How did you first come to know about Core Energetics, and what drew you to it at the time?

It was late summer of 1971 and life was getting more and more difficult and confusing. Something had to give or maybe break. My wonderful daughter was about a month old and her mother was beginning to show signs of what eventually developed into full blown postpartum depression.

I was totally lost.

Never even having heard of postpartum depression at the time, I was completely at sea as to how to deal with both a new baby and a wife that seemed to be spinning ‘out of control’. This was the background for what, as many such crises tend to do, turned into a life altering moment.

With the serendipitous help of a friend who was a psychiatric social worker, I was educated on what I was facing and what I needed to do. I had to get her, and eventually myself into the world of psychological counseling, a world that I had hardly ever even heard of, much less considered as important to my own life.

It was long enough ago that I’m a bit foggy as to exactly how it came about, but within a year we were both seeing therapists in Washington DC and our lives were going through a rapid transformation.

As it happened the institute that we found to do our therapy was a recently opened ‘branch’ of the NY Institute of Bioenergetic Analysis [IBA] which had been co-founded by John Pierrakos and Alexander Lowen and which had been set up to further the work of Wilhelm Reich, a German MD who was a contemporary, in the early 20th Century, of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler and was the founder of what eventually became known as body psychotherapy. 

The work of the IBA was beginning to flourish and it was decided to open branches in Washington and Toronto. John was traveling regularly to Washington DC to teach, work and supervise the work of the therapists in the Washington branch.”

Can you describe the early days of Core Energetics with John Pierrakos?

Our personal growth work was quickly changing our lives and by the fall of 1972. My wife and I had enrolled in a training class to become Bioenergetic therapists under John’s direction but it would be 2 more years until we began to hear of John’s wife Eva and the Pathwork which was to change our lives even more profoundly than we could know even at that point.

In the spring of 1974 as we were nearing the completion of our IBA training, John invited us to a professional workshop that he was leading in Phoenicia NY at what was to be the home of the Pathwork and Core community for so many years. This was the moment, as I read my first Guide lecture, that I began to sense how deeply the work was affecting my very soul. As I read that lecture I seemed to lose any resistance to following a deeply spiritual path guided by the Guide material and John and Eva.

By the summer of 1975 John was clear that he was resigning as a director from the IBA to form Core Energetics and all of his students were invited to be in the first such training. I was, to say the least, reluctant to join a new training just as I was finishing the 3 year Bioenergetic training but about 4 days before the first Core training was to start, I was walking with John along a path at the Pathwork Center and simply talking about the deer that were grazing nearby when John took me by the arm [my left one] and looked me right in the eye and said with total clarity and certainty “See you on Saturday”. 

I joined the first Core Energetics training class and have never regretted it for an instant. This was one week after the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live!

It took about 4 months for the class members to begin to realize that John was no administrator. Everything seemed, on the organizational level, to be in total chaos. While the training classes were profound we never quite knew what to expect from John who was constantly changing things that had been planned and announced. This ‘disorganization’ went on for the entire first year despite John’s regular promise to get things more organized. When, at the beginning of the 2nd year of our training, we students realized that not much had changed on the organizational level, several of us decided to take charge of the administration of the classes, and did, and simply told John that we had done it.

By this time a 2nd training class had also started and we enlisted some of them to help with the administration and the Core Institute began to settle into a somewhat smoothly running organization. I say somewhat, since John was still John and was constantly changing his mind and tossing new challenges at us to sort out but, as is evident today, the spirit and energy that is released in the students and faculty is alive and well today.

By the time the first class graduated in 1978, the Pathwork was flourishing and had purchased an office building in Manhattan for the HQ of CoreEnergetics and John and I and several classmates established our offices there for the next 6 years.

The original name was The Institute for the New Age of Man and my ‘acceptance’ letter to the first class bore that letter head.  The original training faculty were, in addition to John, Andre Leites, Eva Pierrakos, Clare Solomon, Bill Solomon, Adrienne Winogrand and Bob Zimmerman.  

By the 2nd year the Name had been shortened to The Institute for the New Age.  It was organized as a branch of The Pathwork to be an ‘outreach’ to the world of psychotherapy.  It was not reformulated as its own organization and named The Institute of CoreEnergetics until the summer of 1983 when it moved from the NY Pathwork building to its new offices on East 23rd St. in NYC.  To my knowledge, there has been a new Core Training class in NY every year since then.  A rather startling record!

Part of the growth of ICE was the branches that developed in other parts of the world which John began to try to amalgamate into a fully ‘International’ organization. Several meetings were scheduled over several years to try to sort out how to do that and, in fact, such a meeting was scheduled to happen in NYC a few days after John’s unexpected death in 2001.

** To date, the International Association of Core Energetics (IACE), formerly registered in the Netherlands, meets regularly, to connect and standardize the work of Core Energetics schools around the world with many faculty teaching in more than one such program.

Looking back, what do you think is the most important lesson or insight that Core Energetics has taught you?

“The fundamental point of Core therapy, from my perspective, is that ANYONE CAN CHANGE for the better no matter the circumstances of their lives! Each of us have the opportunity to make fundamental changes to the lives we have developed since birth that have proved to have problematic aspects.  Yes, we have guidance from history and psychology and other thinkers and, most of all, from the immense wisdom in the guide lectures, but none of that would be useful without the dedication of those who find, plunge into, and practice this wisdom with energy and spirit.”