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breakthrough. He went to Israel for a three-week vacation, "and something changed during that trip," he says. "Something changed within me." All of a sudden, he started reading Hebrew in a way he hadn't been able to before. "The shift was really kind of a surrender," he says, "a letting go of all the anger and frustration. It was the accepting of a new path. I became committed to this new direction and dived into this new life. Since then, so much has changed." His structural integration training impacted his life in one more very profound way: it's where he met his wife, Debbie. "She was one of the 'practice bodies,'" he says. "She heard me speak Hebrew, and it just went from there." Today, the Thompsons have been married five years and have three children: a four-year-old son, Noah, and two daughters—two-year-old Talia and seven-month-old Nava. Thompson now happily has a feels more natural than the old one. You reach a tipping point, in a sense. "If I hadn't taken that first course, I might have continued with massage, might have gotten into energy-based work, but I don't know what satisfaction I would have gotten from that." Thompson saw this play out in his own life. As he learned more about structural integration, he saw the destructive old patterns of his old life slipping away, evolving into healthier patterns. As a boy growing up in Israel, Thompson had been outgoing and sociable. But when his family moved to the United States when he was nine, he withdrew. The change in culture left him traumatized. "It was tough transitioning," he says. "I had to conform. The way I did that was by shutting down and burying everything about me that was different, everything that was special or Israeli. I became a different person." It wasn't until years later, in the summer after he took that first Tom Myers class, that Thompson made a full-time practice in Brookline, Massachusetts, doing structural integration work, and as of 2005 he became a certified teacher of Kinesis, teaching Anatomy Trains. He has also opened a second business called Benchworks, selling the ergonomically- correct benches (pictured) required for structural integration work. Using his mechanical engineering background, he redesigned the old Ida Rolf bench, giving it a modern look and several color options. "My life," he says, "is a wonder writer who embraces life and a myriad of topics. Contact her at killarneyrose@comcast.net. to me." Rebecca Jones is a Denver-based freelance visit abmp.com for a calendar of ceu listings 149