Frank Natale

A gifted teacher and author, Frank Natale was founder and creative director of The Natale Institute, an experiential education organization presenting seminars throughout the United States, Europe and Australia. Natale’s teaching emphasized self-awareness, personal responsibility and choice as paths to conscious living and spiritual growth.

Books by Frank Natale include Meet Your Self; The Circle of Life; Results: The Willingness to Create; Relationships for Life; The Wisdom of Midlife; Trance Dance, the Dance of Life; and Mastering Alive Relationships.

“Most paths of self-correction purposely increase the effort and struggle to achieve these states or vibrations,” Natale wrote in his foundational course Results: The Willingness to Create. “They insist that you must ‘earn it’ or ‘handle it’ or ‘surrender to it’ or ‘get it’ when the truth is you already have immediate access to all of it. You, in fact, are an aspect of it. The illusion we have created that we are separate from our source robs us of the direct experience of the intimacy and aliveness of our higher selves.”

Life Skills seminars created by Frank Natale include Rites of Passage; The One Experience; Trance Dance; Honorable Sexuality; Alive Relationships; Creative Communications; Self Esteem, The Power Within; Results: The Willingness to Create.

Natale was committed to the healing dance practices of indigenous cultures since the early days of The Esalen Institute where he became friends with Gabrielle Roth, the founder of 5Rhythms. In the 1990s Natale, with his band Professor Trance and other collaborators, produced a body of music to drive the Trance Dance experience including the albums Shaman’s Breath, Medicine Trance, Rites of Passage, Dance Your Animal, Spirit Animal, Breath of Fire and Dancers of Eternity.

Om Bilateral Alignment and Ambient Om meditation albums were dedicated to Baba Muktananda, Natale’s spiritual teacher.

A native New Yorker, in 1967 Natale co-founded Phoenix House in New York, which became the largest residential treatment facility for chemical dependency in the United States. After serving as clinical director for twelve years, Natale chose to leave Phoenix House and focus his work on successful, functioning personalities who want to experience new levels of spirituality, creativity and aliveness.

During the Sixties and Seventies Natale studied and worked with many leaders of the modern human consciousness movement including Charles Dederich, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Baba Muktananda, J. Krishnamurti and Buckminster Fuller.

Frank Natale lived a conscious life and died a conscious death. He passed in Hawaii on his birthday in 2002 surrounded by family and friends.