BraveSpace® Focus Group
Facilitate embodied trust from the inside out.
Matthew Nelson, BraveSpace® Founder
You are likely here because, like me, you value the incredible mystery revealing itself through your body.
It is meaningful to share and offer this aliveness to and with others because we are both individual and communal beings. We bring vitality to the field around us when we find it first within ourselves, and this allows us to create the world we want to live in. BraveSpace arises when we take the risk of not knowing what happens next, take responsibility for our own safety, and engage with others listening to the language of our moving, feeling bodies. In this group we will study our bodies as a communal spiritual text, gathering information through our felt experiences, sharing in motion, and witnessing what emerges through us. The 10 principles of BraveSpace, detailed below, are the result of my inquiry thus far over my 27 year quest for connection with self, other, and spirit. They are living entities that I call upon to guide our journey.
Vulnerability is Now
To be worthy of your trust I need to be vulnerable and real; you will feel if I am not feeling you; not grounded in the truth of our shared world. Holding BraveSpace together does not and cannot require mastery—such a requirement would pressure us into a dangerous and impossible moral puritanism. Instead, we can recognize all the things we’re already doing right—all that our bodies know intrinsically. Listening to this deep intelligence brings me a joy I call the deep pleasure of integrity. I invite you to return with me to the place of advanced beginner, a place of vital listening that balances the artificial and sterile place of ‘expert’. We have collectively lost access to meaning because we have distanced ourselves from the eros and spirit that are actually moving us. Nature is alive with longing and connection—it is the divine making love with itself. BraveSpace arises from the knowledge that we are nature, our bodies in motion are meaningful experiences, and we can trust our bodies don’t lie.
Holding BraveSpace® together has fundamental principles:
1) Somatic Research:
We notice the sensations, emotions, images, and movements that we can perceive in our bodies. We collect this data without jumping to conclusions about its meaning or significance prematurely. Simultaneously, we recognize that the truth of our bodies cannot be manipulated away by our minds.
2) De-shaming:
We recognize our bodies as nature, both wild and civilized. We recognize and hold our judgements lightly in order to openly witness ourselves and each other. While we mindfully choose our actions, we release the need to control our experience, asking of our bodies and each other’s bodies what is being revealed through our perceptions.
3) Trans-formation:
We recognize that our movements and personalities are comprised of patterns that take form in our bodies and behaviors, and that these patterns may include traumatic responses. We are willing to change our form, face trauma, and invite discomfort in order to grow in alignment with purpose, truth, and community. We simultaneously seek to avoid injury to self, other, and world.
4) Improvisation:
We invite awe and wonder as we inhabit the mysterious gap between knowing and not knowing. We allow truth to emerge through us and recognize power as the ability to be with what is.
5) Response-ability:
We reposition ourselves in relation to others and the world in each moment seeking our consensual and coherent place of belonging. If we become overwhelmed, frozen, or otherwise unable to respond we do our best to speak to it openly and honestly. We do not attempt to control others’ actions in order to avoid shifting our own relationship to the external world, although we may share our perspectives and invite change.
6) Heart-Centeredness:
We recognize our hearts as portals to spirit and communal consciousness, with the potential to guide us through the limitations of our minds and individual identities. We embody qualities of unconditional love, healing presence, innate harmony, and compassion by calling our attention and energy back to our hearts and to the communal heart.
7) Tensegrity:
We recognize tensional integrity as a systemic wholeness of our physical bodies in space and also of the interpersonal and spiritual realms we inhabit together. We value and hold the tension of opposites as a necessary and healthy aspect of consciousness, and as a key to improvisational emergence.
8) Risk:
We recognize life as a place of inherent mortality and choose in BraveSpace the risk of intimacy with ourselves, each other, and the divine, knowing that none of us will complete our journey on this planet alive. Every phrase has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We embrace fear without being led by it.
9) Eros:
We recognize our bodies are charged with a force of life that is inherently erotic and which manifests differently for each of us. We celebrate our pleasure, vitality, and longing by meeting masculine and feminine dynamics within ourselves. In BraveSpace we direct sexual energy that may wish to fixate on others into making love with spirit in its many forms, including attuning with others.
10) Interbeing:
We recognize that we are simultaneously individual and collectively conscious beings in concert with an animate world. We attune to and contribute to communal fields of consciousness by noting our own values and preferences, voicing and moving them as they are given to us to share, and being willing to release them to impermanence.
BraveSpace® is pan-somatic in that it draws from and applies to many traditions and practices of embodiment including:
- Ecstatic Dance
- Modern/Contemporary Dance
- Laban Movement Analysis/Bartenieff Fundamentals
- Body-Mind Centering/ Developmental Movement Patterning
- Feldenkrais
- Yoga
- Pilates
- Myofascial and Cranio-Sacral Bodywork
- Authentic Movement
- Chi-Kung
- Polyvagal theory
- Breathwork
And countless other influences.
A Spiritual Experience
BraveSpace explores shifting states of consciousness, and thereby honors and incorporates the lessons of psychedelic work, vision questing, tantra, and other spiritual ceremonial lineages. We will engage the principle of Somatic Research to explore what rings true for us within the practices we incorporate, consciously meeting the question of appropriation by being clear with the purpose of practices as we use them, and by discerning the results.
THE FORMAT
The focus of the group will be your exploration of holding BraveSpace for yourself and others. I will guide a communal investigation of the principles, supporting you to engage with this work in your life and community. You will have an individual project through which to apply our work, which may be based on things you are already doing. While it will look a bit different if you are a yoga teacher than a contact improvisation teacher, a psychotherapist, a performer, or a leader in the boardroom, our cohort will give you a reflection point and anchor for your bravery and application. BraveSpace is about how we position ourselves in relationship with others, honoring ourselves as sovereign individuals and also as communal consensual beings. As with so many things, you will receive from this group the energy that you invest. Our identity and purpose in gathering will form from the bottom up through you as well as from the top down through me. One teacher of mine calls this being ‘leaderful’.
We will mix online and in-person interaction. We will meet a few times online between now and the end of the year, assembling intentions, commitments, and priming the group. Our first in-person gathering will be in January, likely Jan 8th-14th. This could be in Boise, ID or Taos, NM, and will be decided in part through your input through the application. Then we will meet online approximately every other week for a few hours as we apply the work in our own lives and communities through our projects, using the group for support. There will be some reading requested for both the group calls and the in-person modules. I will also offer individual check-ins up to once a month. We will have another concluding retreat together in May, dates and place TBD based on the application process. There is the potential to develop something together that we offer to others, either/both as an ongoing online practice or/and as part of our second in-person meeting.
Our time together in person will be focused on embodying the principles with practical tools in somatic movement, contact improvisation, authentic expression, and the emergent group field. You will have the opportunity in the first gathering, and will be expected in the second gathering, to facilitate something and receive feedback from us all. Our schedule in each module will give time for personal connection and self-care.
SPECIFIC LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In the BraveSpace® Focus group we will endeavor:
-To invite and open new possibilities in our movement, and to track methods for doing so.
-To lead others in fundamental practices of Contact Improvisation and Ecstatic Dance.
-To say enough, and not too much.
-To hold ourselves in the presence of discomfort, and empower others to do the same.
-To allow and encourage risk and vulnerability while minimizing danger.
-To minimize harm to others while empowering them in radical responsibility.
-To cue others using words that take them deeper into their truth.
-To funnel judgement of self and others into loving discernment and awareness of shadow.
-To create boundaries so that we can both engage with others and stay ourselves.
-To deepen connection with self, other, world, and spirit.
-To enact consent as a constant re-positioning of our selves in relationship to others—choosing to be ‘here’.
-To identify when we or someone in our field enters a trauma response.
-To be clear with our expectations as facilitators and participants.
-To shift states of consciousness in the blink of an eye, and hold multiple states at once.
-To increase our loving presence—our effervescence as we walk through the world.
-To hold erotic energy and pleasure without shame, and to support others to do the same.
-To engage in and lead spaces that include conscious touch.
-To use music consciously in support of a group field.
-To feel what we’re genuinely devoted to creating in ourselves and our world.
-To bring our gifts as facilitators forward.
-To allow space for the mystery.
THE EXCHANGE
I want this to be accessible and to ask for a deep commitment to our shared field. As a first rendition of this work dedicated to facilitation, inwardly and outwardly, I value this offering at $2000. Recognizing differentials in resources, I would like to offer a sliding scale of $1000-$2000. I would also be grateful for an assistant who can help me with administrative tasks such as media and I can compensate for the role. I can offer a 3-payment structure so long as the minimum of $1000 is paid by the time we meet in person. Housing and food are not included. I have the ability to host some people if we meet in Boise, by donation. I may have some local friends who can help host, and am also happy to work on procuring a rental that could house the group.
Part of the exchange and participation in the group is also an agreement to allow and assist with media creation. This is an aspect of our bravery—to allow the world to see our process when possible and appropriate. This is also a piece of my own learning, claiming the potential of this work to have a beautiful effect in the world.
FEELING CALLED?
Please fill out this application. Apply Today If we have not yet spoken I will contact you to schedule a call together. I see this group constellating by the beginning of November, with 5-10 participants.What people are saying about Matthew’s BraveSpace® facilitation:
The material was very clear and built upon itself in a meaningful, strategic way. Matthew was a brilliant group facilitator and knew when to take a pause or divert us in a different way to enhance our learning.
Liz
The most challenging thing about BraveSpace was shedding the layers I put between myself and others. There was something so special about the group and Matthew’s guidance that helped me do so sooner and more completely than ever before.
Joel
Matthew is very perceptive and bridges the gap exquisitely between honoring edges/boundaries and inviting the next important unknown step.
Anonymous
BraveSpace is a spiritual journey through physical sense.
Johanna, PT/Yoga Teacher
Bios
Lead Facilitator
Matthew Nelson
Matthew Nelson is a somatic therapist and facilitator holding embodied spaces safe enough to take the risk of being vulnerable. With over 25 years of experience studying, practicing, and teaching in the fields of somatic movement, bodywork, and dance, Matthew has been collecting and clarifying core principles of effective somatic education into a ‘pan-somatic’ perspective that acknowledges and includes spirit and eros in its scope. His BraveSpace® approach to shared therapeutic, ceremonial, and recreational movement practice honors the sanctity of the individual while furthering community--recognizing that nobody creates or heals their sacred wounds alone. Matthew has an MFA in dance, certificates in massage, Pilates, and Laban Movement Analysis, and is a Mystery School initiate. Matthew can be found teaching locally in Boise, ID, at festivals, retreats, and conferences worldwide. He welcomes teaching invitations and offers one-on-one sessions as a therapeutic practitioner.
Supporting Facilitator
John-Michael Wasmer
John-Michael is a somatic facilitator and embodiment coach with many years of training in somatic learning in the domains of leadership, sexuality and authentic intimacy. He is certified as a master somatic coach through the Strozzi Institute, and has additional certifications through the Hudson Institute (adult development) and Somatica (a somatic approach to sex and intimacy).
His passion for discovery and deep curiosity in the life of the body and relationships between humans has led him to pursue professional as well as personal practices in acting, and dance forms from partnered (blues, tango, zouk...) to performative (theatrical, burlesque...) to transformational (ecstatic, trance, contact...). He is currently active as a dancer, choreographer and facilitator.
His background as a meditator and martial artist also inform his somatic sensibility and abilities to interpret relational dynamics into embodied practices that accelerate learning that often takes years into transformational moments.
He has been developing his ability to read the group field and lead from emergent spaces over the past 25 years, and has created a dojo for somatic learning called TRUSTLab which is based in Taos, New Mexico.