Another leap took him to the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico where he finished a Master's Degree in Intercultural Education in 1974. While there he began studies in yoga and reading eastern literature. While recovering from a bout of hepatitis he became acquainted with a number of books that gave him the feeling that he had discovered his own personal and internal path. In a brief moment of feeling oneness with nature, he wrote a letter home to his parents describing his experience. They wrote back concerned that he was taking hallucinogenic substances. He was only learning how to be alone with and find beauty his personal experiences.

Upon returning from Mexico, Jeff lived in Oregon and became a high school teacher. At a conference he helped organize, he saw George Leonard give a demonstration of Aikido. Jeff recognized Aikido as a three-dimensional form of play and movement that would open him to a much fuller range of expression and movement than basketball had. He turned in his resignation as a high school teacher the next day. He was moving to San Francisco to study Aikido. That very evening while visiting the professor of speech who had introduced him to Feldenkrais^®, he was given a brochure for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP). Aikido and the Feldenkrais Method were part of its Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology program. Jeff had found heaven, or so he thought.

To his dismay, upon his arrival in the Bay Area in the fall of 1977, he found that Moshe Feldenkrais was just completing the San Francisco training program he had begun in 1975. He was not intending to train another class of practitioners. This was a blow, but Jeff had in fact found a home at ITP and was in love with his doctoral course work, classes in the Feldenkrais Method of Awareness Through Movement^® and training in Aikido.

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