In a way, this adventure began in 2006 in Point Reyes Station. I was newly living with my young family in the house on Manana Way we purchased from Ewell McIsaac. Life revolved around endless home repairs, my new baby girl Giulia, the Point Reyes clinic where I worked as a family practice doc, and my own practice at the Sandcastle building. A new baby, a new house, a new practice . . . I never knew I could do so much or sleep so little.

My body said, “head to Yoga Toes,” but then, would a yoga class kill me? This was my inner dialogue as I raced down the hill to daycare on my way to yoga. I was racing to slow down and dying to live. This was the paradox that I would love to think I somehow invoked to catalyze the mystical experience that was about to unfold.

When I finally landed on my mat, I instinctively drew on the practice I had relied on in med school. I dropped into my own blend of yoga, Continuum and self-osteopathy. Without even thinking, I began moving subtle waves, breath, and quiet humming throughout my body till I became wave, breath, and sound. I imagined, and felt myself “dissolve,” seemingly from particle to light. Yes, this is the practice my mentor Bonnie Gintis, D.O. taught and also conveyed in her book Engaging the Movement of Life: Exploring Health and Embodiment Through Osteopathy and Continuum to a packed Dance Palace the following year.

At Yoga Toes I became aware of grunts and groans throughout the room. Lots of effort was happening. But I wasn’t struggling. My body was buoyant. It took many moments to realize that I was doing a lot, because it felt like I was hardly doing anything.

I felt completely attuned. As if the teacher Nick Giacomini was teaching directly to me. Each bit of guidance seemed to speak to exactly the experience I was having in my body and consciousness in each moment. Perfect synchrony.

At the end of class I felt calm, still, full, and sane for the first time in months. An incredible contrast to the zany frenzy that had defined my life up to the moment when I first “melted” on my mat.

Deeply slowed and “in flow,” I was soon the only one left in the room. Sitting on the edge of the huge old wood subfloor to put on my shoes, I did just that and nothing else. That’s when I had what I could call a mystical experience while simply tying my boot. I wasn’t pondering anything profound. I was just being.

One boot lace and then another, and suddenly I was aware that I was not alone. There was no one present, but a “presence” had entered the room. Unmistakably. Was this an ancestor teacher? A healing spirit? I had never felt such a presence before.

At the time, the experience was so strange; I had no words. I was a bit spooked, actually. How could I possibly speak of this? Who would possibly understand? Who wouldn’t think I’m crazy? No one, I decided. So I didn’t mention it to anyone. I simply finished tying my boots and headed back to Giulia and the Papermill Creek Children’s Corner.

Fast forward 10 years and I’m working in a big medical building in Mill Valley. Nothing about the place recalled sacred ground, except for the majesty of Shelter Bay and Mount Tamalpais outside my window. It was there in Mill Valley, in 2016, doing what I do, that it happened again.

I was “doing” my own version of “fluid” osteopathic treatment, my “dissolving” practice, with a patient named Syris Falkan, a Chinese medical doctor. I was following cues in her body with my hands, dreamily merging with the ground below my feet, and the water and mountain outside. We were all connected.

Suddenly, I was aware of the presence again. Just the same as the time I felt it in Yoga Toes ten years before. Only this time I wasn’t afraid. I had been here before.

I felt strongly this was meant to be shared, but how? What could I say? How could I possibly share what I was sensing? Are there even words for such a thing?

I settled on humor. “Syris,” I said, laughing a bit. “You know what I think?” A few moments passed. “I think you’re an incarnate of an ancient healing master.” That was mild and light-hearted enough, I thought. She said nothing. I finished my work.

When the session was over, she told me, “You know, I wasn’t sure if you were joking, if you were guessing, or if you knew.” She decided to tell me about how when she was little, before she could even talk, she could see channels of current running through people’s bodies. That she could reach right out and touch the channels and open them if they wanted to be opened. She said she’d seen the world as movement her whole life. She explained how she could feel what the currents were doing in the water right outside my window as we worked. It was then that I decided she was going to be my doctor.

Syris grew up in rural Arizona with no phone or electricity, on sacred Hopi land in the thickest ponderosa forest in the United States. She’d known little of the modern world for most of her life, and even now hardly feels a part of it. She’s spent her life writing and playing music, reading and writing books, creating art, and mastering her craft of healing, which was supported by her achieving a clinical Ph.D. in Chinese medicine.

When I fall asleep on her table, she feels me wake up from the next room. I’ve found a lot of permission and reverence for the non-material in this woman. An integration of the mystical, experiential, scientific, and academic. She has supported me finding the openings, the “doorways,” as we say, to larger awareness. And I have supported her.

Syris explained to me recently that we cannot open the “door,” that we cannot expand in consciousness by ourselves. That’s just not how nature works. I remember the moment I was listening to MC Yogi’s devotional music when I realized he had been invoking guidance all along. References to the masters and to the forces of nature are everywhere in his music. He would have likely understood perfectly had I chosen to share my experience that day in his yoga studio in Toby’s Feed Barn.

Feeling and being in this life is a quiet experience for me now. I’ve settled in the woods of Forest Knolls, where I reflect daily on how blessed we are to be graced with the wondrous community and land of West Marin. And gratefully, as of July 1, I’ve left Mill Valley and the 101 freeway for good. I’m happy and supported here in the San Geronimo Valley in my quiet little home, and now by a quiet little office in Fairfax across from Good Earth Natural Foods—closer to home, to beloved West Marin, and to myself.