And this is a different kind of invitation. Not so different that it should make you nervous. Rather, my hope is that it is just different enough to let you know that you've found something real. Like a walk in nature is real after a day of sitting at your computer trying to "get things done." Real in a way that kind of wakes you up to how so much of what we do in our modern lives is...NOT real.

In case it helps to know...I have had thousands and thousands of hours of classroom and clinical training in East-West medicine. I started working in medical offices when i was 14, and started studying plants at the ripe age of 15. I have trained with world class doctors of Chinese medicine, Western MD's, Naturopaths, an 88th generation Taoist priest and several senior students in that lineage who were direct mentors, with master herbalists, functional medicine pioneers, old-school bioterrain practitioners, weed-eating Cretan grandmothers, Aztec, Mayan, Zapotec medicine carriers, a very special High Andean priest and more than a few shamans, and continue to mentor under my dearest and wisest Teacher Juan Ruiz Naupari, the founder and Director of Pneuma Institute of Traspersonal Psychology. I have spent many humbling hours in sweat lodges and temascalli, and walked on pilgrimages to many holy places, sometimes harvesting wildflowers, other times just carrying prayers through the desert, and have crossed oceans to sit in meditation with Tibetan buddhist monks, to make offerings in caves, and to worship the sun and the rain from the edge of the earth.

The last two decades have found me mostly immersed in the clinic in Venice, then Santa Barbara and Ojai, and serving a population that is uniquely burdened with stress, in a place I once swore I'd never live and referred to as the belly of the dragon - also known as Southern California. It's not so different in many ways, but also holds its particular challenges, illusions, and seductive pleasures, and an addiction to a special brand of stress that some believe has rippled out from here to affect many and distant parts of the world.

What I have learned in this time is that healing, true healing, is an inside job. But it is also a job that cannot be done alone, a journey we must travel in good company, or we are destined to get lost, distracted, waylaid along the way.

Because healing is also about restoring right Relationship.

Medicine, true medicine, is something that flows from a secret and sacred spring in a pristine high mountain meadow deep inside the landscape of the heart, and it is something that must be harvested by the part of ourselves that most of us have entirely neglected, forgotten, or ignored. There are those who can help lead you to the path that leads inward to that source, but you must walk the steps to get there, to smell the flowers, and to drink from that deepest, purest wellspring.

The invitation here is to join us for a workshop of sorts, a place and time to remember, to reconnect to what you already know but need to hear again in a new way, so that you can begin again to trust what you know. It is too easy to become cynical in this time, and although a healthy skepticism is well placed in this world, cynicism blocks us from being able to receive, to learn, to trust, and thus, to heal.

We are opening this space as an offering to the part of you that knows you need something different. Not a different doctor, exactly, but a different approach, a different conversation, a different way of seeing yourself, your body, your health, and your life. A different relationship to yourself, your body, and to life. We have made it as accessible as possible so that you don't hesitate to listen to your intuition. Plus we will send you a free pass to bring one friend to join you, because we believe that healing happens in good company. And we are including a year membership in our Threshold online community so that this one experience doesn't just get filed away in the cabinet, but becomes the beginning of a new and ongoing dialogue that has the REAL potential to change your life and your sense of wellbeing for the better, and even, I daresay, for the best.

I sincerely hope that if this speaks to you, you decide to listen, to join us, and to experience something new, safe, nourishing, and transformative in the presence of other pilgrims walking in the same direction. It's good to have good travel companions on the journey, (and good to have a map and/or a compass! - we'll talk about this during the retreat...)

A deep bow, from my heart to yours.

Dr. Eric Baumgartner DAOM, L.Ac.