Ken Russell is one of those rare people who has taken his vast personal and professional experience as a basis for evolving a unique way of working with people. His intention is to mentor each person to their deepest fulfillment. More particulars of his life can be seen at his website Biography
While studying personally with Ken has significantly helped and enriched how I live my daily life, it has also been an enormous challenge for me. Ken works and focuses his attention, not on the areas of life that come easy for me, but on the areas where I have the most difficulties. He has a way of pointing directly to my core, through the defenses and self protective mechanisms that keep me from being truly open to progress and growth.
The path to oneself, according to Ken, is simple but our minds are complicated and tend to prefer sophisticated formulations and conceptual ideas rather than seeing clearly. Ken prefers to work privately, either personally or by phone, with each of his students. This maximizes the direct impact experienced in each session and insures that each person is addressed and respected in their uniqueness.
Ken’s sessions are fiercely practical, often dealing with the most ordinary details of daily life. His teachings are not separate from life but are intended to be incorporated in an experimental, and experiential way into living. Life becomes a laboratory for finding what works best. I continue to learn the necessity of living and learning from mistakes and successes as I develop my own unique way of living.
All of Ken’s students practice a simple yet rigorous form of daily meditation practice. For me this practice has allowed me to have some distance from the workings of my mind, bringing more clarity to my life and work. Ken also teaches a much less formal form of meditation he calls “tuning in” in which one attends and deeply experiences their emotions and feelings. Being in touch with my feelings has significantly helped me become more sensitive to others, especially my children and my clients. Learning to feel the deep feelings of pain and fear as they appear within me, without distracting myself or defending myself has been one of the hardest practices I have ever undertaken. However, my increasing ability to feel these feelings undercuts the ability of my mind to cause me problems or to cloud my vision.
On a professional level, one focus of my sessions with Ken, has been to continually develop my work, deepening and expanding the fundamental material I learned from Moshe Feldenkrais. I have been motivated to work on refining my ability to communicate clearly with students and clients in effective new engaging ways, whether through touch or words. It has been especially difficult for me to learn to teach directly without complicated conceptualizations that historically made my teaching difficult to understand. I have also been encouraged to follow my intuitions and let my work become more creative and helpful to my clients and practitioner trainees. This has invigorated my work and made it more enjoyable for myself and helpful to my clients and practitioners who are mentored by me.
Ken has in large measure, helped me clarify, the how and what of what I teach and offer. Through winnowing out unnecessary complicated material from my offerings, I have been able to come to and teach a far more functional and practical body oriented practice for improving how my students live their life.
For further information on Ken’s work you will find these useful.
The Way of Seeing® - Key Elements
Also under the library heading there are several articles. Two in particular have been most useful for me.
As well, in the library you will find a listing for dialogues which give a mild flavor of how Ken works.