Prof. Birgit Menzel: Healing in Soviet-American New Age Diplomacy: A TTouch Method

The Canadian horse therapist Linda Tellington-Jones (*1937) has developed a psychically-informed method of animal healing known as TTouch, which was inspired by another holistic method developed by Israeli engineer—and later alternative movement therapist—Moshé Feldenkrais (1904–1984). In the mid-1980s, Tellington-Jones traveled extensively throughout the Soviet Union as a citizen-diplomat of the Western New Age movement, inspired by and collaborating with Human Potential activists from the Californian Esalen Institute. Intuition, understood as a divine manifestation, became her spiritual path to expanded consciousness and guided her healing work with humans and animals of all species. In the USSR, she established connections from Kiev to Lake Baikal in Siberia, where she found herself on an esoteric mission. She met and trained a wide range of practitioners—from veterinarians and jockeys at the Olympic Center Bitsa in Moscow to members of the semi-official club “Healthy Family,” a hub where many unconventional concepts and practices of holistic and psychic healing were thriving. As a practitioner of interspecies communication, she introduced the idea of the “animal ambassador” to Russia. The patented TTouch method continues to be practiced on animals and humans in Russia and around the world, and has recently gained a degree of legitimacy through collaboration with controversial American scientists such as Bruce Lipton and Gregg Braden.