Profiles

While preparing for an annual excursion to Brasil to see my daughter, I’m remembering a man I met there nearly five years ago. In January of 2014, the height of Brasil’s steamy summer, Alaine and I hiked the Atlantic Forest surrounding Paranapiacaba, a tiny railroad town near São Paulo that has seen better days. Per state park regulations, no one can enter the forest without a monitor ambiental (environmental monitor), and ours was a big, loquacious, adventuresome man named Marcos Vital.

A native of Canada, Patty now makes her home in Taos, New Mexico (just north of the Mothership). It was through her studies at California’s Hellerwork Structural Integration School that she ended up in the States and, in a roundabout way, after studying with Donna and Ellen, found her true calling: using Acutonics as a way to treat the equine species. Patty has been working with horses, and creating better relationships between horses and their riders, for over 15 years.

Life began for Dorothy Wallis close to nature and animals in the rolling countryside of Illinois. Her parents owned Brenwood dog kennel, where they raised and bred Irish Setters first brought from England for show and field trials. The business boarded every breed of dog and she developed an intimate psychic connection to the dogs and communion with the trees, plants and spiritual energy of the land.

Dr. Christine Gallagher learned about Acutonics while she was working on her PhD. And that was not long after having had her third child. After earning her Doctorate in Natural Health, she opened her own private practice, Journey for Wellness - Center for Natural Family Health, in 2006 in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Mary Burke-Kelly may have come to Acutonics a little later in life than most Acutonics teachers (and practitioners), but only five years into her certification, she exudes a kind of “old soul” quality—giving one the feeling that she’s been doing this for decades. A practicing astrologer since 1993, and well versed in sacred geometry and holographic sound, until finding Acutonics she’d never considered herself a healer. But a healer she is. And entirely forthcoming. “I’m a Sagittarius rising,” says Mary, who practices and teaches at Dallas/Fort Worth Acutonics. “If anything, I’m too open.”

While not a teacher or even yet a full-time practitioner of Acutonics^® (she’s done all the coursework for certification as a practitioner—save the clinical hours and the project), there are few people, even among the most fervent in the Acutonics^® community, who’ve proselytized on its behalf as passionately, and in as short a time since being introduced to it, as Holly Greene. “I have not been practicing Acutonics^®,” Holly says from her home in the San Francisco-Bay Area, (where she was born over 70 years ago), “but I am sold on its effectiveness as a treatment modality.”

Debra Kaatz is a spiritual Renaissance woman. A prolific author, of titles such as Characters of Wisdom: Taoist Tales of the Acupuncture Points, Receiving Spirit—The Practice of Five Element Acupuncture, and The Alchemical Path, all with master Chinese calligrapher Harrison Xinshi Tu, and an equally prolific reader (she tries to read a book a day).

Born in Rota, Spain and raised (mostly) in Oslo, Norway, Sylvia moved with her father, a devout capitalist who worked in shipping and investing, her mother, a stay-at-home mom, and her brother, who was into engineering and cars, to the U.S. at the age of 13. Within three years, she managed to get herself kicked out of several boarding schools and into the more important role (at the time) of traveling Deadhead—traipsing across the country on the heels of the Grateful Dead. Always into music, art, and space as a child and knowing that someday she wanted to do something that’d make a difference (to others, to the planet), she knew she’d end up having an impact at some point, she just wasn’t sure how. By the time she reached her late 20s, the how became clearer. Although she’d studied goldsmith-ing at the Rochester Institute of Technology and later earned her BA in anthropology and her BFA in art history from the University of Colorado, these were more avocations than life call-ings.

It’s not as though Theresa Lee’s life has changed dramatically since meeting (and then marrying) Will Morris several years ago. But it has changed.

Patrice teaches music composition and the healing arts at UNM. In 2002 she founded the university’s “Arts-in-Medicine: Healing and the Humanities” program (AIM) which she continues to direct.