Joe’s Extended Bio
Joe Noonan, aka Joebaby, reflects back that this world is already a Heaven on Earth, and that the tools to find joy in the moment are all around and within us. He reminds us that harmony is inevitable and that innately we all just love each other and sometimes we forget.
He invites us to experience the beauty in nature, and bring the lessons that nature teaches back into our relationships at work and home. He facilitates a remembrance that life is a dance and that we are all ‘fingers of the same hand’.
He champions the metamorphosis of the masculine into a cooperative, synergistic, gentle and kind way of being. He is here to ignite the playful child in us, to help us see God in all things, including ourselves and each other.
Seventh of eight kids, he grew up fishing, hunting and gardening on a farm in southern Maine. When he was fifteen, during a family counseling session over the suicide of his brother, he recognized that we are the guardians of our own reality, and that it is only our unconscious beliefs that limit us. At the age of 22, in a desire to deepen his love of nature, he hand-built a log cabin and lived off the grid in the north Maine woods for a year.
One north Maine winter was enough (!) and after that he moved to Boston and joined a Spiritualist church. Over the next decade he had a private healing practice using shiatsu, reflexology and flower essences, and worked as a hands-on healer in local churches and hospitals.
Realizing that the physical illnesses he was treating had their origins in our thoughts and beliefs, he studied psychosynthesis and in 1987 he had a full-time private psychotherapy practice. He volunteered in a domestic violence program, counseled male batterers and spoken in prisons to violent offenders.
To balance his healing work and maintain his connection to Nature, he also worked as a wilderness guide, leading hiking, canoeing and backpacking trips for several Outward Bound schools around the country.
In 1990 he started his own consulting company that teaches team-building programs to corporations and universities. He takes teams on leadership retreats around the world, including such adventures as climbing, rafting, sailing and swimming with dolphins and sharks. (www.JoeNoonan.com)
In 1995, Joe had his first swim with a pod of wild dolphins, and he stepped out of the water a changed man. Since that time, he’s brought groups and families from all over the world to swim with the wild dolphins in both the Pacific and Atlantic. He’s called the ‘Dolphin Whisperer’ for the way dolphins respond to him.
In 2008 he was given the name ‘Nimbeesh’, aka ‘Merman’, by a group of Native Elders, recognizing him as the return of the Mer-people, those who are the bridge between the tribes of the land with the tribes of the sea.
7SKY Surf magazine: “So what attracts us to the ocean ? What are we looking for when we leave the shore and move towards vaster horizons ? Waterman Joebaby, living between the Bahamas and Hawaii, embodies the answer to these questions. He is one of those for whom the surface was not enough. Meeting him and diving deep into his mind and heart might very well trigger some of our deeper feelings of ‘longing’ and ‘belonging’. Read the 7SKY interview here
