When you come to study with me, try to put aside your left-brained expectations about what you will learn and how you will learn it. My job is to encourage, nurture and facilitate your becoming all that you can be. I create a safe environment where you can test and work with your intuition, and use all of your innate and acquired talents.

Holistic Healing can best be taught holistically. I do not teach just your mind. I do not teach just by talking. I invite you to come and live my life with me. That's why my workshops are live-in Intensives. You may learn more while we are washing dishes or walking on the beach or swimming with the dolphins than you will learn while sitting in a formal setting and listening to me lecture. You may learn more from other students than you do from me.

The actual hours of the workshops are somewhat flexible, depending on whether the dolphins show up, and various inclinations and needs of the group. The topics of the workshops are somewhat interchangeable, because we are constantly learning from our living together. If, for example, one of you has an emotional crisis during the Healing Voice workshop, I will not ask you to put off expressing your emotions for three days, until the appropriate workshop heading. On the other hand, during an Emotional Release Workshop, a participant may have strong feelings that are best processed by a Vibrational Alignment using sound and crystal healing.

Image by Kalalani

Each day we begin by doing four things (which are also subject to change)

* 1) Releasing. We form a circle and then turn away from the center and make releasing sounds to express pent-up anxieties and "negative" emotions.
* 2) Attuning. We face the center of the circle, holding hands, and go into the silence, where we find our individual tones. Then we tone as a group, listening to our neighbors and wrapping our own sounds around theirs until we find a harmonious group sound.
* 3) Practical Realities. We discuss how we will handle the practical details of the day, including who will assist with cooking and cleaning.
* 4) Appreciations and Difficulties. As adults, we too seldom state our appreciations for the kind and thoughtful things that we do for one another. This is an opportunity to give each other positive verbal strokes. We tend to value happiness over truth, and so we too often sweep our resentments under the rug. But even the tiniest unspoken resentment becomes a barrier to the authenticity that is a trademark of these workshops. While most Appreciations and Resentments are simply thrown into the circle without response, we do end these sessions by creating a time for Major Resentments that may need to be processed. These rarely occur, but when they do occur they are great gifts. We find that Major Resentments almost always happen when the behavior of one participant triggers old, unresolved childhood wounds for another. In most cases, I will work with the wounded person, helping them to go back to the original source of their wounding.

Occasionally participants are frustrated by this apparent lack of organization, but eventually most people settle into going with the flow and appreciate that it is part of the greater gestalt, and sooner or later, all topics do get covered. I can appreciate this initial frustration. When I was 24 (in 1968), I went to Arizona with my infant son, Kalon, hoping to study with the Hopi Indians. I wanted to learn about herbs and gardening and childrearing. In my mind, I imagined befriending some Indian who would sit me down and teach me these things.

I was very fortunate that David and Nora Monongye invited me into their home in Hotevila where we ate together and I joined them in washing dishes and fetching water and tending the garden. Meanwhile\ people came in and out of their house and children were passed from aunt to uncle to cousin, and plants were handled, and healing was done all in the nature of things, not as something apart from the lives they lived together. It was an honor to participate in the web of their lives, and in doing so I learned a little less of the specifics than I anticipated, but far more about a total way of life. I know that I am a better person, a better mother, teacher, and gardener than I was before.

So this is what I bring to those who study with me. Each workshop is unique, according to the personalities and talents of those who attend. I am extremely fortunate in drawing marvelous people to my workshops. Since I limit the Intensives to 14 participants, we grow close quickly, and the synergy of each group is always remarkable.

The only downside is that when the workshops come to an end, people don't want to leave. So much safety, authenticity and genuine affection develops among us that there is a reluctance to go back into a world that does not necessarily hold these qualities. The challenge, then, is to take what has been learned into our daily lives and begin to create these qualities in the world where we live.
   Image by Kalalani

This is how two of my graduate students experience my teaching style:

Kate DeVore, Voice and Speech Therapist, Harvard affiliate: "Joy's teaching style is revolutionary. Rather than a linear "teacher-student" relationship, her paradigm is circular. She shares her whole self and makes it clear that the distinction between teacher and student is largely artificial. She allows herself to be a student as well as a teacher, and creates a circular flow of energy that allows for maximal growth for all involved. She models the ideal teacher so subtly; it is a tribute to her open, honest, egoless, gentle, loving style of guidance. Joy is truly a Master Teacher."

Karen McDaniel, Librarian: "When Joy first asked if I'd like to write about her teaching style, I burst out laughing! I thought, 'I can't write about Joy's teaching style-- she HAS no teaching style!--Joy just IS...and people come (somehow always the right people)...and life happens (but somehow in bolder, more pointed strokes and more brilliant colors than in our usual existence)...and we go home changed into brighter and truer versions of our real selves...and not so much alone as we felt when we started the process!'

"Actually, Joy knows tons of stuff, and I've probably learned more from her than I have from anyone on this planet. But it is not Joy's style to recite copious facts to her students, as happened so frequently in my 16-plus years of formal education. Though Joy's books form a basic intellectual background, the teaching method she uses is loving, intuitive, and experiential.

" Joy does not say, 'You must use this particular stone or tone to remedy this condition.' She is much more likely to send us off with some inspiring ideas, to practice on each other, to access our own inner wisdom, until we see for ourselves what fits the situation. One of Joy's gifts is her uncanny knack for opening her mouth (this may be in a lecture, but could just as well be while walking to the beach), and a word, or a phrase, or a sentence, or a story pops out, seemingly innocuous and inconsequential, yet it lodges in your soul, like a precious nugget of gold, which may later explode into a life-changing cataclysm. Or it may quietly nudge and nag, inviting you to see or do something that will help you to see a person in your life differently, to release a long-held limiting belief, to bring to the surface an old wound that needs healing, or even to tap more deeply into your own wellspring of joy and love.

"Joy refers in her autobiography to being privileged to apprentice with teachers who were 'very real' and who 'walked their talk.' Joy has in fact become one of those teachers."