A method is only as alive as the people
who carry it.
The Romanowski Method was not built alone. It grew through decades of collaboration, through people who arrived by synchronicity, who recognised something before they could name it, and who gave their own particular gifts to what it became.
Founder
Jeff Romanowski
United States — practicing since 1991
Jeff Romanowski began learning how to perceive what is hidden long before he had a name for what he was doing. As a boy walking in the woods with his father, he learned to sense mushrooms before he saw them — to feel through his feet the subtle organisation of the mycelium running beneath the forest floor, the network that quietly connects what looks separate above the ground.
The mycelium of the forest and the fascia of the human body are remarkably similar in form and function — vast interconnected networks, largely invisible from the surface, responsive to pressure and to the living things moving through them. Jeff has spent decades learning to feel and work with the human version of that network.
The Romanowski Method began forming 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 the tissue, in the 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.
Lead teacher · Training · Director, Brazil
Mariana Candeia
Brazil - practicing for 19 years
Mariana Candeia was shaped by places that do not forgive distraction. For fifteen years she led month-long expeditions through remote glaciers in Alaska and Patagonia — climbing, navigating, surviving close calls, learning from death in its many forms. She traveled alone through ecosystems and cultures that humbled her, worked as a therapist across landscapes that each asked something different of her. She did not emerge from those years with a resume. She emerged with a kind of knowing that cannot be taught in a classroom — an animistic attunement to the world, a capacity to alter her state and sharpen her perception in wild places, a trust in the intelligence of the living Earth that has never left her.
Nature was her first "training program". The Romanowski Method became her second.
In 2007, Mariana — then one year into her work as an outdoor educator — received an email about a workshop. The description read: a method to liberate memories stored in the body. Something in her said: I found it. She enrolled in levels one and two of the training program before she had ever received a single session. It was Paula Gama who introduced her to Jeff Romanowski and to the method. Her first session opened something in her vision — she described her eyes becoming two vast spheres, seeing everything around her differently. She has been walking this path for nineteen years.
Practitioner · Spain
Santiago Ruiz
Spain — practicing for over 20 years
Santiago Ruiz arrived at the method the way the method tends to arrive — through something that could not have been planned. Flying from New York to São Paulo, he sat next to Jeff Romanowski for the entire flight without knowing who he was. It was Paula Gama — who had come to meet Jeff at the airport — who made the introduction. Santiago, a special kind of traveller who had not yet decided where to stay in São Paulo, found himself invited to be the demonstration body in Jeff's next seminar. He said yes.
His first session left him feeling like he was inside a column of air surrounded by vibration. He was already walking a path within the Toltec tradition, and the method felt like an acceleration of something already in motion. Jeff offered to teach him. He accepted. He brought the method to Madrid, and has been practicing for over twenty years.
Before the method, Santiago had spent decades as an actor, director, filmmaker, and creative director — working with Walt Disney, Universal Studios, Cirque du Soleil, and directing the first Spanish edition of Got Talent. His life had always been a study in how to move people, how to create the conditions for something real to happen in another human being. Jeff's word for him is impeccability.
"I strongly believe in the importance of caring. Care begins with honesty and deep understanding of the human nature."
— Santiago Ruiz
The method lives in the people it moves.
Co-creator · Brazil
Paula Gama
Brazil — 1998 to 2024
Paula Gama came to the method in her early twenties. She saw a friend return home with a different face — something had changed in him — and she said, without hesitation: whatever you just did, I want that.
She booked a session in Brazil. Afterward, she told Jeff: you resolved in me in one hour what would take four years of psychotherapy. She then went to the United States to study Buddhist psychology at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Already in the same country as Jeff, she reached out to him again to ask to learn. He said yes. She went to Connecticut, where she began learning alongside him and assisting his sessions.
From 1998 she became the coordinator of the Romanowski Method in Brazil — the person who built everything there. She was a psychologist, a lifelong Buddhist practitioner, an artist. She built a bridge between Jeff's work and the indigenous peoples of the Xingu — facilitating an exchange of healing knowledge between the method and the Yawalapiti people that deepened both.
Paula passed away on May 6, 2024, returning from a meditation retreat in Nepal with her Buddhist teacher. Her passing was sudden and unexpected.
"She was an angel, disguised in imperfections... Having helped guide her back to the remembrance of her true self is a profound honour, the kind that makes your body vibrate."
— Jeff Romanowski, on Paula Gama