Bio
Trauma from Day 1
Growing up, I had to fend off an older sister who projected her pain into jealous torment of me. “You’re adopted! Mommy and Daddy don’t love you!”
Kids in my working-class neighborhood would yell, “dirty Jew!”
I was strictly prohibited from dating certain girls in my private school because I was one of the few Jews there. (A rich uncle helped with my education — we didn’t have money).
With all the torment, I got tough enough to be a Little All-America football player at age 13. But always, I was a weird misfit.
Having skipped a year in public school, I was emotionally behind — even if intellectually ahead — of the other guys.
Fast forward a couple of decades...
Nine Years of Tears
I cried every day after coming home from the Vietnam War. For nine years. That had not been like me before or during the war.
Little things would set me off. A dead dog by the side of the road made me burst into tears. So did pictures in the newspaper of people in a traffic accident. And any pictures from Vietnam had me choke up instantly.
I mourned for the Vietnamese girlfriend I left behind, the hundreds of thousands of families shattered, millions dead, for the guys killed and crippled on our side.
But most of all, I grieved the searing truth that took me months to physically write in a journal, let alone say out loud:
I have to live the rest of my life complicit in mass murder,
justified by my government and a colluding media,
all to serve the interests of those in power and others who profited from this war.
Especially painful was the bitter irony of how I had been vulnerable to being drafted.
Almost all the guys I grew up with had deferments from joining the military for being in graduate school.
But I had to risk it. After four years at Harvard — where I graduated with high honors — the only sure direction I had was to get away, certain that I would never fit in anywhere.
Slurs against Jews continued during college during the early ’60s. They'd be stage-whispered from prep school guys to their buddies in the French that they learned during their year abroad in high school.
I was determined to get fluent in French too, which I did by living in Paris for 8 months.
While there, I felt driven to go into the belly of the beast: Germany. In those lands, my relatives had been mass murdered. I learned the German language, my only hope of being able to stand up as a man in the world.
And it was there, in Germany, where the draft caught up with me.
At a US Army base, I heard that the “the best deal” for me would be to enlist for an extra year and get my choice of “Area Studies.”
I trusted the captain's guidance, hoping to put my Economics degree and mastery of languages to constructive use.
Although I had gone to a Quaker private school and sometimes flirted with pacifism, I knew that a generation earlier, I would have been among the first to pick up a gun against Hitler.
It turns out “Area Studies” was a cover name for espionage, an Army scam. I was put through training to be a spy and sent to Vietnam to recruit, train, and dispatch former paratroopers from France’s colonial wars to behind enemy lines where no American could travel.
My spies were fascists. To make sure they knew who their boss was I chose as my spy name Levy, Artie Levy.
Protest
In Vietnam, and a year later back in the army’s elite intelligence headquarters in Washington, D.C., I learned of even more official lying, corruption of corporate and national institutions to mask what was really going on in US policy.
So once I was discharged, I joined John Kerry and other Vietnam Veterans Against the War. We threw our medals at the Capitol and lobbied the Representatives inside by telling the truth of what we knew.
How to live with all this? Through my own personal agony came an answer:
"Learn to help one person at a time. When something comes worth sharing
more widely, do it with heart and soul."
So, as I finished a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, studied philosophy East and West, began life-long practices of meditation, yoga, energy healing, and subtle body work, I also coordinated the first veteran self-help groups in New York City.
I cried.
Even with all the seeking, my deepest pain did not lessen.
I lobbied Congress more strategically, asking them to fund a study of Vietnam vets. I organized a group of senior social scientists to do a pilot study. When the study was funded, I was chosen to execute the study. Still, I cried.
Then, after years of working on myself, with a Ph.D. in Psych, all that time in therapy, meditating, doing yoga, bodywork, I The est Standard Training.
“Get Off It” and “Fake It 'Til You Make It”
In the est Training, I was talked into a new program of “get off it” and “get on with it”. These principles Tony Robbins —whose invaluable work is of a related flavor — now calls “the science of achievement.”
Good at learning, I was able to get things done.
It took me another 4 decades to realize how much “get off it” and “get on with it” were versions of “fake it 'til you make it.” I had heard that slogan while helping in addiction treatment “tough love” programs in the ’70s, a riff that Brene Brown would later make more widely famous.
Of course, “fake it 'til you make” or Tony Robbins' line “Just make a decision and stick to it: I’m going to live in a beautiful state” is effective for practical uses.
But for me — and many of my clients — bypassing WHAT IS can come with a stiff price. In order to "fake it," I was forced to close emotionally and energetically, limiting my ability to pursue what Tony calls “the art of fulfillment.”
Nonetheless, forward I went.
Our study for Congress gathered the first national data on PTSD and triggered a change in national policy to expand the Veterans Administration to set up outreach centers across the country for fellow veterans.
Four years later (1985), I published “Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation After Vietnam,” which won a Christopher Award for “affirming the highest human values,” announced in the New York Times.
I ended the book with what was both a prophesy and a veiled confession.
“Healing from war needs to come to the veterans of life,” I wrote.
And further, “that will take all of us, singly and together living in joy.”
The veiled confession was that I had to end the book there. I did not know how such a long-prophesied hopeful evolution would come about, or what I could contribute further to bring it about.
So, I got married. We had a daughter, then twin sons — all while I had a therapy practice and taught groups of fellow therapists what I called “the foundations of therapy,’ an integration of Eastern philosophy and practice (mostly from the Tibetan Lama Tarthang Tulku’s “Time Space, and Knowledge”) and a score of western approaches I had learned and practiced.
New Crisis
Tending to three infants and a wife who loved them — but who had an allergy to crying babies and unacknowledged rage at me for her debilitated state post-pregnancy that disabled her during the last 5 months — broke through my outwardly successful ways of dealing.
Desperate to escape, I ate too much, occasionally drank to the point of being obnoxious, slept around, and was careless with money.
Before long, my situation reached crisis proportions.
To save my marriage, I began with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and later did stints with Overeaters Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous. Plus, I was in therapy and transformational workshops with the successor to est, Landmark Education.
I searched everywhere for solutions to the pain, and for ways to fix, change, and improve myself. The underlying subtext?
“Find a problem, trace it to its source, then fix it.”
And if necessary, there was always, “Fake it till you make it.”
And so I continued — driven and searching — until the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drove me nuts all over again.
A voice began screaming inside, “You want to end wars? Look! Your whole life is a waste!”
So, I left my suburban life, got divorced, ramped up all my practices. I got certified as a personal trainer, then capped decades of doing Reiki healing and therapy with certification in Pranic Healing. I couldn’t hope to share with others what I hadn’t somehow learned to do with myself.
Psychic Powers
Decades of practicing energy healing and other higher disciplines brought me to become psychic enough in my mid-60’s to check my work on myself.
This insight revealed the most humbling surprise of my career.
Although I had clearly reduced my external symptoms through years of therapy and self-help, I had some kind of underlying traumatic energy that was completely UNCHANGED.
How could this be?!? I had led the path-breaking study and research, written the book, and was often cited as a pioneer in the field of trauma healing.
In fact, a client of mine came back from a consultation with Bessel van der Kolk, author of numerous articles and books on trauma, and told me: “Bessel said:
'Oh, you’re working with Artie? He’s always 10 years ahead of us.'”
But Something Was Missing
I checked colleagues' websites and videos. I found it was not just me.
All approaches that claimed to heal, clear, release trauma were usually effective at reducing symptoms and bringing people to report positive results. But repeatedly, underlying traumatic energy was left UNCHANGED.
“Healing trauma” had grown from the title of my book ... into a mental health specialty ... and it now spread as an imperative for awake people everywhere to address in themselves.
But as best as I could and still can tell, the whole field — like my own work until then — was still only skimming the surface.
The Next Chapter
I don't believe I have been called in this lifetime to debunk the work of others.
I am here to find ways to spread what I call “Subtle Energy Literacy” —
so others can learn to read the "map", to check in on their healing journey for themselves,
and then teach their clients to do the same.
And in that quest, I took up an intensive 2-year study of an offshoot of the subtle body awareness, movement, and the coaching work of Moshe Feldenkrais.
A year into that training, on the morning of my 67th birthday, I got up from morning devotions — meditation, yoga, energy healing, prayer, and subtle body moves — to a most delightful surprise...
The Discovery of a Lifetime...
All those higher disciplines, all the decades of study and deep application, fused into a seamless, slow-motion way of moving that was moving me.
Exquisitely good feelings filled me to overflowing. I could energetically “read” my aura. Before my inner-eyes, it was doubling in minutes — unheard of in any yoga, meditation, or energy work I know. I did the math: Double daily 10 times and that's a thousand-fold increase. 20 days make a million. 30 days, a billion.
Grow energetically into cosmic proportions?!?
Just as astounding: I could tell that underlying traumatic energy was diminishing noticeably, after just a few minutes of engaging in this new revelation.
Almost a decade later, my delight and excitement still seem warranted.
But I did not foresee all that would be involved in learning how to apply this discovery.
It was a long journey to heal by soothing “all my little ones,” the leftover baggage from this lifetime, plus ancestral and past life baggage too.
I kept finding that sharing this discovery was complicated and hard for me, which spurred further self-healing around my beliefs that I didn't fit in or wasn't accepted.
Few people “got it.” I had to learn over and over — and ever more deeply — that I was complicating the process too. Inadvertently, I was turning people off.
Years of frustrating failures to reach people brought accumulating evidence that under or behind my addictions of the past and some still present — alcohol food, sex, gambling, and financial underachieving — has been a chronic "shriveling.” I have been attempting to defend myself on the inside.
So many of my trauma patterns have been expressions of the many moments of being convinced that “I’m not . . .” and the ways of filling that blank: "I'm not... liked, loved, OK, included, seen, listened to, appreciated, respected, granted my due. And the list went on and on.
I long attributed my bravado to a family culture to my grandmother, whose family fled Russia in the 1890s to escape the persecution of Jews. She would often say to me as a child: “Keep your chin up, Artie! Don’t let them get to you!” I developed ways to celebrate myself, not realizing that these efforts would come off as hollow posturing.
Only slowly, I have come to recognize that no generous sharing happens when there’s even a hint of self-celebrating. The gift I want to pass on is not my personal badge. Rather, this gift is an act of grace given to me to share.
And to claim that this practice is unusually effective at creating "hits of wise, loving, potent, joy,” I have to be genuinely radiating those treasures myself.
So, when I would have glitches with people or tense interactions on social media, my time of reflection would bring me to discover ways I had not yet attended to, listened to, and welcomed inner voices from younger versions of me from pained, past moments.
Mine was never a single abstraction like “the inner child,” but the countless moments of my life when I was understandably hurt, pissed off, sad, lonely scared, or totally numb. And when not yet soothed and included in a caring responsive inner family, who I was in those moments, can erupt.
As for healing “underlying traumatic energy”? Years of the most potent learning, which came from holding myself out to teach, brought a further discovery, checked psychically many times with myself and others.
Healing Beyond the Individual, Beyond the Personal
Self-healing earlier and earlier led me back to the beginning. I eventually discovered that the initial shock that can call for a lifetime of healing is not so much one's physical birth, rather it's from the message conveyed in vibes from the collective at birth.
And these are virtually universal at our stage of global culture.
It's not a PARTICULAR war that we all have had to cope with from the start, but WAR CULTURE. We have all been groomed to fit in, play the game, form our bodies, souls, and spirits to be parts of some great machinery of familial, communal, social, and political-economic structures that control, dominate, and exploit life on earth.
So, the message we get is all-pervasive: “You’re not you. Forget about your ultimate origins from before birth and your destiny after death. You’re a blip in a dumb, numb, dead universe on a spec of a planet in a forbidding vastness that doesn’t care what you think, feel, or do.”
Searching to understand how a new practice could be doubling our energies in minutes, growing us exponentially to galactic proportions and beyond over months and years, led me to timeless, indigenous wisdom. This deep knowing also has roots in the scriptures of East and West, and nowhere taught more diligently than in the monumental masterwork, "The Secret Doctrine," by Madame Blavatsky, and then throughout the 400 volumes of collected works by another of the greatest sages of all time, Rudolf Steiner.
I paraphrase:
“We are the cosmos. She is alive."
And what has come to me to pass on is what I call a “Hug of Hugs.” This divine gift communicates in vibes that harmonize all of you with all. It can seep into the earliest moment of you which you carry within.
The Hug of Hugs will listen, hear, acknowledge, and, when the time is ripe, respond soothingly with the words our deepest soul most needs to hear.
Who You Truly Are and All of Us Too
"Welcome most precious one, dear uniquely invaluable divine cosmic heavenly messenger."
As for the ancient foreshadowing of who I am, who you are, and this new revelation... we can draw on a practice to heal as never before and also realize our true nature in completely new ways.
Ah, I was long reluctant to share what was in retrospect crucial preparation that catalyzed this discovery but seemed too esoteric to mention:
When my children began to approach their teens, I got tutored in Hebrew so I could guide them personally to appreciate some of the gems from our tradition that are meant as a message for our whole human family.
During a trip to Israel, I was advised to read a book that is a distillation of Kabbala (a mystical practice that has Egyptian and Hebraic roots), “The Book of Creation.” I learned that Genesis — the Greek name of the Bible’s first book which in Hebrew has the name of the first word of that entire text: “Beginning…” — has encoded a secret energy meditation intended to cultivate the powers of co-creation on this plane.
For years, I read Genesis in the original Hebrew aloud every Saturday. And now I realize that the secret meditation encoded in that chapter that I poured over so many times has come to life through this revelation of “the Hug of Hugs.” This embodied way of moving to “harmonize all of you with all” awakens, cleanses, and energizes all of the Kabbalistic equivalents of the 12 chakras of highest yoga — simply, effortlessly, and pleasurably.
And who are we to be able to accomplish such a feat? As written in the “6th Day” of the seven-day sequence in Genesis I, we are created “in the Divine Image,” as “Sparks of God.”
So, what I have been given to pass on is no religious teaching for an ingroup, but rather a way to embody, experience, and exude the marvel of ancient prophetic calls for awakening our common humanity to a destiny as co-creators in a divine and cosmic challenge.
We are to bring expressions of the highest (heavenly) virtues to this earthy plane.
To this end, I am called to share with the self-organizing army mobilizing to uplift humanity, the spiritually open coaches, who are dedicated to learn first for themselves, and then are committed to teaching their clients.
And also I intend to honor the practitioners and teachers of “The Science of Achievement” by conveying a practice that can activate who you are truly as “the come from” for any act undertaken for even the most practical purposes.
And so, through this simple, pleasurable, and energetically rewarding revelation, we can now more readily reconcile “achievement” moment to moment with “fulfillment.”
Gifts of Dramatically Enhanced Energy and Healing
I haven’t had a cigarette or drink in decades or gambled in years. I just finished losing the 35 pounds gained over the last 35 years. I am in a committed, faithful relationship with my new fiancee, a mate from 3 previous lives who I met soon after coming to Costa Rica in September 2019. I am also now the godfather, helping to raise her 5-year-old son.
At 77, I am the healthiest I’ve ever been in my life — eating organic keto with intermittent fasting, and launching my work as a self-supporting project, which recently just doubled my annual income.
And you? Thank you for witnessing.
Know that I know:
It's no accident you've read to this point.
If you haven't already, sign up below for the free video to see the Hug of Hugs in action. Take me up on my follow-up invitation to get in touch with me — through my book, course, or directly by saying, “Let’s work together, Artie!”
Loving blessings,
Artie
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