My Dance and body movement started when I was introduced to my main Buddhist teacher whose profession was Modern Oriental Dance. Kim On Wong had been brought up since the age of 3 in a Buddhist monastery in southern China. In early childhood, maybe 7 or 8 he decided to be a dancer and moved to Bali to study with a famous 100 year old teacher. He also studied Indian and Japanese dance before creating his own form. Having already had an enlightenment experience, I had no hesitation is deciding to learn dance in order to understand this teacher at the deepest and most direct level, called "mind to mind". At the time I was living in Chicago at the Catholic Worker and I had a job at the Newberry Library. Six months later when I resumed my position as assistant principle Bassist with the New Orleans Symphony, I began the study of Ballet. In 1967 I started studying Tia Chi Chuan and in 1974, folk Dance. I also briefly studied Judo and Aikido.
In 1971 I made a proposal to the Ravenswood mental health clinic in Chicago for a program of adjunctive therapy based on body movement of my own design, but anticipated by the work of Albert Pesso in the books "Movement in Psychotherapy" and "Experience in Action" 1969.
Mudra or gesture is the action of non-verbal mind: mind / brain whose intelligence is hundreds of millions of years old, yet is totally overlooked as active and viable by psychology. It is called at the best, collective unconscious and at the worst stimulus - response. I will outline mudra as one of the paths to spiritual development as awakening to this intelligence. Psychology has already demonstrated that persons deficient in motor development may also have learning disabilities as done in a study of young prisoners that improved their reading grade level after relearning crawling!