Your Body Never Lies

Much of Your Body Never Lies grew out of my experience with Patrick Collard, developer of The Collard Method. Former students may recognize some of the vocabulary, techniques, and results from his classes, but this path is not The Collard Method, even though it is closely related. For the past thirty years, I have worked to unpack Patrick’s techniques and make them more accessible. The nature of his abilities was difficult for him to explain convincingly, and much of what he did remained unfathomable to his students at the time. Graduates of The YBNL College who previously studied with Patrick may gain a new understanding of their Collard Method skills, along with greater confidence, clarity, and effectiveness in using them. My aim has been to make Collard-style training more grounded, understandable, and accessible to anyone.

Patrick Collard

Many of Patrick’s former students came from New Age and healing circles, but he also said that he conducted trainings for governments, military organizations, royalty, and businesses around the world. Within the spiritual and healing communities I knew, Patrick was regarded as both magical and masterful. I do not know how he was perceived in other settings, but I believe the essence of his teaching remained the same: temper your power, notice the obvious, and act in ways that support a win-win outcome for everyone. He did not believe that anyone needed to lose. His life and work were extraordinary, but he was not a strong teacher in the traditional sense.

Patrick described himself as having been born “left-brain dead,” meaning that he did not experience intellect in the way most people do. As a child, he had to navigate life through sensation and visual cues. He told me that other people sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher—more like incoherent muffling than understandable speech. He began speaking at the age of nine and, over time, learned how to communicate his unusually sensitive observations. He called what he shared “The Collard Method.” His strengths did not lie in intellectual explanation, however, and teaching was not always easy for him. To truly “get” Patrick, we had to feel what was happening—both with him and within ourselves.

Passing the Work Forward

Most of us thought Patrick was somehow magical, and that his explanations were little more than smoke and mirrors. I was determined to understand what he was actually doing, and one day he noticed me explaining his material to other students during a break. Around 1998 or 1999, he took me to lunch and told me, in words close to these, “You need to teach this. You’re a better teacher than I am. Figure it out and do it.” I was not expecting that direction at all. It took time to fully take it in, and then nearly twenty years to unpack the material and make it understandable.