How the Ankrum Institute Was Born
A cease-and-desist letter, two years of paperwork, a friend floating in a Costa Rican pool — and a school that turned out to have its own heartbeat.
I have been teaching for a long time — much longer than I have had the Ankrum Institute. It started in 1989 in Tulsa. My friend Lynda arranged for me to teach a one-day class in body mobilization to a group of twenty-five people. I was so nervous I sweat right through my shirt. A very auspicious beginning.
From there I assisted on craniosacral trainings for twelve years, traveling all over the country and beyond — Jamaica, Switzerland, Canada, and teaching alone in Italy. I taught my own small workshops for over two decades. Never once, in all that time, did I think about opening a licensed school.
The letter
I was two-thirds of the way through a year-long craniosacral course here in Tulsa when I got a letter from the Oklahoma State Board of Barbering: get a license, or cease and desist. I was freaked out. First — how did they find out? And second — how was I ever going to get a license?
It took two years of jumping through hoops. I had to build a curriculum I didn't have and had never thought to write down. I had to account for every minute of class — how long the breaks were, when lunch was. Meticulous, grinding work: make a change, send it in, wait, do it again. Eventually it all came together, and in 2016 the Ankrum Institute was born.
I'd agonized for weeks over a long, complicated name. My friend looked at me from across the pool and said, "Call it Ankrum Institute." Simple. To the point.
The deepening
In the early years, my teaching was built on technique. I stayed in that lane because it felt safe — though the techniques themselves were very advanced, and the school produced some remarkable practitioners.
Then something happened with my fourth training group. I can't tell you exactly what it was. I underwent a deepening. The students who remained were open and cohesive, and on some energetic level they asked for expansion. The bigger, more spiritual side was invited into the classroom — the marriage of high-level bodywork with an understanding of the intelligence at work within us, and our connection to all things.
In 2012, after twenty-six years of running around the world gathering knowledge, something inside me said, stop. So I stopped. I let everything I had learned settle, and in the stillness the next level came in. That is an embryological principle, and a life principle: when stillness happens, something new can arrive. If I am too busy, there's no room for it.
The school is a living, breathing thing. It has its own heartbeat — and its own beautiful fields, the way the heart does.
— Leigh Ankrum