When Bob was about 10 years old, his father was critically injured in a streetcar accident. Clearly close to death and in tremendous pain, he was brought home to die with his family around him. The doctor left his bedside, expecting to return after the weekend to sign a death certificate. Bob's father requested that Bob bring in a neighbor who was a Christian Science practitioner for a healing. When the practitioner left, Bob's father called Bob to his bedside and said to him, "Son, I believe you can do this." Responding to his father's need for help and confidence in him, Bob had his first experience with healing.

As he placed his hands on his father's heart and abdomen, Bob realized he could see the areas fluoresce where his father had pain. Bob would place his hands on area after area until the fluorescence disappeared. He had relieved his father's pain and triggered some healing mechanism. When the doctor returned, Bob's father was not only alive but improving, and he did indeed go on to heal quite well and live for another 17 years.

Following this experience, Bob visited several churches, hoping to learn more about healing, then as a teenager, Bob's interest here gave way to music. Sunday concerts played in many Milwaukee parks, including classical, Dixieland, ragtime, and Sousa marches. Bob learned to play drums, began to spend time in Chicago's south side, listening to and playing in jazz bands, before moving on to play in clubs in Los Angeles. Then World War II began.

Bob volunteered for the Army, where he became a drill sergeant. Soon the Army Air Corps became established, and Bob was asked to teach instrument flying.

After the war, Bob, now married, moved with his wife and five children to Victorville, California. In Victorville he met a number of psychics who rekindled his interest in spirituality, metaphysics, and healing. In the late 1950s, Bob moved to the San Francisco Bay area. He was working there as an engineer for a sign constructions business when he fell critically ill with an unknown disease. He later believed that he may have been one of the first people to become infected with what became known as Legionnaires' disease.

Bob went into a coma in the hospital and the doctors declared him clinically dead. The day Bob and I met, he told me, and later told Hermina (who kindly refreshed my memory), that he recalled going through the stages of death; being drawn outward from his body and seeing (and hearing) the doctors from above, being drawn to the light, meeting "celestial" beings, seeing every event of his life as if it were a movie, and experiencing the feelings of those with whom he had interacted. He said he went before what seemed to be some sort of spiritual tribunal. He was informed that he had a habit of checking out of his incarnations at an early age, and he really needed to complete at least one before he could move on. He was also informed that he had not yet completed his spiritual purpose for this life. He made a choice to return, and with a sense of tremendous velocity, came back into his body.

Shortly after his recovery, Bob was visiting with his secretary. While she was in the kitchen preparing coffee, Bob was in the living room with his secretary's young daughter, who was severely bow-legged. Bob later said he had an "intuition" that if he touched the outsides of her knees, something would happen. He obeyed that impulse, and within seconds, her legs had straightened. She called out to her mother, "Mommy, I can touch my knees together!"

Though Bob tried to keep his new-found talent under wraps, word got out and people began coming to him. Soon Bob realized he had a gift and moved to Santa Cruz, California, where he began a full-time healing practice. He began to notice that he was called upon to work repeatedly on the same types of illnesses or injuries. It dawned on him that, somehow, he was being educated until he found the best approach to work with the most effective access points. From these early intuitive approaches he developed a very powerful, focused form of energy healing and techniques to deal with the spectrum of the human condition.

Some of Bob's results seemed impossible, but the author personally knows enough of Bob's clients to whom they happened to trust they are all true. One personal story involved a Regenesis student who had a rollover accident in an old Jeep with no roll bars. His right hand was crushed so badly between the steering wheel and the pavement that the emergency room doctors said they would have to amputate what was left. The student instead asked them to wrap it, and phoned Bob. It was already past 10:00 p.m., but Bob, of course, told him to come on over. After some minutes of working, they both felt a "pop," and Bob said, "I think we just reconstituted your knuckles." When they removed the bandage, they saw he was right. Today, his hand is as good as if the accident had never happened. He puts it to good use as a Regenesis� practitioner.

Another client came in with a titanium rod through the length of his thigh bone. The fracture that had created its necessity had long-healed, and now the rod was becoming painful. The client went in expecting to be prepared for the coming surgery, but when he left Bob's healing room, the rod was simply not there.

Bob had indeed discovered something powerful, and he wanted to share it. When I met Bob in the late '70s, it was not yet known as Regenesis, but rather, "Bob's work." Bob did tell me early on that he could teach others how to do it, and when two of my friends were in extremely critical condition from a small airplane crash, he showed me enough in minutes to help me bring them both through to restored health. But it was not until Hermina Sauberman joined Bob as a partner in life in 1978 that Regenesis� emerged as a teachable healing process.

As a former book editor, she observed and took notes while Bob dealt with various conditions. She converted his healing knowledge into written materials that ultimately formed the basis of the Regenesis Workbook. Now he could teach his work as a cohesive seminar to numerous students. Soon after, he was invited to teach at Columbia Pacific University (in Santa Cruz) in 1980. His first seminar was in September of that year, and soon after that he began to offer seminars to the public, which were in great demand. He taught thousands, both in the United States and Switzerland. He continued to teach until 1996 when his health forced him to retire.

In 1997 Bob and Hermina moved to Paso Robles where they married. The night before 9/11, Bob had a stroke and went into a coma from which he never emerged. He passed away in the home in Paso Robles on September 12, 2001, the day after the attack on the Twin Towers. It seemed as if he knew he had healing work to do elsewhere.

When it came to teaching, Bob cared deeply for the purity of his work, the Regenesis (tm) healing art. At seminars he asked that students perform only the Regenesis� techniques and no techniques they had learned elsewhere. He believed in a strong apprenticeship over a year or two with close, consistent interaction between student and teacher. During this time, Regenesis (tm)students were to practice the principles and techniques that formed the essence of his work. Once they established their own practices, he encouraged students to follow their own intuition and experience in the use of Regenesis� with their clients.

When Bob entrusted the work to others to teach, he cared deeply that the purity of the work be kept intact as he developed it and not watered down or changed by them. He felt that clarity, purity and integrity of the work would give the students the best chance for success with his work, and more than 4,000 of his students agree with this philosophy.

The basic technique is almost impossibly simple to grasp, and is indeed the focus of no more than the first three hours of the first 20-hour seminar, but it is only the beginning. The practicalities of holding intent, seeing perfection (the true meaning of love), and putting oneself aside to allow the healing to occur, to learn to read the nonverbal as well as the verbal, and to have the appropriate word of encouragement at hand, take long exposure and guidance to completely realize.

Often clients can tap into tremendous emotional releases in the course of a treatment. If we accept the power to hold the space where such a thing can occur, we must also accept the responsibility to provide a safe, secure and supportive environment. "Awareness," said Bob, "is everything." From this awareness comes the depth of his teaching.

Training in Regenesis (tm) all the way to certified practitioner is a journey, but those who make that journey have all found it more than worthwhile, and I know they all, as do I, thank Bob for his gift.