Soon I was in a room lying on a table and needles were being stuck into all sorts of odd places on my body. Some were connected to an electric muscle stimulator machine, and electricity was shooting through them and into my muscles to create controlled spasms. I slipped into the most blissful sleep I had had in months.
I walked outside an hour later feeling entirely different. I still had pain in my back, but something had shifted. I felt connected to my body again. I knew this was what I needed if I hoped to fix my back—as well as, perhaps, the rest of my life.
When I got home, I canceled my physical therapy appointments. The PT was helping me repair and strengthen my muscles, but I had now realized I couldn’t address my pain on a physical level until I had helped my energetic and spiritual being. And before I could do that, I would have to give my system a break from the drugs and alcohol I was using to numb the pain, help me sleep, help me focus, and help with whatever else I believed they were “helping.”
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m against Western medicine. I’m a big supporter of what it does for people. But at that moment it wasn’t working for me.
I kept up my visits to Dr. Chan, and after a few months of acupuncture, plus a specific concoction of Chinese herbs that would rebalance my imbalanced internal system, I was really starting to feel different. The next step to healing was working on how to better manage the stress I was continuing to endure as a young entrepreneur. I had tried meditation a few times but had found it uncomfortable to sit still because my mind and body were so restless. Dr. Chan suggested that I try tai chi, a Chinese form of moving meditation.
I asked him, “You mean I don’t have to sit to meditate?” He smiled and told me no.
The next day I was talking to a friend, and without his knowing about my conversation with Dr. Chan, he told me he had been thinking about learning tai chi. I was blown away by the coincidence. It was a sign!
I set out to find a tai chi teacher (and learned that they are called masters). Later that week I was headed to a friend’s holiday party being held in the basement of an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. I walked down the narrow steps into a sea of people who were standing around drinking wine and eating appetizers. Through the crowd, a small, bald head was weaving its way toward me. Finally, a smiling Chinese man emerged from the crowd and thrust out his hand to meet me. He said, “Hi, I’m Master Ru. I teach tai chi.”
You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought.
MASTER RU’S INELEGANT HORSE
Master Ru’s approach was to teach by doing. He moved, and I mimicked his movements (or at least tried the best I could). He described my early attempts to learn his powerful tradition as the fumblings of an inelegant horse. And as we were training, I kept asking questions, such as “What does this pose do?” and “Why are we moving in this direction?” I love the cerebral aspects of learning, and I wanted to understand everything. But Master Ru didn’t want to cloud my mind with language and theory. He would just smile and say, “We talk later, just breathe.” He is a great master, and he could tell I was trying too hard to think about what we were doing. He knew how to stop me from distracting myself with too many thoughts.
The other thing that made learning from Master Ru so engaging was that we practiced our tai chi outside, no matter what kind of weather we faced. In New York, we get about ten weeks of great weather a year. The rest is either freezing cold or swelteringly hot. But that didn’t matter because we did tai chi in snow up to our knees and we did it in 100 percent humidity. That was part of the meditation Master Ru taught. Over time, I stopped noticing the temperature. We’d be standing in the snow, and I’d be sweating from the amount of qi (pronounced “chee”) I was cultivating. Qi is our life force—the energy that powers us. It was truly awesome to see how much more control I had over my mind and body when I was in that meditative state.
After tai chi, Master Ru took me back to his house, where he performed bodywork on me in a tradition called qigong Gong essentially means “working.” So qigong translates to “working with life force.” It’s a powerful form of energetic medicine that has helped to heal me and many others. Qigong is practiced in different ways. In Master Ru’s apartment he manipulated my energy through touch as well as working around my energetic body. Qigong also has poses (like yoga) and meditative practices, and over time Master Ru taught me to do them along with my tai chi practice. That powerful combination of work turned out to be just the medicine I needed to get my mind, body, and spirit onto the same wavelength.
While I was working to mend myself, Sub Rosa was still evolving, too. As things were changing for the better and I was bringing real clarity to my life, I was also working more efficiently, and I was finding time to mentor the team around me and help them grow. But most important, Sub Rosa’s core philosophy was beginning to come into focus. That foundation not only was good for the business but ultimately provided a solid base that had a stabilizing effect on me and my ability to lead.
With my newfound momentum and sense of groundedness, I dove headfirst into my exploration of every form of Eastern and new age healing modalities I could find. In addition to my regular acupuncture sessions with Dr. Chan and my training with Master Ru, I tried shamanic healing, sound healing, aromatherapy, yoga, massage, applied kinesiology, hypnosis, craniosacral therapy, and more. I walked the spiritual buffet line for quite some time, sampling various practices and seeing what worked for me. A lesson I learned at a certain point along the path was that I needed to commit and go deep with one or a few practices. An understanding of the world’s spiritual practices is helpful, but the real results, the powerful stuff I was seeking, would come only when I committed myself to a specific practice and went deep with it.
Exploring those practices also widened my appreciation for indigenous wisdom. Many of those traditions are the caretakers of the oldest medicines in the world. I was fascinated to discover the communities and practitioners who had maintained those wisdoms and carried them into the modern world. I decided that whenever possible, I would do whatever I could to support the indigenous communities that have continued to preserve and protect those traditions for thousands of years.
One way I would honor them was to train to become a practitioner of the forms that had helped me to heal.
I realized that in my study I had been “taking” from a broad range of disciplines, and I was grateful to the practitioners who had helped me and had been generous and compassionate in sharing their work. But now I went to those powerful healers, shamans, and practitioners with an even bigger request, humbly asking if they would take me on as an apprentice, as someone who had willingly accepted (and was in many ways living proof) that the body, mind, and spirit can work together to heal.
All of them agreed.
COMING FULL CIRCLE
For the next couple of years, I studied with them, sometimes formally in a regular classlike structure and sometimes informally through conversation and workshops we devised together. I devoured books on esoteric sciences and indigenous practices. I became fully immersed. Along the way I met another powerful teacher named Doña Leova. Doña Leova is a Nahuatl curandera (medicine woman) from rural Mexico who took me under her wing as though I were part of her own family. Her practice, known as limpia (Spanish for “cleaning”), works with touch, plants, prayer, and often an uncooked egg to help diagnose and remove emotional blocks from the body and spirit. Learning this work from Doña Leova challenged my perspective, as initially it was difficult to understand how rubbing an egg on someone would help him or her heal. But time and again, Doña Leova’s work brought people to new states of clarity and peace. Working alongside her, I deepened my own knowledge and, in parallel, increased my appreciation of the power of indigenous medicine and the wisdom keepers who carry this knowledge.
I was spending my nights and weekends going deep into those gossamer worlds while I still spent my days leading a growing company. Life and work were busy, but not distractingly so
. Things were becoming balanced, and they were more harmonious. One practice fed the other. I had also not experienced back pain in years.
After studying for almost two years, I felt I was prepared to formally work on others. I’d built up the knowledge and the confidence to do the work. I took a deep breath and sent an email to friends and family, telling them what I had been doing with my nights and weekends and invited anyone who was willing to be one of my first clients.
A few brave souls responded.
I was excited to start this new chapter alongside friends and family who believed in me. Many of them were coming with physical ailments—which was perfectly aligned with my initial training. My teachers had taught me that I should first focus only on the physical body before I even entertained the idea of working on any systemic issues or energetic aspects of the body. After all, if you can’t help someone’s quad muscles heal, you have no business working on their deeper, more complex internal systems. I had also discovered on the journey that the word heal brought with it a ton of baggage. Real healing doesn’t come from the practitioner; it comes from you. It comes when you awaken to your whole self and allow your system to repair itself. That is what happened to me, and my teachers taught me that our job is not to heal but to put our patients into a position to heal themselves. It didn’t take me long to realize how applicable that is to my work at Sub Rosa: our best work occurs not when we fix everything for our clients but when we empower them with the tools and the clarity to fix their own teams, products, culture, or business.
Soon I had patients coming back for additional treatments; what’s more, their pains were disappearing. Their tennis elbows were gone. Arthritic hands had regained their motion. Their lower backs were stronger and more stable. It was really working. I remember the first time I helped a patient heal his low back pain. It felt like I had come full circle. It was wonderful to know that he was feeling better, but for me it was more powerful just to see how far I’d come myself.
In time, more and more people came, and the issues they brought were deeper: chronic, psychological, and spiritual. And my practice expanded with them.
Today I give about fifteen treatments a week, seeing clients before and after Sub Rosa’s business hours, as well as on Saturdays. What’s interesting is that I don’t see my days divided into two parts. Whether my work is in an office or a treatment room, to me there is a commonality. The ability to be present, to listen to another being, to hear his or her needs and connect through empathy, and to help the person get into a position where he or she can move forward—that’s what I do, and that’s how Sub Rosa evolved into what it is today.
Life seems to know when we need to be presented with opportunities to discover new paths.
I guess I needed to look under the glugging flow of a spilled water jug to be awakened to this side of myself.
THE POWERFUL LESSONS OF THE PAST
During my journey into alternative medicine, I learned that the indigenous communities from which this thinking originated have endured for so many years primarily because of their sense of, and reverence for, their own histories. This is something many leaders lose in our fast-paced world. And it’s the reason we too often find ourselves directionless and without purpose.
Most of the leaders in today’s C-suites started their jobs well after their company was founded. For that reason, they sometimes lack a sense of the organization’s origin story. This is understandable. Sure, they could read some historical documents or interview employees who have been there from the beginning, but if they weren’t actually there and didn’t feel what it was like to be on the ground floor when a company such as Johnson & Johnson or Apple was getting started, it’s difficult to make that up. In addition, they rightly place their primary focus on what they’re doing next, not on where the company came from. This can be just as true for some founders who are still operating the company, and origin stories can start to drift further and further into the rearview mirror.
I discovered this in our work with General Electric. The most “indigenous” aspect of GE’s origin story begins with Thomas Edison, whose powerful and innovative ideas were at the heart of the company’s foundation. Edison was a big thinker and a solver of huge problems. He said, “I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.” That’s the GE spirit. But it’s not always easy to uphold, nor is it simple to stay focused on that premise.
GE has had some huge growth moments when it worked from this place of inspiration. It has succeeded when it has looked into the world and solved big, complex challenges. When it innovates new forms of energy, medicine, or aviation, the company feels like it’s on the right path. Its stock price often rises, its employee retention rate is likely to be higher, and its brand experiences a lift in the public eye. But when it has deviated from its origin story—for example, when it has tried to be a bank or a real estate company, which doesn’t possess the underlying spirit of Edison’s mission—it has faltered.
Over time, I’ve seen GE take some of those off-course endeavors and move them back into the right position. The management of GE Capital realized it couldn’t be competitive if it simply offered to invest the same way the world’s big banks did. Instead, they shifted their position to say, “We’re not just bankers, we’re builders.” The idea was that when GE Capital invested in your business, you weren’t just getting funds, you were getting decades of experience running large, often complex manufacturing businesses. Its people came in like a well-trained SWAT team and worked with businesses to create cost savings through energy efficiencies; they retooled factories to be more logistically and operationally sound; they brought their spirit of invention into their holdings, and everything took a turn for the better. In essence, they added a little Edison to the business.
Often the best way we inspire our clients for the future is when we connect them to the most indigenous part of themselves, to understanding why they were founded and why they are still here. The greatest “medicine” is already inside us; sometimes all we need is a little help reconnecting to it.
EMPATHY FOR YOUR OWN ROOTS
Pamela Kraft is what I often describe as a “white witch.” I mean this with the utmost respect and admiration. She has a mystical and otherworldly quality that she has cultivated for years and channels it to bring good things into being. She’s an esoteric who somehow keeps one foot in this world and another in the beyond. I was introduced to Pam by Gil Barretto; the two of them had been hosting monthly group meetings since the early 1980s. In her youth, Pam was a muse and contemporary of artists such as Andy Warhol and Ray Johnson, and her own art takes many forms. But to me, Pam is a painter of connections, and she supports the people and communities she cares about. She holds space elegantly—she is a true Convener.
Somewhere after her wilder years in the 1960s, Pam became connected to indigenous wisdoms, and it awakened something within her. In 1992, she attended the Rio Earth Summit in Brazil, where she met many indigenous peoples and began her journey to support them. She made a commitment then to dedicate her life to those important communities, and her dedication to them has been unwavering ever since. She started an organization called Tribal Link Foundation, which, in affiliation with the United Nations, works to preserve, protect, and empower indigenous leaders from around the world.
I met and got to know Pam while I was training with Master Ru and beginning my indigenous medicine education with Doña Leova. I also think of Doña Leova as a white witch, for the same affectionate reasons I apply that term to Pam. Both of these powerful women have the gift to use their love and their compassion to perform alchemy. They truly facilitate healing in both our inner and outer worlds. I’m honored to have worked beside both of them for so many years.
It was my training with Doña Leova that showed me how important it was to support and protect indigenous cultures, and that led me to ask Pam how I could help Tribal Link Foundation. Within weeks I’d joined the organization’s board, and Pa
m and I have worked together to help it continue to grow and serve as many communities as possible. That work has helped me form many lifelong relationships with indigenous leaders and elders, from Native American holy men to chiefs of Amazonian tribes. I have been granted an opportunity to hear their stories, to understand more about their traditions, and to see how the foundations of their ancestral communities were built.
I know how crazy it sounds that I was doing all of this while still running Sub Rosa. Just doing one of those things probably seems like a full-time job, never mind doing all of them at once. But we create room for the things that matter in our lives, and all of them mattered to me. My dear wife has been a supportive and loving partner to me throughout it all, and in truth, she has been my most important teacher (and is a powerful white witch herself).
My work with Tribal Link Foundation and the indigenous communities it serves has helped me to empathically connect with some of the elemental parts of these resilient cultures. In so doing, I’ve discovered that the things that matter to these tribal communities today are things that have had the same level of importance and significance to them for centuries. It became clear that those key elements could, and should, be translated and applied to the business world. They include:
• Origin story: How it all began
• Language: Your shared lexicon
• Traditions: How you engage your community and acknowledge milestones
• Purpose: Your reason for being
Think about it: these are the building blocks of every thriving community. Whether in a tribe, a religion, or a corporation, these four building blocks are what provide meaning and create the connective tissue that forms a lasting foundation from which to grow. It was time to bring this understanding into our practice at Sub Rosa and help our clients connect empathically to their own origins and to discover how those origins can be used to help guide them into a new future.
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