When I learned about Ayurveda, the oldest recorded medical system that influenced Arab and modern Western medicine and covers a wide spectrum of eight different disciplines from food, safe highly advanced herbal methods,  surgery to mental health and pre-natal care. I knew, I needed to understand more and found Ayurveda believes all disease begins as a mistake of the intellect (ego) and then first manifests in the digestion.  My path into Ayurveda began and I found a way to integrate my life with Spirit that I believe we have lost in modern society. 

Along the way, I experienced my own healing in recovery from my broken leg in a hip to toe cast one summer I watched TV to while away the long days. If I was lucky there was a good afternoon movie otherwise it was mostly soap operas. But I found cooking shows that were interesting and amusing. I watched Julia Childs teach Americans how to cook French cuisine (often amusing as she would put on her French accent, cook meat – I was already a vegetarian – and she would complicate the procedures in proper Cardon Bleu style). I loved Graham Kerr, the galloping gourmet, where I learned good technique and how to make everything. I also loved the priest turned cook show host Jeff Smith, “the Frugal Gourmet,” who taught me about many regional cuisines fueling my interest in foods from around the world. 

I went to University to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and became interested in Biomedical Engineering. Continuing to Graduate school I choose to attend Washington University in St. Louis , MO one of the top medical research Universities in the US where I was funded by an NIH grant to make some instrumentation to study and quantify Alzheimer’s in the aging populations. The next healing crisis for me was when I was made redundant at the electronics company I had helped found. This became a struggle and trauma of identity, losing my “what I had thought” life’s work. But it was a wake-up call to explore my calling in health and when my Company went public a few years later I had the opportunity to explore other creative and health oriented aspects of myself like music and I wrote several cookbooks and taught vegetarian cooking.

Later in my late forties and early fifties I developed excruciating lower back pain. Nothing nor anyone I consulted seems to totally help, I saw most of the top chiropractors in the US and I would get some relief but not release.  In some very deep emotional work, we discovered this was an emotional time bomb that would trigger later in my fifties as a heart attack unless I made changes.

I had to decide I was responsible and take  back ownership for my own health (what I have since then seen with many of our patients). As I became responsible for my healing and decided to go against medical and some natural healing advice and follow my intuition and natural healing practices and practitioners I was drawn to. I choose to do mostly what gave me joy, keep up my emotional releasing and chiropractic adjustment. I followed my joy even if in the short term it gave me some pain (sometimes a lot) or aggravated my condition.

I choose to continue skiing, riding my horse and intuitively was driven to add six days a week of Bikram (hot) yoga sessions to my schedule.

I distinctly remember being in a complicated yoga asana (posture) and noticing that I felt good – the pain had disappeared. I was focusing on what gave me joy and had stopped measuring and remembering I had back pain. It never came back and I have lived in a proactive wellness lifestyle ever since. I  transformed my life to a happy and active health practice with the help of friendly chiropractors, yoga teachers and later martial arts and chi-gong.

My wife and I decided to move to South Africa and started the Red Roan Ranch Retreats in 2004. My wife started offering advanced chiropractic and naturopathic health services in South Africa. It is a unique program that restores structural integrity, biochemical integrity, environmental integrity and emotional integrity of the body.

We welcome patients from around the world and show them step by step in a week long or longer hands-on experiential retreat setting to learn how to live a heathier more abundant life with balance around body, mind, emotion, and spirit. Included is morning routines, movement , breath, meditation,  and renewal (reset), cooking and food for your body type. 

I am trained in Ayurveda and have practiced it with our retreat patients for over twelve years, have taught Yoga for over thirty years, as well as breathwork and rebirthing, actively practice and taught martial arts, and learned Taoist and Chinese traditional medicine approaches, and Chi Gong. In the process I learned how to:

• cultivating a peaceful relationship with food
• found practices for consciously balancing my energies and emotions
• learning to listen to my intuition
• embraced a gentler, more natural cyclical way of living
• embraced my true nature of Spirit and am less influenced by the material or physical world.