The Luckiest Man Alive?

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Within a few weeks an offer came out of the blue to lecture at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. He remembered reading that the Bushman people in the nearby Kalahari experienced something similar to kundalini in their dances, so he agreed to go to Pretoria on the promise that he could meet the Bushmen. With the help of an intrepreter, Keeney was welcomed into a village and invited to dance. “It blew my mind,” he says. “It felt like the kundalini thing that happened to me in college. The medicine men explained that it was very powerful magic that could only be done in a group. If someone dancing around the fire got too much energy, they hurried over to touch them and tap them to let it cool down. That’s what I had needed the first time it hit me.

“This was an important lesson,” he adds, “which a lot of New Agers never learn. You can’t easily divorce the power of these rituals from their cultural context. They are not a commodity. You need to be in a frame of mind similar to that of the people who created them.”

Offers soon materialized to visit Paraguay, the Diné (Navajo) reservation, and Japan, and he found more traditional healers to study with. Wanting to share what he was learning with people outside of universities, he penned practical how-to books, Everyday Soul (1996) and The Energy Break (1998), and hit the lecture circuit with an ensemble of musicians and performers he called the Lifeforce Theater. The tour culminated with a 1997 show at the Miami Arena where thousands danced in their seats as Keeney demonstrated the ins and outs of ecstatic movement to the music of Al Di Meola’s jazz band. Time and Newsweek took notice, and it appeared that Bradford Keeney could be the next big New Age star.

But this “carnival of the spirit,” as he calls it, didn’t feel quite right, so Keeney gradually withdrew to concentrate on the work of scouting and studying indigenous healing traditions. Then one day, again by complete surprise, he was contacted on behalf of high-tech executive Nancy Connor, who had heard about an outrageous speech he had given at a psychology conference while breathing helium. “It was a serious group,” he explains with a sheepish grin, “so I thought they needed it.”

One of the founders and former director of FTP Software, the company that developed File Transfer Program, a key contribution to the growth of Internet use, Connor was now interested in investigating older sources of human knowledge. She invited Keeney to help her launch “a foundation dedicated to documenting and conserving cultural wisdom traditions and their healing practices.”

Teaming up to launch the Ringing Rocks Foundation, Connor and Keeney initiated the Profiles of Healing book series, a small grant program, and cultural preservation projects with universities and museums around the world. They are now at work preparing a video curriculum that Keeney believes is the “first shamanic-inspired college course.”

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