Joe Noonan, Dolphin Whisperer

“Swimming with wild dolphins and whales, in their home, on their terms, is a joyful life-changing experience“

Joe Noonan is a nature guide and dolphin whisperer who loves sharing the adventure of discovery, both inwardly and in our beautiful natural world. He has an innate ability to help people move easily into a more loving and exuberant experience of life. He loves sharing the joy and excitement of the dolphins, the ocean and nature with people of all ages.

He leads private boat and yacht charters around the globe including Hawaii, the Bahamas & the Caribbean, as well as spiritual nature retreats around the world. He will teach you how to swim, snorkel, freedive and feel more at home on land and in the sea than you ever dreamed possible.

Seventh of eight kids, Joe grew up on a farm in Southern Maine. As a teenager, during a family counseling session over the suicide of his brother, he had a profound recognition that we are the custodians of our own reality, and began a lifelong passion of moving beyond conventional limitations and exploring his full potential. He knew at an early age that his passion was sharing the beauty of nature and adventure. At the age of 23, in his passion for adventure, he hitchhiked from Maine to California and Mexico to Washington. Feeling a call to deepen his connection to nature, he cut down fifty spruce trees in his mid-twenties, hand built a log cabin and lived off the grid in the north woods for a year.

Over the next decade Joe had a private healing practice, working with acupressure, flower essences and as a hands-on healer in local churches and hospitals. Realizing that 90% of the illnesses he was treating had their origin in the mind, he studied psycho-synthesis, NLP and The Option Method, and started his own private psychotherapy practice.

To balance his work as a healer he worked as a wilderness guide for several Outward Bound Schools, leading weeklong hiking, canoeing, backpacking and sailing adventures for individuals, families and corporations. He was surprised to see that people with little to no outdoor experience could thrive in an outdoor setting.

Taking what he learned from his holistic and wilderness experience, in 1990 he started his own consulting company that teaches his own brand of right/left brain team-building, leadership and communication programs to businesses, corporations and universities including Harvard, Cornell and MIT. He has taken executive teams from Fortune 500 companies on leadership retreats around the world, including such adventures as climbing, rafting, sailing and swimming with dolphins and sharks. He has worked as a life coach with many senior executives from different backgrounds and industries, helping them bring more balance and joy into their lives.

In 1995, Joe had his first swim with a pod of wild dolphins, and he stepped out of the water a changed man. He committed himself to a life of directness to nature, giving up his corporate work and sharing the magic of living in joy and flow, something that nature and the dolphins are always offering. Since that time, he’s brought corporate groups and families from all over the world to swim with wild dolphins. He’s called the ‘Dolphin Whisperer’ for the way dolphins respond to him.

In 2008, on a sacred ceremony on an island in the great lakes, he was given the name Nimbeesh, aka ‘Merman’ by a group of Native American Elders, recognizing him as one of the Mer-people, those who are the bridge between the tribes of the land and the tribes of the sea. It was another demonstration of his passion of sharing nature’s beauty and magic.

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

For the past twenty years, Joe has been bringing people to swim with wild dolphins in Hawaii and the Bahamas, where he lives. He loves sharing the joy of being in the ocean and invites you to come on an adventure with him!

“Life is an invitation to have fun; and nature, the sea, the dolphins and whales are wonderful allies in this adventure of being fully alive and present!”