I should start out by saying that while I have been practicing Buddhism under my root guru, Lama Lodu Rinpoche, for over twenty-three years, I am not a particularly good Buddhist practitioner nor the best example of the power of his teachings.  Lama Lodu has trained thousands of people, many who have gone on to become lamas in their own right.  I have some of that training, but I am a lama-school drop-out never having cracked the code as to how one 

For nearly thirty years, The Healing Arts Center has been training massage therapists and has evolved to be, by far, the largest and most well-loved massage training program in the St. Louis region.  It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true and statistically, it’s true.  The HAC curriculum has always been unique.  We have always required Reiki training as a requirement for graduation and every student s required to have at least some transformative breathwork training as well.  We require an entire term

   The Healing Arts Center trains more licensed massage therapists in the St. Louis region than all other programs combined.  As the oldest and largest school around, we feel that we have a responsibility to train massage therapists for prosperity in the real world.   Given that nearly 60% of all massage therapists are self-employed, independent operators, HAC has decided that it must improve its business training to assist its graduates in creating their own massage practices should they chose that direction.
     Massage therapy is a wonderful profession, but it does not have be practiced full-time to be useful for personal prosperity.  A significant segment of the massage therapy community are part-time therapists who use the practice to augment income  that they earn in other professions.

Tom Tessereau, the Headmaster and CEO of The Healing Arts Center, and David Kenyon have been friends for twenty years.  David, an attorney by training, helped Tom acquire the Healing Art Center back in the day.  Both men are members of Kagyu Droden Kunchab, a Tibetan Buddhist group under the direction of Lama Lodu Rinpoche.  In addition to their training in trantric Buddhism, both men have studied the martial arts.  Both men have written books.  But that is pretty much where the similarities end.

In 2004, Kenyon retired from the practice of law where he had been a trial attorney for twenty years.  His practice had centered on business litigation and employment law, primarily, and he says that he simply got tired of "fighting with people all the time".  "I worked with a lot of workers over the years handling workers compensation cases and I despised the way many companies treated workers", he adds.