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Prime Times Quiet inspiration By John Darling ASHLAND � Marty Thommes runs his guest cottage on sleepy Auburn Street, helps coach his daughter�s crew team, runs three miles a day, volunteers as storyteller in local grade schools and in general seeks a life of quiet anonymity. There�s little to show that Thommes, 68, once stood on the battlements of cultural upheavals in the 1960s, leaving the Catholic priesthood at age 37 to teach the world "how to be honest in a safe environment" by using the new encounter groups and the widely published "Feel Wheel" he helped invent. Thommes had entered the monastery at age 14. When he left in 1969, he earned his doctorate in psychology from U.S. International University, San Diego, then joined the Western Behavioral Science Institute, which was pioneering and teaching the then-new encounter-group method in schools. Three dozen of the staff, including Thommes and famed author-therapist Carl Rogers, broke off to form a think tank called the Center for the Studies of the Person in La Jolla, Calif., Thommes said. "It was a very exciting time. Everyone was open to these new ways in psychology. We went to medical schools, the New York Lottery, Bell and Howell, the Santa Barbara school system, trying to humanize education and to show how to be honest in a safe environment," he said. With three fellow San Diego psychologists, Thommes in 1972 invented the Feel Wheel and Body Talk games which were bannered in and marketed by Psychology Today Magazine. Long out of use and out of print, the Feel Wheel was used by schoolchildren, business people and couples, who, while communicating, moved chips around a wheel labeled with 32 emotions � hope, hurt, shyness, fear, anger, relief, trust � to show how they felt. "It really helped people open up and communicate, but the mood of the country has gone to the right and it would now be seen as soft education," Thommes said. "It would have to have a harder edge before it was acceptable to the culture." Thommes trained at the Los Angeles School of Massage and for 10 years worked at Claremont College�s counseling center, helping students with the new biofeedback technology and teaching students to relieve stress through massage. Then, his own stress � and the California smog � began getting to him and his wife, architect Joyce Ward. In 1980, they found Ashland, walked around town until they found their dream house, a 1911 Craftsman design, knocked on the door and asked if the owner wanted to sell it (it wasn�t on the market). She thought about it and said yes, Thommes said. He and Ward raised their daughter, Devon, in the home and have made it into a guest cottage. Thommes practiced psychology in Ashland until Devon�s birth, then, "burned out with therapy," he closed his office to devote himself to full-time parenting. He never went back to psychology, except peripherally as a storyteller in schools. "I tell tales from the Odyssey, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen � all real mythic sources. I don�t make things up. Traditional tales contain deep psychological truths that children need, and I�ve really enjoyed helping transmit these age-old stories to children," he said. Thommes is still in touch with his friends who were ordained priests with him in the early 1950s. They go on retreats together and are planning to co-author a book, with a chapter from each, titled "Ex-Monks Speak Out." In later years, the white-bearded Thommes has settled into a spiritual life he describes as "evolutionary pantheist." "I�m probably part Buddhist. I like to stay in the shadows with religion. Being an evolutionary pantheist recognizes that the divine essence is in all existence, so all that exists is divine. There are levels of consciousness in all this, so the higher the consciousness, the closer one is to the divine," he said. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.