We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Edan Harari a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Edan, thanks for joining us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

As a manual therapist and bodyworker for many years, I found myself in sessions with clients from time to time and my client would have some sort of emotional release. I always found it fascinating when this occurred. Eventually, I started learning the Barnes method of Myofascial Release and noticed that engaging my clients fascia in this way and with this precise technique, they would very often have an emotional release occur as the trauma was leaving their body.

This reminded me of the energy work and bodywork that I was doing years and years earlier with my psychiatrist/psychotherapist. So I decided to reach out to him and ask him to teach me how to practice his cutting-edge techniques and from then on he became my mentor.

These days, I specialize in body therapy and emotional release bodywork and my entire practice has evolved and moved further and further away from just structural bodywork and alignment work which is what I was practicing for years and into more emotional/energetic bodywork that is designed to heal trauma and treat mental health conditions versus just treating physical pain or structural issues.

Before, I was treating my clients for physical pain and now I’m treating them for emotional pain.
What I noticed was that most of the time, the physical pain we experience is actually a manifestation of some sort of emotional pain we are storing in our body.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Growing up I was met with lots of physical and mental health challenges.

I’ve had an interest in health and wellness since I was in my late teens when I found myself suffering from anxiety and I discovered the practice of yoga. At the young age of 21, over 23 years ago, I started teaching yoga and eventually discovered Thai Massage and that was life changing for me as it helped me heal myself of my anxiety and depression that I was dealing with.

I was always interested in massage therapy and I found that I had a gift in my hands and I was able to help people feel better in their bodies through touch.

Also in my early 20’s I had a mental breakdown because I literally felt like I exploded because I was suppressing my anger for most of my life and storing that in my body. I wasn’t given permission to feel my anger while growing up and was always taught not to express it until I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
This was a major pivot point for me in my life and I decided to change my entire lifestyle and to focus on health and wellness by better taking care of myself. Part of this process was meeting my now mentor who is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who specializes in a cutting-edge hands-on energy work technique that is designed to release emotions from our body.
Going for sessions with him literally changed my life because it allowed for me to express my emotions in the safe space of a therapeutic setting.

Fast forward many years, I found myself unhappy with my career of managing restaurants and nightclubs in NYC, and I decided to register to a massage therapy program and become a manual therapist.

After a few years working as a manual therapist, I discovered that my clients kept coming back to see me weekly and they were not getting any better. So I then remembered a modality that I discovered in massage therapy school that was a very potent osteopathic-based healing method called Ortho-Bionomy and so I decided to go all in and learn that. From there, I discovered another manual therapy modality that worked with the fascia, our connective tissue system, and was taught to me by a physical therapist by the name of John F. Barnes. After learning the Barnes method of Myofascial Release, I became more and more interested in working with emotions and trauma. I then continued my education and learned how to work with the energy work technique that my previous psychotherapist used to practice,

These days, I specialize in trauma-informed somatic and emotional bodywork that is designed to release our emotions and trauma from our body in order to heal the problems of our mind.

I’ve also found myself interested in psychedelic therapy the last several years and discovering firsthand how it can help us heal and how it goes hand-in-hand with the body therapy that I do. I discovered that if I ever reach a plateau in treatment of my clients, I would recommend that they try psychedelic therapy.

Fortunately, along my path, I met therapist Pia Isabel Rossle who lives between Mexico and Spain and once I did some psychedelic therapy with her, I came to realize just how important it would be to also have body therapy involved.

Recently, we decided to team up and offer her psychedelic therapy sessions alongside my body therapy so we can really create massive impact in the lives of our clients.

What sets me apart from other bodywork practitioners is that I work with my clients to treat the cause of their physical or mental health ailments rather than just treating symptoms.

Oftentimes, the cause of our physical pain or our mental health issues is usually having something to do with our fascia and our emotions. These are the missing links in our current healthcare system and I’m delighted to share this with the world so as to liberate people’s bodies and improve their lives.

These days, I not only treat my clients in my private practice in Miami Beach and NYC (Kinetic Body Therapy), but I’m also an educator in the field of mental wellness and I am often interviewed on podcasts to speak about the healing power of emotional body therapy.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

I think that in order to succeed in the field of healing and wellness, it’s best to have first-hand experience healing ourselves from something so that it’s not just learning from books and training but experiential learning.

The reason why I feel that I am really good at supporting others in healing using the modalities I practice is because I myself had to heal from various ailments and conditions with some of these potent modalities.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

Absolutely not. There’s nothing that I’d rather be doing than working as a healing facilitator and educator in this field. I’m extremely passionate about all things anatomy, wellness and healing from pain and mental health issues because of my own healing journey and path. Having to heal from all types of ailments since childhood has opened me up to the possibility of our body healing itself. But I will say that being an expert in pain and healing did not come without costs. From birth, I was faced with health challenges, setbacks and traumas. I was born in Israel with a urinary tract dysfunction and structural deformities. After my family moved to Brooklyn, I had my first surgery when I was three, to repair my urinary tract. I had a similar surgery five years later. In my early twenties, I was ridden with a rare and severe neurological pain condition known as cluster headaches, a debilitating head pain that sent me to the ER on numerous occasions. This illness is considered to be one of the most painful conditions known to medical science and I can attest to that. Then came my mental breakdown that I mentioned earlier. After about a year of attending weekly bodywork-based psychotherapy sessions called ‘Open Orgonomy’, along with designing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, I was finally able to achieve a state of harmony and balance in my life. Being active and an athlete, I’ve also had several sports injuries from broken bones to ruptured tendons and torn ligaments so I’ve learned the hard way what it’s like to have to heal from pain. Over the years, I have become deeply passionate about various somatic healing and movement modalities that are based in subtle mind body consciousness work. These healing and movement methods translate in the effectiveness of our everyday life, our work, and our relationships, but also keep us profoundly connected to our higher selves. I love helping people become free from all their pain so they can perform at their peak, becoming supple and resilient as children and animals.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.KineticBodyTherapy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kineticbodytherapy
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kineticbodytherapy
• Youtube: Kinetic Body Therapy
• Other: TikTok: KineticBodyTherapy