"Awaken your senses and wield time with joy."
"Awaken your senses and wield time with joy."
Producer · Researcher · Educator
Your body is doing thousands of extraordinary things right now that you've never been taught to notice. I help people learn to notice. That's the whole game. And play is how the game is played.
By day, a producer. By night, everything else. All of it runs on the same physics: will plus a little playfulness.
By day, I'm a producer. I'm producing Pan Eternal, the true story of Neverland. A trilogy, intimate live performances, and a documentary. Book two is complete. We're already performing. The public front door is peterpan.org. The series lives at paneternal.com. The documentary lives at theboywhohatedmothers.com.
By night, I'm everything I've always been: a researcher, educator, musician, and builder working at the intersection of physics, physiology, and human experience. I develop frameworks, technologies, training methods, and spaces that help people increase their experiential capacity: the ability to sense, process, and respond to more of what life is actually offering, in real time, through a body that runs on physics you can learn.
The connection between the two is play. Every project on this site, every tool I've built, every room I've opened runs on the same discovery: playful constraint is the mechanism by which bodies heal, nervous systems reorganize, and people come back to themselves. The story is the proof. The science is the practice. They're the same conversation.
That work shows up in a lot of rooms:
These days my work lives in groups, on stages, in labs, and in the products and systems I'm building. I don't take one-on-one clients anymore. But if you want to learn in a room full of people who are all discovering something at the same time, that's where I'll be.
"On a scale of 1 to 10 my pain went from like an 8.5 to a 2. What you teach is amazing!"
Each of these is an expression of the same discovery: a playful constraint, held with care, creates the conditions for something to emerge that no amount of planning could produce. A rule. A surface. A field. A story. The constraint is the play. The emergence is the science.
Pain, posture, balance, sleep, hormones, emotions, energy, relationships. The tongue touches all of it. TheTongue.com is where I teach live classes, host community, and share the science of how this single organ connects to your entire system. thetongue.com
Can you stand on one leg for 10 seconds? People who can't have an 84% higher risk of death within the next decade. Coordination! is a free game that rewires your brain, prevents falls, and makes you feel like you're flying. The world is your balance board. coordinationgames.com
Couch cushions. Rocks across a creek. Logs in a forest. One rule: the ground is dangerous, find another way. That single constraint forces the nervous system to solve problems it has never encountered. Four game modes, ceremony, tuned PVC staves that double as instruments, and a gear system where every piece does more than one thing. The full expression of coordination as play. worldoflava.com
One foot on a small curved surface. One foot free. Your nervous system does the rest. Twelve peer-reviewed mechanisms converge on a single object: fascial chain activation from foot to tongue, ventral vagal state induction, dual-task neuroplasticity, and nine more. Kids to elderly. Rehab to elite athletics. The simplest, most effective proprioceptive training device I've found, because you use it while doing everything else. pivot.how
You are a system of systems running on physics you can learn to feel and work with. The thread that connects the coaching, the music, the technology, the research, and the book. Map of One houses Modality Atlas, which maps the relationships between therapeutic modalities, the biology they affect, and the evidence behind them. AssayNexus, a measurement registry for the data underneath it all. And The Field Series, hardware and software I'm developing for physiological measurement: wearable sensors, desktop units, and a software layer that turns the data into something you can actually use. mapofone.com
Where the physics of radiant warmth meets the real world. A professional division in partnership with Relax Saunas, bringing semiconductor-based far-infrared technology into clinical settings, commercial facilities, and places no one has put it before. relaxinfrared.com
A wellness facility I cofounded in Scottsdale. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, PEMF, red light therapy, cryotherapy, and more under one roof. eminentcenter.com
A nonprofit network of extraordinary spaces built for connection, curiosity, and the kind of healing that only happens when people are together. No appointments. No sales. No gatekeepers. Wellness technologies in living rooms. A sauna bus climbing a mountain. Guided hikes. Neighborhood dinners. A distributed network of homes, vehicles, and partnerships. roothouse.net
Ryan Today is home to all my projects. Roothouse is where I'm home. With all the rest of you. My family.
"I did not believe you. I came to you for stress. But it's been 8 weeks since your office and I just realized I haven't had a drink in 6 weeks. I forgot that I quit drinking after being an alcoholic for 20 years. I still don't know what you did."
Most of what passes for help is someone handing you their answers. A protocol. A program. A plan. You follow the steps, white-knuckle your way through, and when it stops working, you assume something's wrong with you.
Your body already has its own answers. The problem isn't a missing solution. The problem is interference. Too much noise. Too many layers between you and the signal your own system has been sending since before you could talk. None of that is your fault. But it is in your power.
What I do is reduce the noise so the signal can move.
That's it. That's the work. Not fixing. Not prescribing. Not performing expertise at you from behind a desk.
I walk beside people. I rain ideas and tools and strange little experiments, and your brain picks up exactly the ones it needs. The ones that fit the shape of your particular life. You build something that no one else could have built for you, because it came from your own geometry.
And the wild part is that the process of building it also builds the capacity to handle whatever comes next. It compounds. It grows. People stop calling. Not because something went wrong, but because they forgot they used to need help.
That's what play does. Not the word people use for it. Not fun, not recreation, not the opposite of work. Play in the way physics uses the word: the degree of freedom within a constraint. A hinge has play. A joint has play. A nervous system has play. When there's enough room to move, the system moves toward its own answer. My job is to make sure there's enough room.
I've been doing this for over 25 years. I've sat with people in mania, in addiction, in grief so deep they couldn't find the floor. I've sat with executives who looked successful from the outside and were drowning on the inside. I've sat with people who couldn't figure out who they were underneath someone else's shadow.
Every single time, the same thing turned out to be true: the system already knew. It just needed the space and the scaffolding for its own answer to surface.
Everybody asks about the ukulele. Alright, let's get into it.Read all about it →
“Sometimes the deepest reason is the simplest one. It’s fun. Not everything needs a framework.”
Start anywhere. Go as deep as you want. Every page stands on its own. And they all connect.
"He didn't fix anything. He just made it impossible to keep pretending I didn't already know."
Curiosity is the master key. If you're curious, reach out.