Benjamin Beardsley was in high school when he was jumped on by a group of his classmates and beaten up. They accused him of thinking he was different, somehow better than them. "You'll never leave this town," they mocked. Well, here I am talking with Ben in Tokyo about theater, massage and holistic integration, and there they all are still.

Raised as a Jehovah's Witness in Pennsylvania, his early years were hardly auspicious. His teens were especially rough, "before I moved to Pittsburgh at 16." His father suffered from a morphine addiction developed in Vietnam, and early on the family hit the hippie trail. "Visiting a certain town as an adult, I was puzzled to find I knew my way around; later I learned we passed through when I was 4."

Still overcoming learning difficulties, Ben believes three things saved him: practicing karate as a kid; an uncle, who is a doctor, gave him lots of books that linked mind and body; and a gammy knee at age 18. "Doctors said, 'Well, we can do this procedure, and you will feel better, but you will always limp.' Feeling this was unacceptable, I looked around for alternative forms of rehab."