Kenneth Robinson says he lives by a perspective Hunter Thompson champions: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” He calls himself a transpersonal healer who “works with the conventional to help them find their weirdness and with the weird to help them make the most of that blessed state.”
He is a practitioner of Alaya, “a process that helps us discover our own answers to the question, 'Who am I?’ ”
Hmmm.
“The idea behind Alaya is to help the person connect with their inner essence,” the 47-year-old Nashvillian says. “What we try to do is help a person not just theorize about that, but actually experience that connectedness.”
Actually, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex approach to physical, mental and spiritual health, Alaya (pronounced “A-lie-uh”) can be explained as a method of blending traditional methods of therapy with yoga-like attention to breathing and movement. Then there’s the unusual blending of various religious readings. It’s an approach to wellness that is likely to make doctors and probably more than a few therapists cringe. And in a time when contemporary society seems to be going back to clear-cut notions of right and wrong, Alaya might seem a bit Sept. 10. Still, Alaya’s focus on the connection between the mind and body is certainly not misplaced, and those who practice it say that it has helped them find peace when all else failed.
Two Boulder, Colo., residents—a social worker and a dancer—devised Alaya as an alternative to psychotherapy in the 1980s. In 1988, Robinson, who has a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling and worked in family counseling for seven years, became one of their clients. Right away, he says, the experience was very powerful, and he quickly decided he wanted to abandon a stable career and practice Alaya himself.
Flying back and forth from Nashville to Boulder over a period of four years, he underwent rigorous training with the Colorado partners. Today, he has a thriving practice. He has 15 regular clients and conducts about 10 group sessions a year. Next February, he will be leading a retreat to Tulum, Mexico. And recently, he and two other part-time partners just developed a Web site (www.alayapartners.com), although we’ll warn that the site doesn’t exactly speak the language of Donald Rumsfeld.
The essence of Alaya—that there is a strong connection between the rumblings of the mind and the health and feeling of the body—isn’t all that radical. (It’s not meant for people with serious depression or mental health problems, unless it’s used in conjunction with more conventional approaches.) But it’s certainly not mainstream either.
The easygoing Robinson meets with clients for anywhere from an hour to 75 minutes. During that time, the client may talk about issues he or she is confronting at work or at home. Robinson, whose reassuring good looks could land him a sensitive male lead in a Lifetime original motion picture, sometimes asks clients to express an emotion such as anger in a physical way. They may shout it out or just shake their fists. He may also have them dance. The idea, Robinson says, is to “bring the force of the feeling into the body.”
Robinson also asks clients to perform what he calls breath work—taking full and deep breaths and noticing changes in their bodies as they do it. Yoga-like exercises are also applied.
“When you’re breathing for 20 to 25 minutes, I don’t know the mechanics of it, but I have powerful, emotional, cathartic experiences,” says Sharon Woodard, a longtime client of Robinson’s who credits Alaya for helping her get through divorce with integrity and compassion. “For me, it was a cleansing of old emotions.”
A therapist for 20 years, Linda Manning is a part-time partner of Robinson’s. She says that Alaya tries to pick up where yoga leaves off. “Let’s say you’re in a difficult yoga position. Some people may want to give up immediately; others may want to force their way through it. Regardless of what you do, that [choice] offers information about yourself. Those things you do in reaction to difficult physical experiences are the same things you do in reaction to conflict in your life.”
In some ways, Alaya is all about making the age-old, if elusive, connection between mind and body.
“We live so much in our heads and in our thoughts,” says Manning, who is also a staunch anti-death penalty activist. “Our bodies are just audio-visual carts that carry the brain around. So just engaging in physical activity like dance or yoga-type postures gets us reconnected with our body, so we can recognize a physical impulse when it comes along.”
In a session filled with breath work and yoga-like exercises, Robinson will also ask clients to read a rather eclectic list of spiritual texts. Asked what might be on the reading list for a particular session, Robinson rattles off the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist priest; Rumi, a Persian poet; and the Dalai Lama. And in case Pat Robertson is reading this, Robinson’s clients also read biblical texts.
Robinson says that generally he asks his clients to “slow down and connect with their own body, breath and feelings.” He himself talks thoughtfully, if very deliberately. If he can’t answer a question right away, he asks for more time. Your heart rate drops just talking to him.
He talks frequently about the deleterious effects of a fast-paced life. “The rush of urban life and the ever increasing levels of stimulation and information that we receive do create some problems,” he says. “What’s even more important is the speed of our thoughts. We can become so overloaded with our thinking that we lose contact with our intuition and our bodies. Then we become more subject to the expectations and demands of other people, our society, even loved ones, and lose some of the freedom to choose for ourselves.”
How the pace of life can affect someone’s mental health may rank as an obsession with Robinson. “All this speed tends to numb us. We can’t process everything, so parts of us shut down, emotionally, physically, even mentally,” he says in a slow, calm manner that doesn’t betray his message. “The first part of Alaya is to notice just how fast it all is going.”
Of course, Robinson doesn’t tell anyone to quit his or her law practice and start a blueberry farm. What he does advise is to slow the tempo of life and figure out what’s important. But the clients have to come to it themselves. The premise of Alaya is that through the breath work, the yoga, the dancing and the spiritual readings, the clients find some sort of peace.
“It wasn’t so much what he did,” Woodard says. “He never told me anything and never gave me any answers. But he allowed me the space and time to come up with my own answers. He’s masterful at what he does. He doesn’t do anything, and yet he does a whole lot.”
“I went to a therapist for several years, but I never cried with him,” another client says. “I just never felt safe enough. But when I started seeing Kenneth, my emotions started happening.”
For sure, all this may sound a bit hokey—especially phrases such as “opening up your heart” and “getting in touch with your deepest wants.” True, Alaya isn’t grounded in an excess of scientific research. But it’s not as farfetched as it might seem. For example, we know that stress can lead to heart attacks and hypertension, so Alaya’s focus on slowing the pace of life isn’t exactly misplaced. We also know from personal experience alone that when we’re agitated and frustrated, that tension manifests itself in our shoulders and muscles. So again, Alaya’s concentration on relaxing the body makes sense.
“I have a Ph.D. in psychology, and I have studied it for a very long time,” says Manning, who also works as the director of the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center at Vanderbilt University. “Alaya may not have been developed as a science, but it’s perfectly compatible with what science teaches us.”
Robinson himself says that the appeal of Alaya lies in just how elementary it is. “It seems strange that something as simple as slowing down and breathing with awareness could take us to a place of compassion for ourselves and others, but strangely it does.”
