Welcome To the Webpage of Acupressure Massage Therapist, Host Travel Consultant, and Writer
Jacob Thomas:
Healing Humanity: Acupressure Massage Therapy and Instruction
Writing For the World From My Imagination, Studies, and Travels
Born in Yuba City, California, I spent most of my childhood growing up in the rural and later suburban town of West Pittsburg, California, later known as Bay Point. After gaining recognition as a local video game playing champion, "most improved player" in the local soccer league, and avid reader of Stephen King in elementary and middle school, I suffered through four stifling years at the suburban Concord High. During high school, I began reading serious Fiction and became constantly engaged in creative writing of stories, poems, and plays, inspired by my freshman creative writing teacher. I was also a member and later president of the high school Earth Club; a journalist for a community magazine for youth, C-Beyond; a participant and seniority student in Art and Film, a fine arts and cinema appreciation program in San Francisco; and a member of Youth Speaks, a community of young Bay Area writers and poets presenting their writing in workshops, formal readings and poetry slams.
In the fall of 1998 I happily enrolled for four years at UC Berkeley. I took steadily more and more courses of a wide variety to complete university breadth requirements the first two years. The last two years I constructed my own interdisciplinary field study of globalization, taking as many classes as permitted within the departments of anthropology, economics, and political science, among others. I completed my studies with a timely 300 page honors thesis analyzing Al-Qaeda, critiquing the "War on Terrorism," and proposing an alternative strategy for global security. I graduated with high honors from Berkeley in the spring of 2002.
While at the university, I also participated in editing the distinguished literary journal, The Berkeley Fiction Review; as a video journalist for the online cyber-magazine Streetspace; as a reporter for the campus magazine Satellite, and as a member and later president of the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Studies Association. During the university years, I also worked part time as a student library assistant at Graduate Student Services in the UCB Main Library, and then as a secretary and note-taker for many disabled students on and off of campus. Toward the end of my university studies I began to feel very disempowered and lonely disembodied head, with great knowledge of the world but no practical skill with which to help people around me. Working 20 hours of week, taking 20 units of classes and serving as president of the Interdisciplinary Studies Association, during my last year at Cal I seriously injured my back and discovered acupressure and shiatsu as a form of therapy I wanted to learn as a gift I could offer to other people. By the time I graduated from Cal I had completed a 150-hour basic certification program to become shiatsu practitioner at The Acupressure Institute.
While at the university I understood that my academic education of concepts, models and theories about the changing world was limited, and I did not want to come into a position of power without saying that I knew people in the countries I talked about and what their lives are like. While I had spent a week in Los Angeles, a month in New York, and three months in Mexico during college to supplement my academic studies, only after I graduated did I discover that I could travel by staying in people’s homes, a style of travel I had always dreamed about as it brought me closer to local people. I decided then to spend a year travelling throughout Europe in a network of hosts and travellers committed to world peace through informal diplomacy. While I was greatly enriched by the abundance of fine European art, architecture, music, and Fiction I encountered along the way, I was even more pleased by the hospitality of my European hosts during this sensitive period of strained transatlantic relations, June of 2001 to May of 2002. By offering free acupressure massage I also understood the importance of offering something special for free in exchange for hospitality as this makes travel much less commerical and more meaningful.
Knowing that my training was minimal and wanting to give any future hosts the best that I could however, I returned to the USA for a year to complete a 850 hour program at the Acupressure Institute in Berkeley to become internationally certified to teach and practice as a professional acupressurist with an additional 200 hour specialization in Woman's Health. After this intensive training, I returned to Turkey, Russia, Britain and Italy, four countries I passed through on my travels through Europe where I wished to try practicing or teaching on my own, an experience that I had found very challenging but also very rewarding. When I learned that my mother was dying however, I immediately returned to the SF Bay Area to watch her pass. Though I had planned to continue travelling through the world beginning with Latin America, after this tragedy, I felt like I needed to get away from everything familiar to me, so I departed to spend an entire year in Africa. This probably was not the proper time for such a trip, and I certainly was not prepared for what I found there, but it helped me tremendously in gaining perspective on my loss.
While in Africa I began receiving many messages from other people who travel with hospitality networks requesting advice based upon my abundant experiences of staying with hosts. I realized then that many other people could save much time and trouble by learning from the mistakes I have made. Since I did not have the time to respond to the volume of these requests and yet realized that this was a unique consultation service that probably nobody else was offering, I decided to start what may be the world’s first online consulting company for host travel (where you stay with local people) and write a guidebook standardizing the information for those who were not interested in obtaining a private consultation. I then returned back to the Bay Area to spend the holidays with family and create a consultation website and guidebook for this style of travel. In the next two to three years I shall be travelling through Latin America, Oceania and Asia, and doing further research for this book and website, continuing my healing work, and writing about my travels before settling down and deciding on where I wish to go to graduate school.
2.Photos:
I do not care to indulge my ego, but I thought some of you might like to see some images of me throughout my life, so I have posted some below:
Dear Fellow Avid Readers,
Below is a list of excellent recommended books that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading on my own over the years, followed by a subsequent list of some great and some not-so-great books that I was compelled to read for academic reasons. In an increasingly post-literate age in which television, internet and radio seem to be numbing so many minds and souls, I believe that for those with imagination, books remain the most powerful portals into the reality of other’s lives, lands, and times. Yet with so many mediocre and terrible books you find at the book store, I would like to provide a list of works to you all that I wish I had when I began reading serious Fiction my freshman year of high school.
These books are listed according to periods in my life, with the books I have read outside of academia first and then those I read within, subdivided into “fiction” (novels, short stories, poetry, and plays), and "non-fiction" (the real world and everything else) two categories which often the two seem to merge with each other!.
Enjoy!
Jake
Books on Writing
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
The Writer’s Life by Anne Dillard
The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Soul Between by Lines: Freeing Your Creative Spirit Through Writing by Dorothey Randell Gray
On Writer’s Block by Victoria Nelson
Surviving a Writer’s Life by Susanne Lipsett
Creative Writing Class (10/94-10/95)
Fiction
A Death In the Family by James Agee
Henderson and the Rain King by Saul Bellow
The Road To Wellville by C.D. Boyle
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Collected Poems by Robert Frost
Lord of the Flies by William Goldberg
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The World According to Garp by John Irving
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Simple Truth by Phillip Levine
A Catcher In the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Bonfire and the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Non-fiction
Essays (Harvard Classics) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What
They Do by Studs Terkel
Walden and other works by Henry David Thoreau
Writing Well by William Zeisner
Counter-Cultural Days (10/95-10/96)
Fiction
1984 by George Orwell
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Jonathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
Trout Fishing In America, The Pill Versus the Spring Hill Mind Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The Baron In the Trees by Italio Calvino
The Portable Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
Collected Poems by e. e. cummings
These Are My Rivers by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Complete Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Demian by Herman Hesse
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Ulysses by James Joyce
Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Collected Stories by Flannery O' Connor
Youth In Revolt by C. D. Payne
Portney's Complaint by Phillip Roth
The Little Prince by Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupury
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Non-fiction
The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach
Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
Holding On by David Isay
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance by Robert Prisig
A Book Concluding With A Love Story About a Purple Cow by Gertrude Stein
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
The Way of Life According To Lao Tzu
Anarchist Cookbook by Anonymous
The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson
The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav
Art and Film (10/96-10/97)
Fiction
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dosteovsky
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dosteovsky
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Fredriech Nietzsche
The English Patient by Micheal Odaatje
Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O' Neil
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Anna Karenia by Leo Tolstoy
The Portable Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Mrs. Dalloway's Party by Virginia Wolfe
Non-fiction
Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger
An Eye On the World: Conversations With International Filmmakers by Judy Stone
The Portable Nietzche edited by Walter Kaufman
An Incomplete Education by Judy Jones and William Wilson
Youth Speaks (10/97-10/98)
Fiction
The Night of the Black Tarantula by Kathy Acker
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Concrete Candy by Apollo
Murder In the Dark by Margaret Atwood
Another Country by James Baldwin
Selected Poetry by Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett
Fear of Dreaming by Jim Carroll
The Wastelands and Other Poems by T. S. Elliot
The Angel of History by Carolyn Forche
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Monkey Girl by Beth Lissick
Undersong: Old and New Poems by Audre Lorde
The Sailor Who Fell From the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Lolita by Vladimar Nabakov
The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien
The Portable Henry Rollins by Henry Rollins
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Push by Sapphire
Selected Poems by Anne Sexton
Plays (Buried Child, Seduced, and Suicide In B Flat) by Sam Shepard
The Cutting Edge by Julia Vinograd
Non-fiction
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll
Derrida For Beginners
Foucault for Beginners
The Autobiography of Malcolm X As Told By Alex Haley
The Bell Curve by Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray
The Essential Koran
Lacan for Beginners
I Told You So by Rush Limbaugh
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Book Got Wrong by James Loewen
Incest: "From the Journal of Love" (The Unexpurgated Diary, 1932-1934) by
Anais Nin
Post-modernism For Beginners
Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Weiner Rilke
Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for Beginners
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
College 1st Year (10/98-10/99)
Fiction
Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
The Balcony by Jean Genet
The Blacks by Jean Genet
Sun Under Wood by Robert Hass
M.A.S.H. by Richard Hooker
Kissing God Goodbye by June Jordan
The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantakis
Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kevin Patchen
A Season In Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre
Last Exit To Brooklyn by Herbert Selby
Julius Caeser by William Shakespeare
Non-fiction
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann
The Poet's Choice: Poems For Everyday Life by Robert Hass
Affirmative Acts by June Jordan
Philosophical Writings by Bertrand Russell
Strangers On These Shores by Ron Takaki
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution by Ken Wilber
College 2nd Year (10/99-10/00)
Fiction
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou
Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros
Renaissance by Ruth Forman
Mother by Maksim Gorky
Selected Poems by Langston Hughes
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Reed Reader by Ishmael Reed
The Essential Rumi by Jalal Al-Din Rumi
Six Plays by Wole Soyinka
She by Saul Williams
Non-fiction
All Things Censored by Mumia Abu-Jamal
The Ends of the Earth: A Journey To the Frontiers of Anarchy by Robert Kaplan
Freedom From the Known by J. Krishnamurti
The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman and the Struggle to Save the
Redwoods by Julia Butterfly Hill
Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks
Campus Wars: A Sympathetic Look At A University In the Throes of Agony by John Searle ;The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty On America's Campuses by Alan
Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate
College 3rd Year 9/01-9/02
Fiction
Whatever Happened To Dulce Viega? A B-Novel by Caio Fernando Abreu
Things Fall Apart by Chinea Achebe
The Buddha of Suburbia by Harif Karishni
The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Soulstorm by Clarice Lispector
Amil's Ghost by Micheal Oddatje
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Intimate Diary bu Ama Cristina Pesar
The Adventures of Henry Potter: The Sorceror's Stone by J.K. Rawlings
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Season of the Jew by Mark Shaboult
Collected Poems by Tagore
Non-fiction
Global Capitalism by Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton
The Case Against the Global Economy by Jerry Mander and William Goldsmith
Hidden Agendas by John Pilger
The Post-Development Reader by Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree
Globalization and Its Discontents by Saskia Sassen
The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered by George Soros
10/01-5/02
Fiction
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didiorot
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
Moby Dick by Hermann Melville
The Crying of Lot 39 by Thomas Pynchon
My Idea of Fun by William Self
Non-fiction
Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy by John Arquila and David Ronfeldt
Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden by Peter L. Bergen
One World, Ready or Not by William Greider
Blowback: The Causes and Consequences of Empire by Chalmers Johnson
Empire by Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri
Terror In the Mind of God by Mark Jurgesmeyer
Grand Tour in Europe 6/02-5/03
Fiction
Saint Petersburg by Andre Bely
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louise De Bernieres
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Collected Poems by Mihai Eminescu
Too Loud a Solitude by Boris Hrabal
The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Non-fiction
Rogue State by Noam Chomsky
Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon
When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten
No Logo by Noami Klein
Captured State by James Mondiot
The Foucault Reader by Paul Rabinow
Year of Acupressure Therapy Study at Berkeley (6/03-5/04)
Fiction
A Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Stars and Ploughshares by Sean O’Casey
Lord of the Rings by T. L. Tolkien
Memories of Pittsburg by Mark Chabot
Non-fiction
A Touch of Healing by Alice Burmeister
Energy Medicine by Donna Eden
And the Truth Shall Set You Free by David Icke
The Secondary Vessels of Acupuncture by Robert Lowe
Aromatherapy For Healing the Spirit by Gabriel Mojay
A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain
Europe to Death of Mother 6-10/05
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Dead Souls by Nicoli Gogol
Non-fiction
Qi Gung Massage by Doctor Yang Jing Mwing
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tole
Travels in Africa
Fiction
Do They Hear You When You Cry? by Fazia Kasindja
African Poetry Anthopology by Unknown
God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew
Scrapiron Blues by Dambudzo Marechera
Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
Petals of Blood by Ngugi Wa Thiongo
Non-fiction
Medium Is the Massage by Marshell McCluhan (a curious rejected print of the same book The Medium Is the Message)
The African Experience by Roland Oliver
Alternative Medicine by Isadora Rosenfield
The Wellness Revolution By Paul Pilzer
North America
Latin America 1/2006 to 6/2007
The Sweet Waist of America by Anthony Daniels
Gentes y Gentecillas by Carlos Luis Fallas
The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galleano
Los Jefes y Los Cachorros by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Old Man tThat Read Novels of Love by Luis Sepulveda
All the Bloods by Maria Jose Arguedes
My Imagined Country by Isabel Allende
Collected Poetry by Pablo Neruda
The Tunnel by Ernest Sabado
The Aleph by Jorge Borges
Rayuela by Julio Cortazar
The Seven Crazy Ones by Robert Alt
Analysis of Bage by Luis Fernando Verissimo
Posthumous Memories of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Captains of Sand by Jorge Amado
Dry Lives by Gracialano Ramos
Grande Sertoe Veredas by Guimaraes Rosa