My Short Letter in Appreciation of Gil Hedley’s Nerve Tour

 

My name is Corey Hess.. I was at the Bellingham Nerve tour presentation. I stopped Rachel afterward to say hello because Gil was busy and I had to run back to my wife and three daughters in Whidbey Island a couple of hours away.

 

I wanted to thank you both for the whole scene there. I have admired Gil from afar for quite some time. I found his youtube presentations years ago so much fun and engaging. This guy with a PhD in Theology, former Rolfer, and basically a performance artist up there doing stand up comedy dissection labs.  I found the whole thing quite refreshing, as well as heartfelt and real.

 

A bit about me, I am a former Zen Monk. I spent my twenties in Japan in a monastery, cranking away with an energy master. I came home to start a family and find a way to offer the unique gifts I discovered in that wild archaic environment.  I ended up in the Structural Integration community, as I thought it to be an environment of people thinking outside of the box about the body and health and life.  With that, my laboratory of relating was being one on one with people for about 15 years here, fine tuning how to be with people and skillfully communicate in deeper more subtle ways.

 

Along the way, I began writing a blog, the zenembodiment  blog, because, shit, no one around me was asking my opinion. And the writing was a way for me to further dissect out and integrate the gold from the sand in my deep experience in Japan and every day since.  If it wasn’t dripping with truth nectar, I couldn’t hit the publish button. With that, question started to come in from all over.

 

A few years ago, during the pandemic, several of my blog admirers asked me to begin teaching some classes, as we were all stuck at home.  I did and those classes blossomed into an international community of sincere practitioners. I mostly teach standing Zhan Zhuang, Non-directed body movement, and qigong movement.  I get a lot of people with kundalini issues, or who’ve had an awakening and need to find a way to walk around and function. I also get people like I was in my twenties, a pressure cooker of intensity and doubt, desperately needing to find a way to express themselves and meet life.  But I’m really an artist trying to bring people to unique personal experience of what I call their Internal Process. It’s all an art project.  It’s been a beautiful four years, and we’ve done a yearlong program and 14 month-long quarterly Immersions, as well as in-person retreats around the world. 

 

Sorry to bore you with details, but I wanted to thank Gil for showing me that people can evolve and create new and exciting connections.  A guy can run around barefoot in sweatpants making jokes and writing poems and doing physical comedy in the unlikely context of dissection labs, and it can be heartfelt and bring tears to your eyes and it can also seriously add to many significant professions.  I think seeing him talk about St. Francis and passion and Fascia years ago helped me to make some leaps in my own process and let the rubber hit the road, and I am deeply indebted. So thank you very much for leading the way as an entrepreneur, doing really cool shit that you love, and being yourself.  

 

I also enjoyed seeing you two work together as a dynamic couple with passion and authenticity.

Core 

 

P.S I am still doing S.I. work, about half time, with extensive nerve training, and so I found the nerve presentation extremely informative and inspiring.

 

*Please feel free to use this as a testimonial if you like. I may toss it on my blog as well. I hope to see you all again sometime.”