Bonnie Rich Humiston, BSN, MS began her studies with Moshe Feldenkrais in 1971 and graduated from the first North American training in 1977. She has been active in the Feldenkrais movement ever since – as two-time President of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America, charter member of the International Feldenkrais Federation Board of Directors, and primary editor of the Amherst Training materials. Bonnie has a passion for helping others discover their own wellness and brings an extensive background in both traditional and holistic medicine to her Feldenkrais work. In addition to helping those mentally, emotionally and physically challenged to find wellness, Bonnie works with color harmonies, crafting personalized palettes that enrich lives through the identification of your own color harmony. Bonnie resides in San Diego, California.
| Karl’s biography
A third-generation physician, Karl grew up in Tacoma, Washington, with a strong intellectual focus. As a pre-med student in college, he majored in biological sciences, but something else happened there. Joining the Stanford University Chorus, he found himself singing with the San Francisco Symphony in Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody. The spirit of the soloist, Marian Anderson, was so powerful that he was overwhelmed with the knowledge that there was much, much more to life than intellect and science. It was fifteen more years before this began to take form in his work, and in the meantime he continued his training at Harvard (M.D. 1955) and the University of Washington (internship and psychiatric residency training 1959). During his two years active duty as a Navy medical officer (psychiatrist) he realized something was missing, that he needed to keep searching. An additional year of psychiatric training in the British National Health Service (Glasgow, Scotland) showed him that he would not find what he sought in academic credential programs and he would have to look elsewhere.
That came the following year when, by chance (apparently) he found himself in a family therapy workshop with Virginia Satir, a most gifted healer/teacher who quickly led people to healthy functioning while he watched. He recognized the truth when he saw it and realized that this was what he was searching for. Working with patients and directing the psychiatric residency training program in a state mental hospital 1966-71, he was on fire to find ways to help people really heal. He checked out a dozen good methods and chose to receive full training in family therapy, Gestalt therapy and Rolfing. Visiting Synanon in 1967, he witnessed how heroin addicts were being guided to solid healing. From all this, he came to realize that mental and emotional healing involves practicing conscious connection with one’s physical body and all the feelings in it.
Meeting Bonnie in 1971, he found himself with a woman of great depth and love of helping others to wellness. Together they explored the role of nutrition in health and guided some very difficult persons to mental healing. 1980-88 they operated the Humiston Holistic Health Center in the middle of New York City, where they successfully treated patients with many kinds of chronic illness, using a combination of detoxification, nutrition and wellness counseling. It was becoming clear that healing is accomplished by something within the patient (not something external like drugs) that we often refer to as the immune system. As a physician in the New York City jail 1988-89 he treated addicts and offenders and saw what was missing in them.
Moving to Oregon, retired from medical practice, Karl continued Rolfing and applied what he had learned to showing how to guide convicted sex offenders to profound healing (for more on that, and for his articles, click here). They now live in San Diego, where he engages in the work outlined in these pages, and continues his searching of the past forty years.
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