Indulgent yogi | Mango maniac | Beach bum | Off-beat poet |
Michael J. Shea, PhD.
MICHAEL J. SHEA, PH.D., is one of the preeminent educators and authors in the fields of somatic psychology, myofascial release and craniosacral therapy. He received his master’s degree in Buddhist Psychology at Naropa University, and a doctorate in Somatic Psychology at The Union Institute. In 1986, he was certified as one of the first Full Instructors of CranioSacral Therapy by the Upledger Institute. A Florida-licensed Massage Therapist since 1976 and an advanced rolfer for 20 years, he is a founding board member of the Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy Association of North America and the International Affiliation of Biodynamic Trainings and the Massage Therapy Body of Knowledge task force (MTBOK). He regularly leads seminars throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Dr Shea is the author of several books, including Somatic Psychology and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy – Volume 1 through 5, Myofascial Release Therapy, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy: The Heart of the Practice, and The Biodynamics of the Immune System: Balancing the Energies of the Body with the Cosmos published in 2023.
https://www.sheaheart.com
My 10 Best
(In no particular order)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Humor is an essential component of my spiritual formation. I have listened to many comedians since childhood, especially Jonathan Winters, Phyllis Diller, Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, Jackie Mason, Gilda Radner, Ernie Kovacs, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Jeanne Robertson, Bill Engvall, and Robin Williams to name just a few. I am particularly fond of Jewish humor. I have read and seen many comedies, especially theatrical productions of Shakespeare, Moliere, and G.B. Shaw but this book opened my eyes to the interface between humor, spirituality and the plethora of psychedelics available in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Hunter Thompson created a new genre of writing called Gonzo based on this thematic interface. During that era, the mixture of psychedelics and Eastern meditation practices led to what were called spiritual emergencies (read Spiritual Emergency, When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis edited by Stanislav Grof M.D. and Christina Grof). On the other hand, psychedelics can temporarily generate seeing the magical nature of the world. They open a visionary world. The research says they reduce fear and anxiety as they did for me in my youth. I have learned that such visions can be induced through contemplative practices. I have a great deal of experience with psychedelics because of being on a killing field in the military and dealing with that horror and reintegration back into American culture without any recognition of the dilemma faced by such veterans. People spat on my uniform and threw paint on my car. It was the Vietnam Era. I have earned a 100% service-related PTSD disability rating with the VA as a result. Being on a killing field in the military opened me up to the enormity of unprocessed and unassimilated grief and loss by all soldiers worldwide who have been on a killing field and survived. I had to reframe my experience as being initiated into compassion as an innate quality in the human heart that needs to be buried and unpacked, so to speak, through contemplative practice and developed through life. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas helped me walk through a door that had already exploded open… literally. I received permission to explore the world by moving away from its center to the periphery of spiritual healing. When I left the service, I was morbidly obese and found no answers to it from the mainstream.
Sex by Design
All art is both erotic and spiritual in its own way. Erotic art is an invitation to see the beauty of the human body and its sensory pleasures. In the spiritual domain it is called Tantra. I met and befriended Betty Dodson, one of the more renowned classical and erotic artists of her generation in the early 1970s. She mentored me my entire adult life in the domain of sex education. My sister Sheila was Betty‘s business partner when Betty first developed her body sex workshops, teaching pre-orgasmic women to have orgasm over a weekend workshop that took place in her rent-controlled apartment at 30th and Madison in Manhattan. She lived and taught in apartment 12B. I rode that elevator up and down many times. I experienced my sexual liberation in New York City in 12B. Betty’s living room had been wired to hold a dozen Panasonic vibrators that needed to be plugged in. The Panabrator as it is called has variable speeds and lots of power. My wife doesn’t like them, but many women do. That was the vibrator of choice amongst all of Betty’s sex toys. She sold sex toys and knew the best sex toy stores in town. However, it was her eye and her vision of the sensual body that captivated me. Her embodied knowledge of the pelvic floor and vulva was always complete experientially and anatomically. Betty‘s artwork and drawings revealed the form of female genitalia in all its varieties of a flower with multiple shapes and forms. A masterpiece of art, sensuality, and anatomy. And it all came from her heart of spiritual kindness. Betty was a classically trained fine artist. She interned in Paris in the 1950s and spent the rest of her life in New York City at 12B. She is legendary in the field of sex therapy and sex education. And yes, legendarily erotic. She was the most articulate woman of her time on the role of bodily pleasure through orgasm, and many other possibilities. Her sense of humor was sublime, and she loved my bodywork whenever I showed up at 12B. And her life was not only about having multiple orgasms with or without partners but anytime was the right time for worldly sensual pleasures. Betty had a heart of gold. Her generosity was sublime.
Medical Nemesis
I was very disturbed by Western medicine when I read this book in 1976. I had just started my initiation into alternative and complementary medicine. I was attending a massage school in Miami on the GI Bill. This book is an indictment of Western medicine that I have come to view as immoral with hundreds of thousands of people dying every year from iatrogenesis, physician and pharma-induced death. This book is very well researched and a complete takedown of Western medicine along with another favorite book called Planet Medicine by Richard Grossinger. These books shifted my spiritual orientation towards compassion in my chosen profession as a massage therapist in the state of Florida. I needed to practice within a healthcare system that had a fully integrated notion of spirituality which had been completely eradicated in Western medicine during the Renaissance as a political deal between the Catholic church and the emerging Western medicine purveyors. This led me to Tibetan Medicine several years later.
Autobiography of a Yogi
This was actually the first book I can remember reading explicitly about spirituality. I grew up a Catholic and started with the New Baltimore Catechism as a child. I minored in theology in undergraduate school. Catholicism never made an impression on my young soul until much later in life in spite of being an altar boy for many years and stealing from the church collection baskets when I was sent to retrieve them by the priest after mass. However, with this book, I reconceived myself as a yogi and began to follow the path of a yogi after my discharge from the Army in 1973. I was fascinated and completely captured by stories of the ascetics in ancient India. I then studied Integral Hatha Yoga, Iyengar Yoga, and have a teacher certificate in Ashtanga Yoga. I lived in an ashram and was certified to teach Kundalini Yoga through the 3HO Organization of Yogi Bhajan. I was ordained by him and given the name Satya Singh in the Sikh religion of northern India in the Punjab. The Sikhs are warriors, and we were required to study the martial arts, so I took up Japanese karate and learned to kill with my hands. It was while studying karate that I was introduced to Buddhism. And I started smoking pot while living in the ashram and knew I had to move on. Now I practice Guru Yoga as a student of the Dalai Lama and Ati Yoga, also known as Dzogchen, as a student at Pure Land Farms.
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
This was one of my textbooks when working on my master’s degree in Contemplative Psychotherapy from the Naropa University. I graduated in 1986 and by then had read dozens of books on Tibetan Buddhism. This book enlightened me about spiritual narcissism, or what is commonly called the “spiritual bypass” when someone uses contemplative practices to avoid their emotional distress. It led me to greater research during my doctoral work on the nature of spiritual emergencies that occurred during the initial influx of Eastern spiritual teachers coming to the USA and especially into California in the 1960s and 70s. Books such as Kundalini-Psychosis or Transcendence? By Lee Sannella, M.D. and The Electric-Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe opened my eyes to the danger of esoteric spiritual practices when mixed with psychedelics. I heard of many people that overdosed on that deadly combination. I count myself as lucky that I survived that era and the ingestion of plenty of plant based and laboratory based recreational medicine. Now psychedelics are mainstream and have become psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. This includes the prevalence of Ayahuasca ceremonies in every corner of Americana. Many people consult with me following their experiences with such “plant spirit medicine” to help integrate their experience.
The Wisdom of No Escape
I’ve read many of her books and listen to her audios. And this was her first book with a focus on a compassion practice in Buddhism called Tonglen. One of the two reasons I desired to convert to Buddhism was for the transmission of practicing Tonglen given during the Bodhisattva Vow ceremony. I was fortunate to receive the transmission for Tonglen during the Bodhisattva Vow by Pema Chodron herself. My Bodhisattva name is Generosity Good Moon. I have been teaching this practice for many years because in the mid-1980s, the Dalai Lama said that anyone who knows this practice must begin teaching it to everyone. Our planet is dramatically lacking in compassion. His Holiness has been my root teacher since 2004. Shortly after my mother died, he came to Miami to give one of his weekend teachings from ancient Buddhist texts. I was deep in my grieving around my mother and drinking excessively. During the second day of his teachings in the basketball arena that held 5000 people, I began to receive mind transmission from him. He was able to enter my mind stream and be fully present with his kindness. Following that weekend of conversations with him inwardly, I contacted his organization and they listened to my experience and verified that it was genuine and that I was being called to be his student. I then became his formal student in Zürich Switzerland in 2005 in the Chenrezig Ceremony, the very next year. As part of being his student, he has requested that I do Buddhist scholarship and over the years I have edited numerous texts by Buddhist teachers and written commentaries and interpretations of Buddhist Dharma especially poetry. Of the many books he has written, this is my most favorite and most thought-provoking.
Living from the Heart
I remember sitting at the feet of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in the mid-70s in Coconut Grove Florida while training to be a massage therapist. This book is by one of his students. Since then, the Sufi path has always captivated me with their focus on the heart. This book by a Western Sufi master completely reoriented my entire style of teaching manual therapy and meditation on the heart. It’s incredible with the number of practices that are given to feel the essence of the heart. In Sufism each of the chambers of the heart has a different name of God. The fourth ventricle of the heart is Allah. And since there are so many names for God in Sufism, the heart has many more of its anatomical parts named for God.
Japanese Death Poems
Poetry and death have always been a backbone of my study and practice. I’ve read numerous books and compilations of Eastern and Western spiritual poetry including cycling through Rumi and Hafiz from the Middle East as many have. However, this book impacted me so strongly that I began to memorize the poems. I practice a daily and nightly contemplative spirituality in which I use my mind for spiritual contemplations in order to replace segments of my neurotic mind. I lay in bed at night non-verbally reciting my favorite poems to the cadence of my heartbeat. Contemplations are critical practice in my spiritual formation and spiritual maturation. Zen Inspired Translations of the Psalms by Norman Fisher really impacted my understanding of the contemplative traditions within Christianity and their interface with Zen Buddhism. I did study to become a Buddhist chaplain for a year and was dismissed because I received my koan that finished my training. “The support of all life involves the taking of life.” It is a contemplation on the first precept of non-killing in Zen. It still works me every day. Seeing life as poetry is my spiritual practice. I have experimented with writing poetry since high school. I am very fond of writing beat poetry, erotic poetry (my wife and I write each other erotic poetry) and spiritual poetry. I’ve tried my hand at writing rap music. I also self-published some of my early poetry.
An Osteopathic Odyssey
Jim mentored me for ten years in biodynamic embryology and biodynamic osteopathy. Jim was a Christian mystic and very much had an enlightened heart. The entire lineage of osteopathy starting with Andrew Taylor Still in the 1800s is mystical in its orientation. By this I mean that their methodology in the manual therapeutic arts wakes up the instinct for self-transcendence. It is through his mentoring of biodynamic embryology that I discovered the deeper meaning of love. I feel that all the books I have on embryology and as a teacher of academic embryology, are some of the greatest spiritual books of all time. When I bought the Color Atlas and Textbook of Human Embryology by Ulrich Drews, I wept as I turned the pages and saw creation unfolding image by image. Jim told me I found love when I shared that with him. I learned in my doctoral work in Somatic Psychology that reconnecting with our original wholeness is an essential piece to healing. Our original wholeness begins either at conception of our human body or the conception of the universe. Spiritual healing requires both vectors of originality. As mentioned, my spiritual ministry is a ministry of “laying-on -of-hands” as I help myself and others restore their originality, which is simply a harmony with all that is inside our mind-body and all that is outside. We are a single continuum of wholeness, as with in, so without. Thanks to Jim’s mentoring and that of dozens of other teachers, and hundreds of spiritual friends, I am not lost in a world of anti-depressants and beta-blockers.
Daily Afflictions
I love this daily reader. It is my all-time favorite daily reader. It is also a book of comedy and satire. My wife and I have well over a dozen daily readers spanning a broad context especially Christian daily readers such as Jesus Saves by Sarah Young and You Are the Beloved by Henri J. Nouwen. I was not a particularly big fan of daily readers until I read Daily Afflictions. I already have a daily spiritual practice of meditation and contemplations where I invest my mental time as much as possible. And every now and then it’s good to get inspiration and as I travel around the world, many daily readers are sitting in the bathroom by the edge of a toilet. It’s true in my home that sitting on the toilet and getting spiritual inspiration is part of many people’s lives. After all, it was said by Sam Keen, the former editor of Psychology Today that the inspiration for the Protestant Revolution came from Martin Luther having an incredible bowel movement. Like Martin Luther, I prefer to concentrate on my intestines and bladder while on the toilet and my wife loves reading about Jesus or A Year of Miracles by Marianne Williamson. I’m so glad she ran for president. Different strokes for different folks. In the bedroom, my wife and I occasionally read A Sacred Sex Devotional, 365 Inspiring Thoughts to Enhance Intimacy. There is also a daily grief reader Healing After Loss by Martha Hickman, or one could just read the newspaper.