Spring Offerings :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
Another happy spring greetings to you all. I wrote not too long ago to announce my return to the Los Angeles area, but I wanted to send out a few quick updates and a discount offer. Also note that April is likely my final month of Sundays in Silverlake. If that is a convenient spot for you, I'd love to see you there in the next few weeks. Otherwise, come see me at my lovely and peaceful Pasadena office!
I have been enjoying settling into my new office, and getting to see many of my old clients. Thank you all for the warm welcome and encouragement. It's good to be back.
Spring Discount
I know the political situation in the country has many of us rattled, and tax season on top of Trump's tariff spree isn't helping most people's pocketbook. I'm offering a 10% discount on all individual sessions booked through the end of April. Use the discount code BLOOM when scheduling. Self-care packages of four or more prepaid sessions are also available at the normal 15% discount.
Schedule your next session here.
This photo comes from one of a series of rainstorms we had last spring in Oakland, many of which produced fantastic rainbows. I'm perched up on the roof of my friend's rehearsal space, looking southeast toward the Oakland hills. Shot on Kodak Tri-X film with a Pentax 6x7 medium format camera.
Visceral Manipulation Study Group and private coaching
I have been volunteering as a teaching assistant with Visceral Manipulation trainings through the Barral Institute for the past few years. I decided to go a step further this spring and start offering VM study groups at my Pasadena office. I am collaborating with another experienced practitioner, Yasaman Barzi, PT. We had our first group last month, and are looking forward to our next one in a little over a week.
In addition to these groups, I am now offering hands-on coaching sessions for groups of two, available during my normal office hours.
For the therapists on my newsletter, please find details for all of the above here.
Sarah Davachi on Alastair Galbraith
In thinking about what to share for this month's newsletter, I came across this touching description of one musician's work by another. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, but I knew I needed to snatch it off of the page and let it be more than mere record promotion. Here, Sarah Davachi addresses the music of Alastair Galbraith. Davachi's music features heavily in my office playlist. Galbraith manages to squeak in with one of his quieter pieces.
"It’s hard to describe how Alastair’s music makes me feel, and it’s something that I’ve been trying to do for myself ever since I first fell in love with his records many years ago. In a concrete way, there’s a kind of intimacy and quietude, a sort of functional aloneness, that I admire so deeply in his music and that I aspire to in my own music. I’m consistently obsessed with the production and arrangement in his records. His songwriting is so beautifully sparse in its base structure, and that’s something that I appreciate on a technical level because I know how hard it is to be simple and reduced for the sake of a specific meaning. But Alastair somehow manages to touch that negative space further and make its emptiness tangible. And I suppose that this intimacy speaks to the emotional aspects that I latch onto in his music as well – from my perspective, what Alastair is so incredible at achieving in his music is the idea that one could take a moment or a feeling, and suspend it in time as a miniature or a sculpture of sorts that you can walk around and observe and maybe just sit with for a while. It’s an experience unlike much else."
Poetry by Elizabeth Bishop
In keeping with the theme, here is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop that has been rattling around my brain ever since I first heard it set to music by the Dutch post-punk band The Ex. Their 1998 Starters Alternators record, produced by the recently deceased Steve Albini, is an old favorite of mine. They adapted Bishop's "One Art" into "Art of Losing," a song whose jaunty rhythm plods along in perfectly unstable tension with a creeping, churning dread that eventually overtakes the song. Similarly, Bishop's lines present themselves with a tidy, almost diminutive order, approaching the notion of loss in steadily escalating stanzas. Her formalism betrays a nimble, vertiginous dance over a vast emptiness; her rhymes neatly laced against dissolution. It is, in Davachi's words, a feeling suspended in time, "a miniature or a sculpture of sorts." Let us sit with it for a while.
One Art
With care,
Wilson