With deep faith that spiritual wisdom is accessible to human knowledge through the scientific study of living phenomena, my mission in life is to advance human freedom.
I’m Elisha. Practitioner-scientist, writer and teacher dedicated to helping you embrace the adventure of your life and evolve through pain. During my own journey from chronic pain and trauma to a life of freedom I learned that we can only heal what we’re willing to take responsibility for.
Entering adulthood, I was on the brink of being engulfed by
Gut pain, jaw pain, unrelenting body tension, and anxiety greeted me every day. Knee pain prevented me from trail running and hiking, which were the only two activities that had given me any sense of peace. Hardened by unbearable emotional wounds, my body became a torture chamber of chronic physical pain.
I felt defective and broken.
Talk therapy made things worse for me. Colonics, cleanses, fasting, supplements, naturopathic doctors, chiropractors, massage…none of these worked, or helped me understand what was going on inside my body. They could not produce the transformation I was seeking.
One traumatic event after another had informed my childhood, including parental abandonment at age 10, being targeted by an adult male neighbor who groomed me for 6 months before spending two years sexually and physically violating me, followed by the sudden death of my best friend at age 17.
Determined not to show anyone how much I was hurting inside, my survival strategy was to shut off my emotions, lie to everyone (including myself) and endure it all with stoicism. I didn’t cry from age 10 to age 24. My body, however, was “keeping score.”
Then, in 2004…
During a morning ritual of journal writing I wrote four words that changed my life forever.
Panic gripped my body as my hand put pen to paper. The truth I had been running from was about to come out and I was afraid that if I acknowledged the severity of my pain that it would unleash a pandora’s box of horrors that I would never be able to put a lid on. Instead, something altogether unexpected occurred:
I FELT MY BODY RELAX.
Peace washed over me for the first time in more than a decade, and in that moment I recognized that truth is felt in the body, and if we want freedom then we have to turn towards pain. I spent the next two years writing my way into the depths of a ravaged psyche, excavating the wounds I had buried there in order to make them conscious.
2008
Augusta, Georgia
My life changed again.
One of my instructors in massage school mentioned this mysterious substance called "fascia" and it was as if an invisible key slipped into a lock on a door I didn't even know existed, and the door to my prison room swung open.
On the other side of this now open door, I saw a whole world of
THE FREEDOM TO TRAIL RUN AND HIKE AGAIN AFTER 8 YEARS OF KNEE PAIN.
THE FREEDOM TO BECOME THE MASTER OF MY PHYSICAL DOMAIN.
THE FREEDOM TO COME ALIVE AND DREAM INTO A FUTURE THAT WOULD BE WORTH THE UPHILL STRUGGLE.
All of this not only felt possible -
it felt inevitable.
Immersing myself in this new world of fascia stretching (a modality called Rossiter that I learned in 2008 which involves stepping on people), I asked every teacher and colleague to help me run and hike again for 3 years…with no luck. Still, I knew this would be my future and I was devoted to its actualization, no matter how long it took me.
Something happened next that would catalyze a permanent transformation.
What no therapist or teacher could help me do, I did with the help of my friend
Childhood friends reunited by Facebook in 2006, Jess and I moved to Colorado together in June of 2011.
Undeterred by years of failed attempts with professionals and teachers, I asked Jess if she would learn to step on me in order to help me run and hike again.
She said “sure, that sounds fun!”
That summer I learned the most important lesson of my career…
Love
is the most
transformative power
on Earth.
With love, gumption and a mindset of possibility, Jess jumped in to help me fulfill a dream. Two weeks later I was running and hiking again with a freedom I will never take for granted.
Everything I do today is an attempt
to pay her gift forward.
Generic protocols and blind faith in remedies are no longer sufficient to meet human needs. We need to start treating individuals rather than labels.
True healing methods help us to know how we function, and to know ourselves -
as INDIVIDUALS, and as WHOLE beings made of body, soul and spirit.
A bigger mission.
After what happened with Jess in 2011, I opened my private practice in Boulder, Colorado. The Kinetix methodology of mapping was developed in collaboration with thousands of clients who were eager to pursue freedom and enthusiastic about addressing not only their fascia, but their nervous system and survival programs, unhealed traumas and lifestyle factors in order to know the root cause(s) of their pain. My office became a “living lab” and I fell in love with science.
I want to live in a world that supports practitioners in the fields of medicine and the healing arts to seek a true understanding of the whole human organism - made of body, soul and spirit - in the context of its whole environment: society, planet and cosmos.
Which is why I started the School For Living Science, a place for all human beings who seek it to find true self knowledge.