two branches, where the symptoms show up below the knee becomes a genuine clue to which branch — and which site — needs your attention next.

Reference: Upton, A.R.M. & McComas, A.J. (1973). The double crush in nerve entrapment syndromes. The Lancet.

14/08/2026

ON LINES, KEYSTONES, AND THE TURN TOWARD ROTATION

A note on framing, for the Spiral Line masterclass
Steven Goldstein, Fascial Therapy Institute Australia - FTIA

A colleague recently pushed back on something I have taught for years: the use of myofascial “lines” as an organising model. His concern — shared publicly, and taken here in the spirit it was offered — was that lines can become a filter, a “limiting prejudice” that leads a practitioner to expect connection where they should instead simply be present with whatever the body shows them.

I do not fully agree with him. But the exchange did something useful: it caught me mid-shift, in material I am developing right now, and gave me cause to make that shift explicit rather than incidental.

The reason for lines was always relationship

Earlier in my teaching, I organised fascial relationships primarily through continuous myofascial lines — tracing tissue from one anatomical landmark to another. My reason for this was never that I believed the line itself was the literal, singular truth of the tissue. It was relational. A line gives a beginner a way to feel that the body is not a collection of separate parts — that pulling here shows up over there, that the system talks to itself across distance. Continuity and relationship were the real lesson; the line was simply the vehicle for teaching it.

That reason has not gone away. What has shifted is the vehicle.
From continuity along a path to load concentrated at hinges
As my own clinical thinking has matured, I have come to see rotation and torsion — the spiral and twisting forces that move through the body’s midline — as a more fundamental way to teach that same relational truth than tissue continuity alone. A line model asks: what connects to what, along a path? A keystone model asks something related, but different: where does the body concentrate its rotational load, and how do those points communicate with each other?

The relationship is still the point. It is simply no longer a straight line demonstrating it — it is a set of hinges, coupled to one another, each one a place where the whole system’s torsion has to resolve. Less a track to follow. More a conversation between distant points, carried on through rotation rather than a direct line between them.

The keystone segments

My Spiral Line masterclass keeps a light reference to classical lines for this reason — they remain a useful, immediate way to show a less experienced practitioner that the body is relational before anything else. But the primary architecture of the course is built on segmental keystones:

T4–8 dorsal hinge — the upper-mid back region where rotational forces concentrate.

T12–L2 thoracolumbar junction — where the rigid, rib-bearing spine meets the more mobile lower back.

L1–L3 and L4–5 — successive lumbar transition points carrying rotational load toward the pelvis.

C7–T2 — the base of the neck, where the head’s mobility meets the relatively fixed upper back.

These keystones are coupled by counter-rotational fascial sleeves running between them. Together they give the model its anatomical credence: they are identifiable, testable points where torsional load transfers through the system — not an assumed continuity stretched along a line’s full length. But they still do the same essential work a line always did for me. They teach relationship.

A working hypothesis, held lightly

I hold this framework, as I have held every model before it, as a working hypothesis rather than settled doctrine — offered because it has proven clinically useful, and open to revision as understanding deepens further.

More on the keystone model — its anatomical basis, its clinical application, and how it relates to the segments above — will follow in subsequent posts.

— Steven Goldstein, Director, Fascial Therapy Institute Australia See less

12/08/2026

Over the years my hands have been finding something that no single framework fully explains on its own to me — a whole-body tension pattern organised around specific spinal segments, released not by force but by taking a joint to its first barrier and simply waiting for it to yield.

I'm developing a new two-day masterclass around this: Spiral Line — Rotational, Torsional and Helical Approaches to the Fascial Form. The Segmental Keystone

The method itself is straightforward to describe, harder to teach well: assess ease and bind at a spinal segment, take it — usually from sidelying position through a counter-twist, arm and shoulder drawn behind the thorax — to the point of first restriction, and then wait and hold there.. Not push. Hold. The variable in this instance is time.

The tissue changes under your hands when the mechanoreceptors (the sensors in the joint and fascia that respond to sustained, gentle load) do their work.

This builds on the respect work of many — Myers, Stecco, Vleeming, Janda, and the gait and recoil research of James Earls and Gary Carter all give credence and shape my understanding.
What I'm adding is a way I’ve found where the pattern locks, and releasing it positionally rather than forcing it. This is likely the most ambitious course I've put together.

Before I commit to a date and venue — would this be of interest to you? Drop a comment or send a message if you'd want to be part of the first offering locally in Ocean Grove, Victoria Australia, and then hopefully later internationall

11/08/2026

Everyone's debating whether the biomechanical model is outdated, and for the most part it is. Fair enough — the caution around language and what we attribute to touch is warranted. But a full quarter century on from Thomas Myers first mapping the Arm Lines, I still find them clinically useful.

The short version:
→ The arm runs on four connected myofascial lines — superficial and deep, front and back — linking spine and ribs all the way out to the hand.

→ Joints act, muscles react. A restricted thoracic facet or rib ring shows up as tightness anywhere along that line.

It starts with the pattern: a rib group in inhalation or exhalation restriction. Find the key rib, release it at the costotransverse joint, and the group has greater potential to self-correct — the whole arm line unloads, no compression required.

Zoom into one rib: it's a closed kinematic ring — sternocostal joint anteriorly, costotransverse joint posteriorly. Three arm lines tap off that ring directly, so a restriction anywhere on it has somewhere specific to go.

Widen the lens: the sternum is the bilateral gauge for the whole system — manubrium to xiphoid, tied through T3–T7, driving both arm lines at once.

This is exactly the map we're working from at FT17: Myofascial Arm Lines & the Thoracic Spine/Scapular Complex — September 5–6, Petersham, Sydney, via Terra Rosa.
https://terrarosa.com.au/.../myofascial-arm-lines-thorax..

03/08/2026

THE SPIRITUAL AND ENERGETIC LINEAGE

Consciousness, the Biofield, and the Healing Presence
Part 2 of 3

A Companion Pre-Read for All Courses — Facebook Blog Series
Steven Goldstein

The First Academic Recognition: Therapeutic Touch
Dolores Krieger (1921–2019) and Dora Kunz (1904–1999)

In 1972, at New York University’s Division of Nursing, something unprecedented occurred: a healing modality based on the conscious direction of the human energy field was taught for the first time within a fully accredited university programme. Dolores Krieger, PhD, RN, Professor of Nursing at NYU, had met Dora Kunz and been transformed by the encounter. Krieger had the academic credibility and the research skills; Kunz had the perceptual gifts and the clinical wisdom. Together they developed Therapeutic Touch — a meditative healing practice adapted from the ancient laying on of hands, designed specifically for health professionals.

Krieger’s central insight — and the insight that made Therapeutic Touch teachable — was that the capacity for healing touch is not a special gift reserved for the few but a natural human capacity that can be developed by anyone who has compassion and the willingness to learn. This was a radical democratisation of healing. It said that the ability to help another person heal through conscious, intentional touch is not magic or mysticism but a trainable clinical skill. That claim has been tested in hundreds of research studies since 1972, and the evidence, while not without controversy, consistently supports the view that something measurable occurs when a skilled Therapeutic Touch practitioner works with a patient.

Dolores Krieger died in 2019 at the age of ninety-seven, still writing. Her final book, A Healer’s Journey to Intuitive Knowing, was completed before her death and published posthumously. She had spent fifty years training nurses, physicians, and other health professionals in Therapeutic Touch, watching it spread from her NYU classroom into hospitals, hospices, and healthcare settings on every continent. The Therapeutic Touch International Association continues her work.

“Healing is not something done to the patient. It is something that happens between the healer and the patient, in the space of genuine compassionate attention.” — Dolores Krieger

The Scientific Foundation: Valerie Hunt and the Measurement of the Field
Valerie V. Hunt (1916–2014)

Valerie Virginia Hunt was Professor Emeritus of the Department of Physiological Sciences at UCLA and the first scientist to measure the human biofield in a laboratory setting. She died in 2014 at ninety-seven — the same age as Krieger, a coincidence that seems fitting given the parallel nature of their contributions.
Hunt’s significance for this lineage is precise: she provided the instrumental measurements that gave the observations of clairvoyants like Dora Kunz and Rosalyn Bruyere their scientific grounding. Working with high frequency electromyographic equipment — initially developed for space biology research with NASA — she detected and recorded electromagnetic field activity at the skin surface adjacent to the traditional chakra locations, in frequency ranges far above those associated with muscle, heart, or brain activity. Normal muscle frequency reaches approximately 225 Hz; the heart reaches 250 Hz. Hunt’s recordings from chakra locations registered signals in the range of 100 to 1600 Hz. Something was there that conventional physiology had not accounted for.

Her Mu Room experiments at UCLA were particularly striking. The Mu Room was a shielded chamber in the Physics Department in which the electromagnetic environment could be altered without affecting oxygen content. When the room’s electromagnetic field was depleted, subjects became disoriented, anxious, and lost proprioceptive awareness of their own bodies.

Aura readers described the energy as becoming incoherent, scattered, and disconnected. When normal electromagnetic levels were restored, subjects regained clarity, emotional stability, and bodily self-awareness. Hunt concluded that the human energy field is not an epiphenomenon of biological processes but a primary organisational system — that we are, in some fundamental sense, electromagnetic beings, and that the quality of the field determines the quality of the biology.

Her book Infinite Mind: Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness, published in 1996, remains one of the most rigorous scientific accounts of the human energy field ever produced. She wrote: “I can no longer consider the body as organic systems or tissues.

The body is a flowing, interactive electrodynamic energy field.” That sentence, from a UCLA professor of physiological sciences with fifty years of laboratory research behind her, is not a mystical claim. It is a scientific conclusion.

“The body is a flowing, interactive electrodynamic energy field.” — Valerie V. Hunt, Infinite Mind, 1996

The Great Map-Maker: Barbara Brennan
Barbara Ann Brennan (1939–2022)

Barbara Brennan was a former NASA research physicist who became, through a process of personal spiritual development and clinical observation spanning decades, the most systematic and detailed cartographer of the human energy field the Western healing tradition has produced. She died on October 3, 2022, aged eighty-three. Her two foundational texts — Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field (1987) and Light Emerging: The Journey of Personal Healing (1993) — remain the most comprehensive accounts of energetic anatomy, energetic diagnosis, and energetic healing in the Western literature.

Her path from physics to healing is worth tracing, because it is itself a model of how scientific rigour and perceptual development can be held together rather than placed in opposition. Working as a research scientist at NASA in the 1960s, Brennan became aware of perceptual capacities she had not previously recognised or cultivated. Over the following decades she trained extensively — with Rosalyn Bruyere, with John Pierrakos in Core Energetics, with spiritual teachers in several traditions — while developing her own capacity to perceive and work with the human energy field with increasing precision.
What distinguished Brennan from other clairvoyant healers was not simply the clarity of her perceptions but her insistence on systematic description.

Hands of Light documents the structure of the human energy field in extraordinary detail — the seven layers of the auric field, the structure and function of each chakra, the relationship between energy field disturbances and physical and psychological pathology, and the specific healing techniques for addressing each layer. The maps she produced are not presented as revealed truth but as clinical observations, offered to practitioners as working hypotheses to be tested against their own experience.

The Barbara Brennan School of Healing, which she founded and which continues to train practitioners internationally, carries this spirit of rigorous inquiry into its curriculum. It is a four-year professional training that combines energetic healing technique with personal development work, psychological understanding, and scientific grounding. The insistence on personal development as an inseparable component of healing training — the recognition that the practitioner’s own unresolved material directly affects the quality of their healing work — is one of the School’s most important contributions to the field.

I attended a weekend introduction to Brennan’s Hands of Light approach in Santa Fe in 1994. That training sits at the direct foundation of the biofield and conscious touch dimensions of my own teaching. What it gave me was not primarily technique but a perceptual education — an extended perception in attending to dimensions of the clinical encounter that the structural and neuromuscular models alone do not reach. Forty years later, that perceptual education remains active in every session.

“You are a creative being in a creative universe. The creative process is the healing process.” — Barbara Brennan

The Engineer and the Healer: Rosalyn Bruyere
Rosalyn L. Bruyere (1943–)

Rosalyn Bruyere is an internationally acclaimed healer, clairvoyant, and ordained minister who brings to her healing work a formation that few in the energetic lineage can match: she trained as an engineer. That combination — precision technical thinking and highly developed perceptual gifts — made her an ideal research partner for Valerie Hunt at UCLA, where she participated in the eight-year research programme on the human electromagnetic field that provided some of the most rigorous early scientific documentation of aura and chakra phenomena.
Her book Wheels of Light: Chakras, Auras, and the Healing Energy of the Body, published in 1989, draws on scientific research, Native American culture, ancient Egyptian and Greek traditions, Hindu philosophy, and Eastern religion to present a uniquely grounded account of the chakra system. Her particular focus on the first chakra — the root, the basic life force, the body’s connection to the earth — reflects a clinical wisdom that more spiritually elevated approaches can miss: that healing begins in the body, in groundedness, in the capacity to be fully present in physical existence before ascending into more refined energetic dimensions.

Barbara Brennan described Bruyere as one of the most important teachers of hands-on healing in the world, and the relationship between the two women — both clairvoyant healers working in the same territory with different emphases and different formations — is a microcosm of how a lineage enriches itself through dialogue rather than uniformity. Bruyere’s Healing Light Center Church in Glendale, California, has offered a four-year training programme for healers for decades, contributing its own generation of practitioners to the field.

The Most Widely Transmitted Practice: Reiki
Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, Hawayo Takata, and the Western Lineage

Reiki is the most widely practised energy healing modality in the world. Taught in hospitals and hospices on every continent, integrated into palliative care programmes and nursing practice internationally, studied in over a hundred peer-reviewed clinical trials, it is the energetic healing tradition that has most successfully crossed the boundary between complementary practice and mainstream healthcare. That crossing has taken nearly a century and has involved a lineage of transmission that is worth tracing.

Mikao Usui (1865–1926) was a Japanese Buddhist teacher and businessman who, following a period of fasting and meditation on Mount Kurama in 1922, experienced an awakening that he subsequently developed into the system of healing practice he called Usui Reiki Ryoho — the Usui System of Natural Healing. Usui’s original system was more spiritually and meditative in character than the standardised Western Reiki that most practitioners learn today, and the recovery and teaching of his original approach has been an important development in the field over the past two decades.

The transmission to the West came through Hawayo Takata (1900–1980), a Japanese-American woman from Hawaii who received Reiki training in Japan in the 1930s from Chujiro Hayashi, one of Usui’s senior students. Takata brought Reiki to the United States and trained twenty-two Reiki Masters before her death in 1980, each of whom went on to train further teachers, creating the exponential growth of Reiki practice that characterised the 1980s and 1990s. She simplified the system considerably for Western audiences and introduced the three-degree structure — Reiki I, II, and Master — that most Western practitioners still learn.

The research base for Reiki has grown substantially since the early 2000s. Studies have demonstrated significant effects on anxiety, pain, fatigue, and quality of life in clinical populations ranging from cancer patients to post-surgical recovery. The mechanisms remain genuinely uncertain — whether what is transmitted is electromagnetic, biofield-mediated, or something more subtle that current instrumentation cannot resolve — but the clinical effects are sufficiently consistent across enough well-designed studies to take seriously. Shamini Jain’s Consciousness and Healing Initiative has been at the forefront of building this evidence base.

William Rand and the International Center for Reiki Training have been the primary institutional home for Reiki education in the Western world since the early 1990s, providing training standards, lineage verification, and a global community of practitioners. The Holy Fire Reiki system that Rand has developed in recent years represents one of the most significant evolutionary developments in Western Reiki practice.

“The secret art of inviting happiness, the miraculous medicine of all diseases: do not be angry today, do not worry, be grateful, work diligently, be kind to others.” — Mikao Usui, Reiki Precepts

The Bridge Between Body and Spirit: Core Energetics
John C. Pierrakos (1921–2001)

John Pierrakos sits at a precise hinge point in this lineage. He co-founded Bioenergetics with Alexander Lowen — and is therefore part of the somatic revolution traced in the second document of this suite — but his later work, Core Energetics, moved explicitly into spiritual territory that Bioenergetics did not occupy, making him a genuine bridge figure between the somatic and the energetic lineages.

After his separation from Lowen and following the death of his wife Eva Pierrakos — whose Pathwork teachings, delivered through trance channelling over decades, formed the philosophical foundation of Core Energetics — John developed a system of body-centred psychotherapy and spiritual development that works simultaneously with the physical body, the human energy field, the character structure, and what he called the core: the essential self that lies beneath the layers of defence and wounding. Core Energetics holds that the path to the core runs through the body, not around it — that the spiritual journey is inseparable from the somatic journey.

Barbara Brennan studied Core Energetics with Pierrakos, and the influence is unmistakeable in Hands of Light — particularly in the account of character structures and their energetic signatures, which draws directly on the Bioenergetics/Core Energetics understanding of how early wounding organises itself into characteristic patterns of body, energy, and consciousness. The lineage runs: Reich → Lowen/Pierrakos (Bioenergetics) → Pierrakos alone (Core Energetics) → Brennan (Hands of Light). That thread is one of the clearest transmissions in the entire energetic healing tradition.

The Scholar of the Subtle Body: Cyndi Dale
Cyndi Dale (1959–)

Cyndi Dale is the most prolific and academically serious scholar of subtle energy anatomy working in the contemporary healing world. With over forty books to her name — including the award-winning The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy, winner of four internationally recognised publishers’ awards — she has built the most comprehensive reference library of energetic healing knowledge available to Western practitioners.

The Subtle Body is precisely what its subtitle promises: an encyclopedia. It covers energy-based therapy principles from every major world healing tradition — Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qigong, Reiki, Kabbalah, shamanic traditions, and many others — alongside the science of subtle anatomy, the role of the chakras and meridians, and the significance of intention in healing. It is the text that no serious practitioner working in the energetic territory can afford not to have read, and it has become the standard reference for practitioners trying to understand how the diverse traditions of energetic healing relate to one another and to contemporary science.

What distinguishes Dale’s work from less rigorous approaches in this field is her consistent attempt to ground energetic concepts in the best available science while maintaining intellectual honesty about where the science ends and informed speculation begins. She does not overclaim. She does not dismiss. She holds the tension between ancient wisdom and modern evidence with a care that models exactly the kind of epistemological integrity that the field needs.

“All medicine is energy medicine. The question is only which aspect of our energetic nature we are choosing to address.” — Cyndi Dale

Fascial Therapy Institute Australia - FTIA

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