My current career is most focused on healing massage, bodywork and energywork (http://www.earondavis.com/), teaching and community building.  I am also in the process of trying to get input and assistance as I seek a publisher for my book, Divine Primates. I am teaching an online college course, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in the B.S. degree Health Sciences Program of Kaplan University - as well as a monthly “energy circle” at Infinity Foundation in Highland Park, IL.

A licensed massage therapist, I work as an integrative medicine specialist part time in a hospital system while I maintain a private shamanic bodywork and massage practice.   My clients include people with chronic pain, cancer, stroke, trauma and emotional and other challenges.

I am a member of the American Massage Therapy Association, World Future Society, Society of Environmental Journalists, etc., and have also led laughter workshops, energy circles and drum circles.

I am volunteering for several nonprofits, including:

–Senior Advisor and Board Member, Living Earth Television,
–Board member, Meditation for Inner Peace and Self Mastery
–Coordinator,  Infinity Foundation Practitioner Network Assn.

–Starting a local Chicago group for the Alliance for a New Humanity

–Helping manage LinkedIn groups for Gaia.com, Living Earth Television, Massage Therapists and Bodyworkers, Divine Primates, Ode Magazine, Free Press and others.


Divine Primates

Currently, in addition to healing bodywork and my teaching, my major project is the completion of a nonfiction book, “Divine Primates:  Hope for Our Stressed-Out Species.”  The premise is that humans possess a unique mixture of conscious and unconscious awarenesses; yet our most profound attributes include compassion and empathy, the source of which is our primate nature rather than any external moral code.  If we learn to accept that we are animals, and very wonderful animals, indeed, we can develop a more useful awareness of how to find our way out of the global ecological and geopolitical crises we currently face.

One of the major obstacles we face in recognizing our primate nature is our psychological need to separate ourselves from other animals and to believe that we are unique and special in all regards.  This anthropomorphophobia, or “anthropodenial”  is a powerful cultural force supported by fundamentalist religions as well as political institutions in the scientific and academic communities.

By recognizing our primate nature, while still celebrating our amazing gifts and talents, we can more readily understand our limits and redouble our efforts to establish reasonable social institutions to mediate our impulsiveness and tendencies to get carried away with everything, our compulsive copying of behaviors we see (regardless of their utility or value) and our compulsion to hold power and/or be popular.  Self-care, stress reduction, social networking and interspirituality are some of the practices offered to support us in our quest to lead better, more sustainable, lives.  Some of the great champions of better understanding our primate nature are noted primatologists Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal and researchers like Dr. Laurie Santos.

My writing on sustainability has been endorsed by Dr. Ashok Khosla, former Director of the United Nations Environment Programme and the Harvard Professor whose course inspired Al Gore to be an environmentalist.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this book concept.  Your endorsements could help convince a publisher to take on this project.  Please leave a comment on my blog or my website - http://www.divineprimates.com or email me at divineprimates@aol.com.  I  blog on related topics such as religion, spirituality, complementary medicine, healing, culture, social philosophy and (hopefully only rarely) politics.


My Background

I have degrees and experience in sociology, law and public health and am a third degree parent emeritus (3 wonderful children who are young adults).  I have been in the following positions: