A life of many colors

I’m Ron Helman, restorative movement coach, musician, yogi, and artist. Over 74 years, I’ve lived a life painted in many colors: vibrant, subtle, and unexpected. I’ve discovered that transformation doesn’t come from ease. It comes from choosing to grow through joy, pain, uncertainty, and grace.

At heart, I’m a guide and a creator. I’ve worked with thousands of people across decades helping them move, breathe, recover, and rediscover.

If you take a moment to look behind the curtains here, I hope you’ll see more than a biography. I hope you find resonance, a glimpse of the extraordinary that lives in all of us.

Roots in Rhythm

As a boy in the 1950s, I grew up on the farmlands of New Jersey. My family was musical, my father played saxophone and led a dance band, and my two brothers became musicians. I studied classical piano, but eventually picked up the trumpet.

I worked on two farms as a teenager, one with African American workers, the other alongside Puerto Rican laborers. Their rhythms, resilience, and stories shaped my understanding of work, dignity, and sound.

After playing in my father’s band for a time, he began sending me out with my own group. One gig still makes me smile: a private party where the doorman greeted us wearing only a bow tie and cuffs. The guests were similarly unclothed. It didn’t take long to realize we were at a nudist colony. After the gig, we were invited to go swimming with the teenage girls. Floating under the stars, grinning, I thought, this is the life I want. A little wild, a little surreal, and absolutely mine.

At 16, determined to deepen my craft, I began taking the Greyhound bus into Manhattan from New Jersey. I stepped off into 1960s Times Square, gritty, electric, pulsing with neon, pimps, and adult theaters. I walked through it all, trumpet case in hand, to study with the legendary Carmine Caruso.

Dancing through The Seventies

In 1973, I moved to New York City dreaming of becoming a studio musician. But life had its own choreography. I was invited to join Musawwir Gymnastic Dance Company (pronounced Moo-sah-weer), a professional modern dance company led by national gymnastics champion Toby Towson.

My background in gymnastics opened the door. Dance opened something deeper: the art of movement and expression… a democracy of collaboration in creating living art.

I settled in the East Village, just off St. Marks Place. It was a vortex of expression with rooftop parties, jazz leaking from open windows, poets on sidewalks, and painters in basements. The streets themselves felt alive. It was my introduction to free expression. All cultures. All united.

Eventually, I began working with Radu Teodorescu, a brilliant Romanian fitness trainer whose clientele included New York’s elite and celebrity artists. At first, I resisted the idea of teaching exercise. I saw myself as an artist, not a trainer. But I came to understand that helping people reconnect with their bodies was its own kind of art and service.

One afternoon during a session at Radu’s, I had a conversation with actor Anthony Quinn about his sculptures. That exchange stayed with me. It confirmed what I’d come to feel: movement and artistic expression are deeply intertwined, different instruments, same language.

Later, I learned of an open studio space on the 9th floor of Carnegie Hall. I simply said, “I’ll take it.” The building held a storied past, home to Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Isadora Duncan, and others who helped shape the cultural world. I rode the elevator with violinist Isaac Stern, pianist Don Shirley, and other icons.

That studio became Ron’s C-57 Movement Arts Studio, and for nearly a decade, it served as a haven for creativity, recovery, and self-inquiry. Sting, Al Pacino, Julianne Moore, and many others came through those doors. They came to move, to rebuild, to work their expression and often left with something they hadn’t expected: a return to themselves.

Juilliard and the Craft of Presence

During a dance concert at Lincoln Center, I was onstage when Moni Yakim, the visionary head of the Juilliard Drama Movement Department, saw my work and invited me to join the faculty.

I created a movement course designed specifically for actors. I taught students who would go on to become major voices in film, television, and theater like Kevin Spacey, Laura Linney, Kelly McGillis, and many more. Their drive and openness taught me as much as I taught them.

Moni became a profound mentor. Through our collaboration, I came to understand that presence isn’t something you perform; it’s something you inhabit. The body, emotion, and imagination are inseparable. And when they’re in harmony, truth becomes visible.

I’ll always remember how, before stepping onto the stage, Moni would whisper in my ear, “Take your time.”

At the same time, I launched Mileshigh Artist Management representing jazz and pop musicians of exceptional talent. I secured recording contracts, publishing deals, and world tours. I loved the work. It allowed me to support other artists in realizing their voice on the world stage.

Lessons in Stillness

After years of trying and failing to get sober alone, a close friend helped me get to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1996, I walked into my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. That was the beginning of a different kind of life.

Sobriety wasn’t about giving something up, it was about opening something deeper: space, clarity, humility. I made the choice to sit with discomfort, to face what I had avoided. The honest examination of fear became the true catalyst for change. It is still a daily reprieve.

While in early recovery, I returned to the horn. But this time, I chose jazz not out of ambition, but from something more tender. I began playing again, inspired by the cool, open landscapes of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It felt like returning to a conversation I’d always been meant to have.

The Sound of Antarctica

In 2009, I joined a pioneering expedition aboard the National Geographic Explorer, a voyage to Antarctica. One morning on a mountain of ice, I played “Georgia on My Mind” on flugelhorn for a colony of nearly 250,000 penguins. It was quiet, surreal, like being on another planet.

But the moment that will live with me forever came later.

The journey took us to South Georgia Island, where explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton is buried. Standing shoulder to shoulder with astronaut Neil Armstrong, I was asked to play Brahms’ Lullaby during a ceremony at the gravesite.

At Shackleton’s original burial, a shipmate had played that same piece on a banjo. I was the second person in history to perform there. It was a rainy, cold morning. To stand beside the first man on the moon, playing Brahms to honor one of the greatest explorers of all time… it was beyond words.

It wasn’t a performance. It was a prayer.

a life composed

Today, whether I’m guiding someone through a restorative movement session, creating music in a quiet room, or brushing color across canvas, my work is about presence.

Not performance. Not perfection.
Just listening. Moving. Returning.

My life has never followed the rules. But it has always followed the rhythm.

Jazz musicians call it swing, sometimes strong, sometimes silent. It has brought me home to myself, again and again.

Now, I help others do the same.

the red chair interview

Watch this exclusive in-depth interview with the fabulous Fiona Monique Hagerty, for a delightful story telling adventure, blending humor and fun to recount some of my life’s remarkable moments.

my purrrfect team

They may not play instruments or practice yoga, but these two have mastered the art of presence. Whether curled up beside me in the studio or keeping a watchful eye on my creative work, they keep me grounded, make me laugh, and always remind me to pause and enjoy the moment.

Ron's Reflections

I’ve always believed storytelling is at the heart of everything, music, movement, even how we live.