Dana Smirin is co-founder of PATH Method and co-founder and managing director of Path to Health Center in Cape Town, South Africa. She arrived at Dr. Goldberg’s practice in 2011 as a patient, in the middle of her own recovery from serious illness, bringing three decades of multidisciplinary work in consciousness studies, systems thinking and embodied practice. What began as a clinical relationship became a working partnership, and PATH Method grew out of it.
Her contribution is structural. Dr. Goldberg’s clinical observation supplied the raw material; Dana’s work has been to find the architecture inside it, to take what one practitioner knew how to do intuitively and shape it into a sequence that can be named, taught, tested and carried by others. The twelve phases, the four stages and the Hand Map are the product of that work. In Dr. Goldberg’s own description, without it PATH Method remains a rough stone rather than a cut one.
She leads PATH Method’s training development, research program, publishing and international positioning, and directs the Center’s clinical and educational operations. She is a co-author on the forthcoming analysis of the 2020 heart-rate variability study.
She also holds the position that PATH Method should not claim more than it can show, a discipline that shapes how PATH Method is taught, written about and presented.