From the outside, my life appears to have taken many unrelated twists and turns: Westinghouse engineer, Jesuit seminarian and ordained priest, philosopher, bodyworker, writer. Yet, to me it has seemed to be a seamless journey whose vortex is formed by a lifelong inquiry into the relations among bodily experience, the earth and cosmos, connections with other people, and a more humane social order.

I was first inspired along this path by a group of visionary Christian Brothers on the faculty of their high school in Sacramento where both my grandfather and father had graduated. They fired me with biblical humanism, a passion for alleviating the lot of the dispossessed and the suffering of the world. Even though their teaching was couched in the language of Christian missiology, dogma was in the background; compassion and generosity in the foreground. "By this shall all men know you are my disciples: if you have love for one another."

Hoping that I would join him in his construction business, my father prompted me to get an engineering degree at Santa Clara University, where I graduated in 1955. Child of a workingclass family who had barely survived the Great Depression, I was the first to attend college. But designing gears and testing concrete didn't grip my imagination nearly as much as a handful of elective courses in philosophy, theology, and the classics taught by the Jesuits who were by far the most interesting and engaging adults I had ever met. I spent a year after graduation in a management training program for Westinghouse when, unable to visualize spending my life there, and I joined the Jesuits where I spent 14 years.

The first years there were among the most peaceful of my life: celibacy, long meditations, reading the lives of the saints, studying the Greek and Latin classics, medieval philosophy, world history and literature. When I entered the 3-year formal period of Jesuit studies devoted to philosophy, I found the center of my life's work, an inquiry into the primal origins of thought and value in the realm of experience. I found the first clues about the significance of that region in the writings of medieval philosophers like Thomas Aquinas who engaged in philosophical reflections grounded on their mystical experiences. Then in the modern philosophers who tried to ferret out the origins of knowing in our sensations, and finally in phenomenologists of the 20th Century such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and David Michael Levin. At the same time, I had long embarked on what would be a constant activity of my life, chronic addiction to classic and contemporary novels, which explored in a more intimate way the intricacies of first-hand experience, and a crafting of the kind of language that is closest to that experience.

I taught philosophy at Loyola University of Los Angeles (since merged with Marymount) for three years before I completed my Jesuit course of studies in the Santa Cruz mountains, completing my masters degree in theology and ordination as a priest. At the same time, under official Jesuit encouragement to investigate the outer edges of the culture, I became involved with Dan Berrigan in resistance to Viet Nam, took psychedelics, and got academic credit for taking a workshop at the newly founded Esalen Institute with Huston Smith and Gia-Fu Feng, and witnessed the work of Ida Rolf, who would soon become my teacher. All of those activities, combined with inevitable sexual liaisons, began to erode my Jesuit vows, as happened to many of my colleagues. In my first year of doctoral studies in philosophy at Yale, William Sloane Coffin invited me to join him as an assistant pastor of the Graduate School. I soon fell in love with the divorced mother of 3 children and moved in with her, which automatically ended my Jesuit career.

After the intensity of Jesuit life and studies, teaching academic philosophy at that deathly period in its history, when linguistic analysis and logic had captured the flag, seemed a dull affair. After completing my doctorate, I left university teaching to study bodywork with Ida Rolf. With my new family, I moved to Santa Fe where I practiced Rolfing for twenty years.

I have always been a writer. I started at Christian Brothers High School and Santa Clara as a journalist for the weekly papers. In the Jesuits, I published a number of scholarly articles on Catholic philosophy and theology. At Yale, I began to explore a wider intellectual voice, and in Santa Fe wrote my first book, The Protean Body. During those years in Santa Fe, I found myself yearning both to write more and to return to the teaching, which I had found so satisfying during my years at Loyola. We moved to San Francisco, where I became involved with a number of people who, like myself, were interested in bridging the practical bodyworks proliferating throughout the world with science, psychology, and philosophy. In 1983, I started the first graduate degree program in Somatics, located at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

During the years since, my professional life has settled into teaching Somatics at the marvelous California Institute of Integral Studies, and writing. The great surprise of recent years has been my being invited to Japan, where I now teach regularly in a Kyoto University. It has made a profound impact on my way of seeing the world.