The Romanowski Method began formally in 1991 — the year Jeff completed his neuromuscular therapy certification with Paul St John. His work focuses on the moments where the body can release what it has been carrying — patterns held in tissue, in breath, in the autonomic system. He works with the body's intelligence rather than imposing on it, recognising that the body knows what it needs to do when the conditions are right.
Alongside the clinical development of the Method, Jeff has carried a parallel practice in ceremony. He danced the Sun-Moon Dance for sixteen years in the tradition of Joseph Rael — Beautiful Painted Arrow, the Picuris Pueblo and Southern Ute spiritual teacher who founded it — and served as Chief of Dance in Croatia from 1999 to 2003. The ceremonial practice has shaped how he holds the body in his clinical work — with the same attention and humility that ceremony asks of those who carry it.
From 1995 to 2002, Jeff taught the Method and saw clients in Croatia, overlapping with the years he was serving as Chief of the Sun-Moon Dance there. The bodywork and the ceremonial practice unfolded in the same country across those years, each informing the other.
The Brazilian arm of the Method began in 1995, when Jeff first travelled to Brazil. Paula Gama came for a session, recognised something in the work, and chose to train. Over time she became his primary partner in the Brazilian development of the Method — from 1998 until her passing in 2024, the two worked closely together through approximately four thousand individual sessions. Many of the Method's distinctive techniques were improvised and refined in that collaboration, making her central to the body of work as it now exists.
In 2019, Jeff worked with the shamans and people of the Yawalapiti tribe of the Xingu in Brazil. The invitation came from the tribe itself, after Paula Gama's earlier work with influential tribe members had addressed conditions for which their shamans did not have an answer. The experience deepened his understanding of intention as a clinical force — the quality of presence a practitioner brings before any technique begins.
The Method's development has also been shaped by long collaboration with Santiago Ruiz of Spain. Jeff and Santiago met by chance on a flight from New York to São Paulo; from that meeting grew more than twenty-five years of Santiago's participation in the work.
Jeff's daily work is craftsmanship in wood. From his workshop in Amenia Union, he builds furniture, cabinets, doors, and small unique structures. The two disciplines — the woodwork and the bodywork — share the same mode of attention. Wood has its own grain, its own history, its own way of being met. The body has the same. The same nervous system that has learned over decades to feel what wood wants under the hand is the nervous system that reads fascia and follows the body's own intelligence. Each practice has shaped the other.
The Method has been taught internationally for three decades and continues to develop through the work of senior practitioners around the world. Mariana Candeia carries the work forward as director in Brazil, shaped by nearly two decades alongside Paula. The lineage that runs through Paula, Mariana, and the international collaborations across its decades are part of what has given the Method its present depth.
The woods of Amenia Union continue to be a quiet companion to all of his work — the wood, the body, the teaching.
