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. In his book The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner devotes approximately the first third of his book to exploring the electromagnetic field created and modulated by the human heart.  He brings in fascinating and objective evidence to suggest that the primary function of our hearts is not about pumping blood, but rather is oriented toward communicating with each other and every other form of life through energetic modulation.  The flow of the blood, and the way it moves through the heart, is part and parcel of how this energetic modulation takes place.  This subject arises in a book about plants because he suggests that this is how humans are able to communicate with plants.  These are bold claims in a culture not used to perceiving animacy; a culture driven to consider our living earth more a ‘what’ than a ‘who’.  And yet, many older and indigenous traditions speak regularly about communicating with all elements of the biosphere, including and not limited to communicating with plants.  The mystery of the heart center revolves around the ability to develop ways of knowing and communicating beyond what our minds are accustomed to, connecting with other states of consciousness.  In light of Buhner’s work it is interesting to consider that psychedelic medicines, which generally come from plants, also offer altered states of consciousness.  Devotees of the heart center enter such states without ingesting plants to do so.  I count myself in this camp as a relatively recent initiate with a moderate ability to shift my state.  I experience my heart center as a way of finding ‘home’ wherever I am.  Having also engaged significantly in plant-based psychedelic work, something I have a deep appreciation for, I find heart center work to be more integrative and stabilizing.  As of this writing I have spent about four years studying and practicing Heart Center Meditation.  My first teacher, Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson, studied with Dr. Brough Joy among others, and both of them speak and write on some level about it being work derived from many lineages.  Since being initiated into this work I have begun to see it everywhere:  I notice the many situations in which people not otherwise ‘trained’ bring their hands to their hearts in specific situations.  I have also sat in circles of people sharing what is dear to them with consistent personal and physical references to their hearts.  In essence, there is nothing new or even all that secret about Heart Center Mediation.  Dr. Chiasson often speaks about how the heart center becomes an activated and important place of consciousness in times of great personal and transpersonal change. Communally I believe we are in now in such a time.   Both Dr. Chiasson and Dr. Joy have books available that describe the heart center with some depth.  I am intentionally not opening or referencing their books directly in this writing because I want to capture the transmission of my experience as it is given to me to share, yet I also want to honor that Dr. Chiasson’s descriptions are to a great degree the source from which I’m writing.  I hope that what I share here may motivate you to read her work too.   There are four primary qualities to the heart center that I have learned, practiced, and felt revealed to me.  Here they take the form of words and concepts, and so in this form they are at least a step removed from their lived experience.  The purpose of sharing them here is to make them available for you to research through your own somatic experience.  For this I recommend simply being present with your heart space in the center of the chest:  Bring your hands to your heart with a sense of reverence.  Hold your heart with the intention of opening a portal to spirit—opening to the divinity of your own being.  Stay here and listen.  In doing so you may or may not have an extraordinary experience, but you can bring extraordinary presence to your ordinary experience.  Allowing myself to stay present with the ordinary has been, and continues to be, one of the most challenging aspects for me of this practice.  This is not a path toward being special, and yet it is a way of meeting the divine here and now.  I share this so that you may notice if you get taken by ‘inflation’ or ‘deflation’ as you proceed—the sense that you are more or less important or divine than others.  If you notice this, please have a good laugh with yourself as you note the data of your experience.  Let’s also recognize that on some level I am telling you how to move (put your hands on your heart), and how to feel (the below descriptions).  In the first BraveSpace principle of Somatic Research, we’ve already established this as an essential impossibility.  Please laugh with me as you entertain these descriptions:  My invitation is to allow them to serve as inspiration.   Unconditional love, as quality of the heart center, is a place of emptiness.  It is the void, held with awe and wonder.  It is a stillness of pure presence.  I hear people speak of unconditional love as something we should feel for everyone, and something that should be attained.  This is such an attractive thought, yet the state of unconditional love itself has no conditions.  There is no ‘should’ because there is no thing.  Unconditional love is not personal, and neither is it impersonal.  It is through this quality that I begin to grok that there is a communal consciousness of which we are all a part.  There is no ‘other’ to whom to compare oneself from this place of being, but rather we are all individual aspects of larger whole.  I like how another teacher of mine, Christian Pankhurst, puts it: “You are me cleverly disguised as you.”  This is core to exploring the mystery of unconditional love. Healing presence, as a quality of the heart center, is movement arising in the void.  It is the longing for healing; the longing for life.  I am reminded of healing presence when I feel pain and then recognize my pain as the healing process itself rather than that which requires healing.  There is no ‘thing’ called pain.  An injury, such as broken bone, can be objectively witnessed and even quantified as to its size and shape, but the pain experienced with the injury may never be exactly known by another person.  As a dancer I have seen people so in love with their dance, and so taken by the life force coming through them, that they could dance with broken bones.  Pain is given meaning through love.  Similarly, I feel healing presence in the way sadness and beauty so often co-arise.  As my heart is broken, it is also potentially broken open.  Healing presence is the quality that arises by observing this process of the life force within. Innate harmony is a place of resonance, where all the infinite voices meet.  It is the eye of the storm and the place where we thread the needle of possibility.  Innate harmony is perfection itself; the impossible possibility that’s also always right here.  I experience innate harmony as an orgasmic state of intimacy with the divine, yet one without intensity.  Intensity does arise for me, yet its arrival drives me from the state of perfection as instantaneously as I arrived there, for innate harmony exists outside of time.  As a passage and gateway, innate harmony leads me into compassion. If unconditional love is the empty void, compassion is a complimentary fullness.  Compassion is the quality of being with; some would say suffering with.  In compassion we entertain the possibility of turning pain into light.  We do well to begin by being with ourselves and our own suffering before naturally extending compassion to others.  This state and quality of the heart center has been taught to me as boundless and oceanic in scope, and arises for me with a pulsing and wavelike quality.  It often begins for me as gratitude.  Sometimes I wonder if I am substituting gratitude for compassion entirely, yet I sense they are just deeply related with each other in shared fullness.  Compassion certainly has flow, and I experience that it has the potential to overflow when first oriented internally. There is a fifth quality of the heart center that arises as the probable result of living the other four:  This is the quality of selfless service.  This service may be given many names and applications, including service to source, spirit, or divinity, yet may intrinsically show up as service to community, family, or anything larger than oneself.  I want to tell you that I experience selfless service as a source of meaning, yet in making the statement I simultaneously notice that meeting my longing for meaning is not selfless.  Such is the paradox of mystery:  These qualities are models and suggestions for where the mystery of the heart center may lead, and yet attempting to grasp the mystery may only hide the path on which it meets us.   The heart center is a key to holding spaces where we can take the risk of being vulnerable because it is a portal to our inherent connectedness and shared divinity.  When I recognize that you are me cleverly disguised as you then I am given the opportunity to drop my personal inflation and deflation to meet you in shared research of a greater mystery.  Similarly, the heart center offers the possibility for me to meet myself in my own reflection, coming home to myself.  We must hold BraveSpace for ourselves to hold it for others.  The essence of connection to and through the heart is that we are never actually alone.

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. ____________________________ I had a breathwork session from a friend.  It was brilliantly simple.  She sat with me and encouraged me to breathe on my own terms.  She helped me to be gentle with myself, expanding and condensing my body in a delightfully natural flow without trying to get anywhere.  In time I experienced a subtle, full-body, orgasmic pleasure.  I tried to deepen the experience by breathing with greater intensity, but my actions only pushed the feeling away.  The paradox of choice was so clear:  The experience of being embodied can be met and explored.  Yet, in its depth it cannot be completely owned or controlled.  We participate in guiding a lived experience that we are not in control of.  I like the word ‘repositioning’ as a way of describing and relating with this process physically and metaphysically.  We may reposition ourselves by making choices about how we move, perceive, and relate with our bodies, others, spirit, and the environment.  Repositioning does not generally alter the conditions we are presented with, but it shifts our relationship to them. Response-ability is the ability to respond.  To be able to respond to conditions is fundamental to life.  We are self-organizing systems who adapt to internal and external change.  Our responses are sometimes voluntary:  For example you have chosen to read these words.  Voluntary response is typically the level at which we choose to reposition ourselves.  You could choose to stop reading this and put your attention somewhere else.  Yet, many of our responses are involuntary.  For example, if there is a loud and sudden sound you cannot choose whether to be startled—it just happens.  Shifting voluntary responses is simple enough.  The deepest aspect of response-ability, and of repositioning ourselves, is noticing and managing involuntary response patterns.  We may also recognize that many response patterns which at first glance appear voluntary, are actually not as voluntary as they seem.  It is customary in the time I’m writing this to speak of being ‘triggered’ into involuntary response patterns.  Polyvagal theory, integrated among other somatic psychology perspectives, offers that in situations that in some way mimic past traumatic experience we can lose the ability to consciously respond to what’s taking place.  Dynamics of fight, flight, freeze, collapse, or fawn may essentially hijack our nervous systems, shifting our state of consciousness.  It becomes very difficult to make new choices despite great intent, and we become unable to do what we think we should do.  Neither are we powerless.  We can practice noticing and de-shaming our responses to slowly increase the potential for conscious choice.  This way of repositioning ourselves is often indirect at first:  If you know what startles you, and how you respond when startled, then you may choose not to enter environments where you are most likely to be startled, or you may avoid making important decisions while in this triggered state.  Essential to this approach to repositioning is being able to notice when we are triggered.  Building self-awareness is key to having response-ability. I had a dream in which I was flying a model plane.  Then I was in the plane, and I was headed for a tree.  I had forgotten that I had any control of the plane, remembered suddenly, and avoided hitting the tree just in time.  In the next part of my dream I was talking with a friend who had just discovered all the places she could get to by train.  She was excited to tell me all the adventures she was having.  As I feel into this dream I recognize themes of response-ability:  In the plane it was only when about to crash that I remembered I had a say in how I repositioned myself.  In the total freedom that flying represents to me, I needed the tree to activate my choice—an external reality to be in relationship with.  Connecting with my friend—another aspect of myself—I learned I could go to specific places mapped out by the tracks.  Mapping train tracks is like mapping my own triggers and states of consciousness, developing awareness of the defined places I go repeatedly.   Self-awareness is built through somatic research, and often requires interaction with others.  Moving and feeling in community we get feedback about our response patterns.  Our triggers show up when in social relationship.  Our shadows—the patterns in us that we are unable to see—often reveal themselves if we are willing to notice and question our reactions.  If I notice that my shoulders and belly tense when you approach me, or when someone says something on a particular subject, then I’m given a clue about my internal mechanisms.  We typically externalize these responses:  I’m angry because you did something, I’m silent because someone silenced me, or I’m turned on (or off) because someone’s seducing me with their power. This can all be true, and yet there’s also another layer of awareness available which affords us greater response-ability. A meditation teacher of mine created a sticker with the words “Don’t just do something, sit there.”  This is a great inroad to deeper response-ability.  In relationship to the above example I might notice my state of tension, recognize it as anger, explore how it moves in my body, and wonder at how often I seem to feel this way.  Then, instead of directing my anger at the person who triggered it I could choose to express it by throwing rocks in the river until I’m able to think more clearly and discern whether I still have something to say.  In the case of silence I may find myself generally unable to access my ability to respond, and I may need to rest for a while in my stillness.  I can find a place to come back to myself, and then update others later on the response I wish I had been able to offer.  In time I may be able to significantly shorten the amount of time it takes me to come back into my activation.  I can similarly choose to change course if I’ve become sexually engaged, recognizing that I’m no longer feeling a genuine draw to the other person.  To do so requires that I have the physical and emotional ability to say ‘no’ and to mean it.  In each of these cases I must first recognize that I’m on a certain track, de-shame it for myself, and wait for the intensity to pass before I can proceed.  This is easy enough to imagine, but clearly more difficult to do in the moment.  Response-ability takes practice, particularly at holding ourselves in the moment of discomforting activation. When we interact with other people we navigate our relational agreements as consent and consensus processes.  Consent is about what we agree to individually, while consensus is communal.  There are numerous practices for getting better at discerning and communicating what is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for us that are taught in consent programs or at events where being able to do this is important.  One thing I’ve noticed about these practices overall is they tend toward situations where a person approaches, and then a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ needs to be offered.  This is an important beginning, and indeed many real-life situations work this way, but many also do not.  There are so many maybes, and also so many opportunities that present themselves indirectly.  We can choose to reposition ourselves so that we may gain access to relationships and experiences that would not otherwise be in our path.  We can also reposition so that we have options beyond ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  This is why I like the model of repositioning as a way of holding response-ability. In total the shift into response-ability happens when I focus on how I’m responding to others rather than trying to change the behaviors of others.  These course corrections are difficult to make because they go against the flow of deep involuntary patterning, a flow we prefer not to alter.  There is also an important ‘and’ to consider:  My instinctive responses may be the perfect way to handle a situation.  It is easy to fall into the trap of constant self-criticism or self-shaming.  The key here is that discernment comes through repeated experimentation, and a willingness to make mistakes.  In time the state of one’s nervous system—the tone of consciousness—becomes more palpable and easier to read.  Therapeutic and recreational play environments offer the opportunity to practice noticing, evaluating, and re-patterning our responses.  My own capacity for power, authenticity, and joy in relationship has grown tremendously through such practice.  Intentional group containers have allowed me to run into my triggers for sport, inspiring in me both fear and joy as I have been given the ability to make mistakes, make amends, and grow.  These containers give me the chance to consciously navigate how I relate and what agreements I am making with others.  BraveSpace® is such a container, offered in the hope and belief that response-ability may be learned, shared, and practiced to strengthen our communal culture.  It is an invitation.

In preparing to hold the embodied ritual of a Grief Dance this Saturday I have been asking myself how I experience and move grief in my body, and what the relationship is between grief and community.  When I dance alone and am able to connect to something bigger—call it source, divinity, God, or expanded consciousness—I often start crying.  There’s both a softening in me, and an engagement that puts my body in motion.  This isn’t necessarily just about grief, but it’s certainly a component.  This state carries in me a longing to be met in my dance, one that at times feels like the very source of my grief.  When I am dancing with others the prevailing energy tends to be more celebratory, and perhaps this is exactly because we are sharing in the joy of meeting each other.  And yet, I also carry a longing to move grief with others in movement; to be met in that very energy.  I have participated in and created such containers, and I have experienced in them the particular type of joy that comes from being in my grief with others.  It’s quite a vulnerable state. Enjoying grief seems a bit odd on the surface, so I’d like to speak to a deeper layer.  Deepening is the fundamental frequency of grief.  Grief moves in me when I allow myself to be permeable, literally softening the tone of my body so that forces can travel deeper through my tissues.  This is also how pleasure moves in me–it similarly requires softening.  As my teacher Christian Pankhurst states it, watching how we close reveals how we open:  The importance of softening is clear when I see myself and others harden our edges, physically and emotionally, in order to function in the face of something very difficult.  When the need to function is no longer there; when softening again becomes available, the grief rushes in.  A few years ago my wife Kendy Radasky and I separated and believed we were headed into divorce.  That time was one of the most difficult experiences of my life, and I moved deeply into grief.  Through the many intense bouts of expression, including crying, moving, dancing, and screaming, I started to recognize the joy I carried simultaneously for my ability to feel.  Energy was moving through me that had been stuck for years.  Our ability to come back together in love was due in large part to this—the movement of energy in both of us that had been stuck.  Pleasure became more available, and thankfully we both opened to it. The most important tool I’ve found for moving grief in my body is breathing into the sensations I’m experiencing without trying to do anything in particular to or about them.  Sometimes it takes me a very long time to drop into myself this way.  When I’m with others in spaces that specifically name and hold the possibility of moving grief together our collective intent can help me go deeper.  Sometimes others express grief that I am not able to express personally but which brings me joy and relief to witness.  There is also something hugely important and powerful about being seen and validated in my grief, and our grief, by others.  African spiritual teacher Malidoma Somé writes about how in his culture men who are not able to hold their grief in daily life are not trusted, but if those same men are unable to access their grief and cry in ceremonies they also are not trusted.  I resonate with wanting access to both the capacity to hold my grief, and the ability to let it move, in community.  I do not see many places in our culture where it is normal, or even desirable to be with the healing power and joy of grief publicly, especially for men.  I’d like to name the fears in myself and perhaps in our collective that grief won’t move, that we might lose all control of ourselves, or that you or I won’t meet someone’s grief correctly.  These are natural fears in a culture that isn’t used to grieving together. If you’re in Boise I’d like to invite you into BraveSpace around grief—into taking the risk of being vulnerable together in our bodies and community.  The Grief Dance this Saturday will be from 12-3pm at SomaWorks. The link for more information and to sign up is here.  

I stated in some conversation recently that the realm of the spiritual occurs when we consider a frame larger than one lifetime.  I’ve been sitting with this, wondering at such a simple, limited inroad to the ineffable.  The first lesson of the mystery school I was initiated into was to “Get your hands off the mystery!”  It’s difficult to allow the unknown to stay this way—feeling through the infinite instead of trying to logic it into definition. Trying to grasp the formless seems only to push it away, and holding that there is more to life than appears at first blush is also essential to having a meaningful experience My mother passed into the next realm earlier this week, and for all conjecture I cannot know where it is that she has gone.  Feeling my way though, I am incredibly glad that I was with her through the process.  I had the opportunity to look into her eyes, see her deeply, and to feel deeply seen.  She was clear that she was ready to die, and she did not appear afraid.  She was always clear about what she wanted and what she saw.  I continue to learn about this from her. I recorded this video in the midst of her passing, which was a three-day process.  As a bodyworker sensitive to energy it was astounding to be near her body at the end:  I could bring my hands near her in the way I generally do to feel someone’s energy field, and they’d simply land on her body.  I typically encounter the energy field as a sense of resistance a few feet away.  In this case I felt nothing there—her field had collapsed to be smaller than her physical body.  Yet, dancing in a park a few miles away, I could feel her.  With the possible exception of at my wedding, or perhaps when I was very young, I never danced with my mom in her physical body.  This video marks something new—dancing with Mom.  I love you, Mom.

Improvisation, the 4th principle of BraveSpace:  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. The key to improvisation is getting the thinking mind out of the way so a deeper responsivity can emerge.  In the beginning our minds need a structure or task—something specific and simple to do.  A later learning step is recognizing that whatever it is the mind is doing matters, but it often isn’t the most important thing going on. Improvising is a divination process.  A core perspective of BraveSpace that we are not in direct control of most of what we do—that our identities are managing the ride of life as it comes through us.  We can thereby approach our bodies as spiritual texts given for us to interpret; texts that we don’t have the capability of writing ourselves.  Somatic movement, dance, meditation, breathwork, and touch experiences shift our state of consciousness.  These practices give us greater choice in how we participate with life because we learn to interpret what is given to us from multiple perspectives.  When we recognize the process of moving and feeling our bodies as a sacred mystery available within ourselves, a natural attitude of awe and wonder is likely to occur!  And, of course, this attitude is difficult to embody when pain or discomfort arises, whether physical, emotional, or otherwise.  This is when the mind steps in to save the day, often refusing to get out of the way.  We use rules, guidelines, and logic to direct our minds, manage our experience, and create maps of our perceived reality.  This kind of ‘knowing’ that occupies our minds is super important, and the principles of BraveSpace represent one such structural map.  Simultaneously we can recognize that the field of what we ‘know’ is infinitely smaller than the realm of the ‘unknown’ that operates through us.  The mystery we are divining in improvisation lies in the tension between these poles.  We can hold what is known loosely without abandoning it.  It is ironic that we can most often wonder at the oceanic unknown only from the shores of our knowing.  To improvise is to dance, sometimes quite literally, in the gap between the finite and the infinite.  The aliveness of this is sometimes terrifying, and it is extraordinary! In many respects this gap between known and unknown is our most accurate place of residence.  We are always improvising because the conditions of our reality are always changing.  In the realm of dancing, the known might be a piece of choreography that I’ve practiced many times to the same piece of music.  The unknown could be a dance I do with no forethought or rehearsal.  We can look at these dances as having more in common with each other than not:  If the room is cold, I will move differently than if it’s warm.  If I ate something I can’t digest then I’ll be nauseous.  If I just won the lottery I’ll be happier than if my wife just requested a divorce, and in either case I’ll be hugely distracted.  There is also another very social element:  Dancing by myself is radically different from dancing for 10,000 people who are watching me, dancing anonymously with 10,000 people who also are dancing, or dancing closely with someone I am in an intimate relationship with.  If the stage lights come on too soon, and my partner fails to appear, it’s clearly time to improvise.  Choreography matters, but it’s only one part of the larger whole.  Interacting with varied conditions I cannot entirely predict or control, internally and externally, is dancing with the unknown.   We are also always referencing what we know.  In considering Trans-Formation as a BraveSpace principle I explored the concept that everything we do is patterned.  We repeat patterns in phrases, from beginning, through middle, to end.  Beginning a phrase, unless there is an interruption, will bring about its completion.  In an improvisational dance I cannot help but use patterns my body knows.  Just like it is possible to differentiate one person’s walk from another’s based on their individual repeated patterns, it is also clear who is who when watching people dance an improvisational dance.  Now, go ahead and imagine a dance; any kind of dance will do.  We are referencing the known simply by defining this movement you are imagining as dance.  ‘Dance’ is a shared nomenclature that gives both I as the writer and you as the reader an understanding based on our previous knowledge. To improvise, given these examples, is to be able to merge the known and unknown elements of anything towards an intention.  There are levels of scale in the shared ecology of self, other, and place that the improviser connects through their perception and action.  The temperature of the room, the social environment, our past experiences, and our collective intentions generate a particular moment of being.  As a dancer my intention when improvising is often exactly to let the physical and social environment move me—to put myself in service to it.  In sports the guiding intention is to win the game.  The movements have been practiced again and again, the needs and rules of the game directing how they are used.  The outcome of such an emergence cannot be pre-determined; that’s why underdogs always have a chance.     The power given through improvisation, and particularly through the practice of improvisation, is to be able to adapt to continually changing conditions.  Improvisation increases resilience—the ability to rebound from impacts and maintain wholeness.  Improvisation is essential in creating places where we can take the risk of being vulnerable because the conditions given within us, through the divination of our own bodies and being, are consistently shifting as much as those outside us.  To know ourselves is a research endeavor with no endpoint.  Revealing ourselves is a process of discovery that only improvisation can meet with integrity.

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. I imagine that every spiritual, mindfulness, or self-help lineage discusses in some form that the only constant in life is change.  As a dancer it has felt self-evident to me that working with my body in movement is a spectacular way to access all sorts of personal trans-formations, but I didn’t begin to experience this until I actually started dancing at age 20.  Learning to move my body in new ways gave me access to new ways of being with myself and others.  It opened my access to my emotional range and began releasing me from what could be termed trauma patterns, both personal and trans-personal, so that I could meet myself and others in new ways.   I don’t want to get stuck debating what is and isn’t trauma, but it is important to look at its fundamental basis.  We can consider trauma with a big ‘T’—clinically diagnosable trauma linked to deeply damaging events that may take people completely out of their ability to regulate themselves in everyday life.  This is PTSD as seen in soldiers coming from war, or that often occurs in people who have experienced rape.  Yet, we can also consider small ‘t’ trauma—like being embarrassed in front of a class—experiences which people also commonly speak about as traumatic.  The reason it has become common to speak this way is that the underlying principle is the same even if the degree of effect is drastically different:  As human life-forms we are patterned beings, and these patterns are created in relationship to our life experiences.  Injuries of all sorts—traumas physical, emotional, and spiritual—often lead to patterns of movement and behavior that are not maximally easeful or efficient.   Have you ever seen someone walking toward you from far away and known who it was just by how they walk?  We walk differently from each other, yet we also consistently maintain our own individual style.  It’s key to recognize that these differences aren’t performed consciously most of the time.  This is how we are as bodies—patterned and mostly unconscious.  If this were not the case we’d be overwhelmed every time we needed to get across the room.  Conversely, noticing our patterns of walking or breathing are meditation techniques exactly because they corral the mind into the present moment and allow us to witness the miracle of all we would usually do without conscious control.  In the noticing also comes an interruption.  Sometimes when I bring my attention to my walk or to my breathing I get tripped up a bit.  Everything feels awkward as I become aware of my own patterning.  Part of the awkwardness is that bringing in my awareness actually shifts what I’m doing; observing our own breath or walk without changing it in some way is difficult if not impossible. Transformation is a change of form.  One’s form is generated by their patterns.  In the body we know this in its most literal sense:  People lift weights because repeating the pattern changes the form of their body.  When we consider that everything we do is composed of patterns that we repeat, from our movements to how we engage with our thoughts, it becomes clear that transformation arises when we shift our automatic, unconscious patterns.  Interrupting our patterns, and in time learning to stop initiating certain patterns, is essential to transformation.   All movements, just like this sentence and paragraph, have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  This way of parsing flow is called a ‘phrase’ in Laban Movement Analysis.  Flow is the ongoing nature of being in time—we can think of it like a river.  Phrasing is how we parse and attempt to control the flow, with a rush here, and an eddy there; perhaps at some point we go over a waterfall.  Every breath is a phrase in the larger phrase of a life.  As with a river, it takes effort and intent to stop in the middle, and when going over a waterfall it’s completely impossible to stop.  Initiations lead to conclusions!  Bringing attention to what’s happening within our mostly automatic phrases is typically uncomfortable and awkward.  It also empowers us to make new choices, and to create new patterns that may better serve our lives.  When dealing with particularly deep patterns of trauma we may have to interrupt ourselves at the first hint of discomfort to avoid going over a waterfall of cascading responses.  Tolerance for discomfort, and the ability to repattern ourselves more quickly, comes with dedicated practice.   To grow is to be willing to be uncomfortable.  This does not mean that everything uncomfortable is growth, nor that all moments are the right time for transformative pattern-shifting.  Trauma—and all the patterns—shift by following the natural rhythm between leaning into discomfort and then coming back to easeful regulation.  It is deeply empowering to be able to engage with our own phrases of transformation when we are ready, and at the pace that fits.  It is also hugely important in holding BraveSpace—places we can take the risk of vulnerability—to honor our own phrasing and that of others through our shared changing of form.  It can help us keep from falling over life’s waterfalls when we aren’t ready, and to enjoy the ride when we are.

The purpose of BraveSpace is to generate embodied spaces save enough to take the risk of being vulnerable.  What makes vulnerability a worthwhile goal?  This was the topic of last weekend’s BraveSpace Focus Group ‘Beta Test’.  (There’s another next Wednesday Nov 1st @6pm MT).  Here’s some of what came up in the discussion. Vulnerability is the door to intimacy; to being real and present in relationship.  One participant in last week’s group shared an image of a hand reaching out inviting them to ‘the other side’.  What is the other side, I asked?  It is the authenticity which arises from and generates the possibility of oneness—with self, others, and the divine wholeness of all-that-is.  This tenderness is not available when we are busy protecting ourselves, positioning ourselves to take power-over, or projecting ourselves out of the present place and time.  In this way vulnerability is framed by the willingness to recognize all that we do not know, as well as the willingness to listen and to claim what we do know.  I find my own vulnerability these days in this second part—to be willing to stand for what I see, and willing to be humiliated if that’s what comes.  If I use ‘not knowing’ as an excuse to not be involved in life then that is guardedness, not vulnerability.  I do that sometimes.  I am vulnerable when I include myself in ‘us’, offering myself from a place of caring.   Vulnerability is essential in the eros of creativity.  To allow my weakness, show my underbelly, be raw, messy, and willing to be humiliated are prerequisites to eros of all types, from sexuality to the pragmatic creativity of writing this post.  To imagine the possibility of something that I have not yet experienced requires me to be vulnerable.  I think this is because such imaginings do not come to pass unless we long for them.  Longings arise from depth beyond the desires of the egoic self.  In my longing I uncover something within that I cannot control, and I yield to it.  Vulnerability arises when I admit I cannot control of my longing—only how it is expressed. I’m personally invested in and grateful for vulnerability because I wish to support a communal transition from a force-oriented paradigm of domination, where power is manufactured by privileging self over other, to an inquiry-oriented paradigm of co-creation, where power is revealed by being with what is and creating in tandem with ‘other’.  Co-creation is vulnerable.  The transition to co-creation is nothing new—it is in many ways the teaching of Jesus, Buddah, and so many others, yet we are at a key point in our evolution:  We have the ability and possible inclination to commit global pan-species suicide.  There are no ‘other’ people at a planetary scale.  Perhaps there has always been war, and yet it seems apparent that if anyone is to survive there cannot continue to be.  We are vulnerable either way, but one path consciously embraces it. I want to honor that vulnerability is not always available to me.  There are conditions for vulnerability, and it is important to have boundaries that match the conditions present.  To find our own vulnerability, and to encourage it in others, we cannot just stand up and declare it.  Rather, vulnerability requires setting up conditions that make it safe enough to take conscious risks.  It is a process and navigation, and the principles of BraveSpace are my take on what’s required.

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. This principle has three distinct yet interwoven faces:  The power, practice, and importance of witnessing, the perspective that the body is nature, and an opportunity to deconstruct judgement.  Shame is not only an emotion, but also an action:  I can feel shame in myself or shame others by projecting judgement onto them.  Shame and shaming constitute more than just a judgement of a behavior:  They devalue the person who has behaved ‘badly’, whether self or other.  Often the shaming process also involves the larger community, leveraging others to further shame an individual or group.  Shame thus relates personal and communal realities:  We are not just looking at an individual, but at the context of the individual in culture.  Let’s also honor shame as a fundamental human experience, recognizing that shame would not exist if it didn’t serve an essential purpose.  De-shaming examines these relationships, and we should be aware of the cyclical trap of additionally shaming ourselves for feeling ashamed or for holding judgements.  De-shaming is a form of inquiry, not an inquisition. There is no body outside of nature.  Civilization can train and affect how people and bodies behave, but we remain natural and interconnected systems.  A behavior cannot exist without a person who behaved, and no person’s behavior has consequence outside of relationship with others.  Ecosystems have layers of scale:  We are living systems, participating in living systems, and we are made up of living systems.  Shame can exist within any and all layers of this framework.  To de-shame is to explore the role of a behavior in the physical and social ecosystem as though our behaviors grow on trees—recognizing them as something given by nature.  Our bodies often behave without our conscious intent, and in resonance across the various layers of scale.  I might look at a part of myself with shame because I have internalized a story I’ve received from others directly, or due to what I’ve internalized through structures of media or education.  My shame arises not just because some part of me isn’t what I desire, but due to a belief that if I were behaving ‘better’ then my relationship to others and the whole would be different.  Shame thus asks for my responsibility at my individual scale.  This is what’s right and important about shame:  Shame is a powerful motivator for pro-social behavior. To witness is to be present with someone or something in its aliveness.  Witnessing draws us deeper into connection with whatever it is we are witnessing.  We can witness at all the social and ecological levels of scale.  I can witness a community within myself, see a part of myself in you, or recognize the divinity of the whole living earth by witnessing leaves ruffling in the wind.  To witness is to acknowledge what is being given by nature.  To fail to witness may be a refusal to acknowledge what is.  Sometimes you or I may lack the capacity to witness, yet failing to acknowledge something doesn’t shift its nature.  Witnessing is a form of love.  What goes unacknowledged will keep asking to be seen and loved. The problematic aspect of shame is that a part of you or I, a part of society—a part of everything—becomes unlovable and dis-included when subject to shame.  What a shame that this part exists!  If judgement were always sound and consistent from all angles, to dis-include would be brilliantly effective.  Of course, it isn’t.  Shaming others can be an attempt to dis-acknowledge something in ourselves and the larger whole.  An ecological perspective tells us that there is no place outside of the whole.  Every waste in a natural system is composted and re-introduced.  There is no place called elsewhere to which we can effectively banish the behaviors and people we don’t like.  Prisons and executions do this only to the degree that we must sit with the weight of who we imprison and kill to take care of the collective.  It is a troublesome and discomforting task to do so.  Even when such measures are necessary for collective safety, to heal the collective more deeply we can still ask why any behavior arose in the frame of a larger systemic scale, and where it sits in the nature of our shared reality.  To kill the murderer is to kill, and to imprison the thief is to take their freedom from them against their will.  In witnessing behaviors and people, and in witnessing our own judgements, we may recognize we are the very ones we are judging.  Shame on us for judging!  We do well to include that part. The opportunity in de-shaming is to find the way back to love.  We are given to do this not because it will necessarily fix anything or everything, but because it’s outside our minds’ power to judge or segregate correctly.  There is no one human who carries the moral authority of the whole, and yet each of us is also generated by this wholeness.  Nature pervades all the layers of scale.  In de-shaming we are given the opportunity to inquire into and witness our divinity, and to marvel at the mystery of what is revealed through us.   

One of the great existential questions is the nature of truth.  Does truth exist, and if so where do we find it? Countless classical, modern, and postmodern thinkers have attempted this one, and I sense the most common result of the attempt is increased anxiety.  I grew up mildly Jewish and the son of academic parents.  I was indoctrinated both with the stories from the Torah, the religious text from which Jewish and Christian perspectives arise, and the many texts and precepts of modern science.  Science runs tests of our physical world to determine a viewpoint—it is ‘objective’ essentially because in science we observe and test our world as objects.  Science has been a hugely effective method for procuring seemingly impossible abilities such as flying around the world, or communicating these words to you through tiny electrical charges.  The religious texts, on the other hand, consider miracles directly.  Moses is said to have parted the sea not because he had next generation 5G technology, but because he was given a divine miracle.  I can’t begin to claim one of these methods or perspectives is more true than the other.  As a child I stood boldly for science.  As an adult I know that I know less than I think, and I’m sitting in awe and wonder regarding all the many miracles. What I do know is that I can use my body as a reference point for engaging with living truth.  My body has become the spiritual text I interpret.  I study daily how to better listen to and through my heart.  My body is alive—a subject as well as an object—and seems to connect to both the world of miracles and the world of knowledge.  I recognize in my body an experience of truth.  This doesn’t mean, as you’ve heard me say before if you’ve been reading me for a while, that I believe everything I feel.  Rather, my body is a place I can hold subjective experiments.  I can notice all the sensations, emotions, and thoughts that come through me, and I can move.  I move my body and my awareness.  This process of movement and awareness defines somatics as a field, one I consider it to be an internal and subjective science.  It is also for me a profoundly spiritual experience—a direct conversation with the divine.   When we come together in groups and conjoin the individual truths coming through our bodies together, something magical happens:  We generate fields of consciousness—of truth—that go beyond what we know or believe.  Moving and feeling together offers an incredible experience of connection.  For me it is prayer, scientific research, and a great party all in one.  It’s also a very vulnerable kind of state, where our traumas may surface, and our personalities are likely to melt a bit.  It’s a place where a tremendous amount of healing can happen, yet we can also get hurt.  Vulnerability is risky, and so it takes intention, responsibility, and skill to hold these spaces for ourselves and for each other.  It takes reverence for each person’s individual divinity. I’m calling together the BraveSpace® Focus Group to create embodied spaces where we can lean into the truth of our bodies and take the risk of being vulnerable.  It’s geared toward facilitators of embodied spaces, from yoga, to dance, to particularly progressive boardrooms, with the recognition that we all facilitate ourselves in our bodies in concert with the aliveness all around us.  I have 10 principles that I believe will help us learn and entrain with one another.  The principles are pan-somatic, arising from the philosophical basis of somatics as a field.  They also include both spirit and eros in their scope, because we could not have living bodies without these miraculous forces.  Please take a look, spread the word to those who should know, and apply if you feel called.  The group is open to ten participants, and I believe it will fill quickly. THE BRAVESPACE® FOCUS GROUP

This spring I sat in a meadow for a few days watching and listening to the birds and the bees.  As my personality struggled to just be in the flow of things, the bees seemed perfectly relaxed in their buzz.  While my mind rushed to fill the emptiness with chaotic thoughts, the birds clearly and sweetly brought melody to the void.  I watched from the level of my soul.  Here is life, I felt. Eros isn’t what you think, nor what I think either.  The birds and bees teach me that eros cannot be thought; it is rather the life force being felt.  I have long wondered why people use the phrase ‘the birds and the bees’ as a reference to speaking with kids about sex.  Sitting in the meadow I got it:  The birds and the bees are wildly erotic because they are literally wildly alive.  It’s difficult to conceptualize and speak to such forces in any form other than poetry.   The ‘birds and the bees’ comprise a delightful, short poem.  They reveal the constant folding and unfolding of the life force.  We are made of eros, motivated by eros, and there is no escape from eros.  To dance in it is as painful as it is beautiful because we think:  We think we can and must control it.  I think perhaps I can define and speak about it.  Yet, it took me three days of sitting with the birds and the bees before it was given to me to dance.  It took that long to be genuinely called out of my head and into the living song of the meadow, to move my body in its own poetry.  Apparently eros also cannot be rushed. The dance of eros often has very little to do with sex, yet it is also the source point for sexuality.  I worry speaking about it here that I’m getting swept up in an obsession with sexuality.  I worry that you think this.  Perhaps I am, and yet it’s repeatedly called through me to consciously engage.  I find it important to acknowledge this often shamed, hidden, and enlivening force. This summer I had the privilege of teaching the “Go F—Yourself Workshop,” in which we explored sexual energy within our own bodies and movement.  It was delightfully simple, the most potent result being a genuine sharing of love for ourselves, together.  I taught another workshop, one of dancing together through contact improvisation naked, at The Field Festival in the Netherlands.  It was entitled “The Art of Innocence.”  We were like five year olds basking in a simple eros, but the experience was not particularly sexual.  A number of participants commented that it was life changing to experience this. For better and worse my leadership often emerges from what longs to be healed in me.  I’ve  noted my own shame in speaking to erotic energy and imagery again and again.  It’s helpful to me just to speak to that, and I hope that my voice may open space for resonant healing (and play) in our collective field of consciousness.  I also hope that in conversations with my teenage son about the ‘birds and the bees’ I’m able to impart something alive, poetic, and free.  I’ll be calling very soon for a focus group of facilitators—people who hold or are interested in holding conscious embodied spaces—who wish to dive into the principles of BraveSpace.  See the principles here, including Eros.

Philip Shepherd is the author of Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being. He’s coming to Boise to teach his Radical Wholeness workshop Sept 16th-17th 2023 at SomaWorks. We spent some time in this video talking about wholeness, trauma, somatics, and his workshop in particular.  In one part of the interview Philip asked what might be different if leaders were considered the ‘heart’ rather than the ‘head’ of their organizations?  There’s so many such metaphors rooted in assumptions we carry about our bodies.  In this short video interview I had with him he speaks to how other cultures have taught him what’s possible and re-oriented his worldview. If you can make the workshop with him I’d love to share his teaching with you in person! Sign up at www.radicalwholeness.com.  Please email me too so I know you’re coming!

Over the past few months I’ve spent time with diverse groups of somatic facilitators—people who hold spaces centered on the body and consciousness.  These are unusual groups of people when compared to those I run into at the grocery store, bank, or even the yoga studio.  In these somatic groups I’ve witnessed a tangible ability to self-organize, to witness and express emotional responses in ways that preserve care, and a joyful sense of expressivity.  I feel confirmed in my belief that facilitation is not just something that happens in an intentional group, but something that happens in every interaction we have with ourselves, others, and the world.  Facilitation is a way of being and a spiritual path.   I grew up in an academic household, received a graduate arts education, and taught in universities.  In this secular context I learned to suspend any spirituality or sexuality in my viewpoint.  I learned to keep my expressions sterile.  Yet, the more I have learned to trust and listen to my body, and the more I have similarly leaned into group dynamics, the more deeply I have come to know that life force is never sterile.  Life is inherently spiritual and inherently erotic.  Avoiding these aspects only creates separation and alienation, particularly from ourselves. The purpose of sterilization is to generate safety and control.  There is plenty that’s right about this:  With various sterilization methods we can consciously and effectively prevent diseases and pregnancy.  I have chosen sterilization so that my wife and I do not have more children.  If sterilization becomes assumed, however, then life becomes dull:  The bread cannot rise, there are no more children, and life loses meaning.  Stripped of spirit, we are dispirited.  Stripped of eros, we are impotent.  We are already destined to die:  Safety cannot be the most important priority of life because when it is we lose the magic of actually being alive. I link spiritual connection to eros because desire—of any sort—is a way I read the life force coming through me.  I can navigate and interact with my desire through intellect, but I cannot control my desire itself.  I read this as a direct connection to the divine; to that which is larger than my control.  This is a somatic experience:  I am breathed.  I am danced.  I am love.  I cannot manipulate the truth of my body away with my mind.  Please do not misread me here:  I am saying that eros is inherent in the body and in human dynamics, not that it should be given control over everything we do.  Similarly, spiritual connection gives way to a more dogmatic spiritualism if everything is believed once someone claims it as the work of divine spirit.  I see in our culture today a longing for meaning and connection.  I see a need for spirit and eros.  These are experiences of the living body that have no substitute in the sterilized world of things.  A faster car and a bigger screen won’t do it.  So far as I can tell more likes on Instagram won’t either.  We need each other, and some well-regulated ways of being with each other.  Somatic facilitators are the leaders who can bring others into a living experience of their body’s divinity.  Rachel Rickards sold me on her group facilitator training—The Field—by stating on her website that facilitation is not something we do but rather something that we are.  I agree completely.  Facilitation is not about the logic, the words, or even the principles shared, but rather a way of being within ourselves and with each other.  That said, principles and practices are fantastically useful as a framework around which to develop ourselves and our ways of communing.  Constitutions are such frameworks.  Religious texts are such frameworks.  Each arises out of a particular time and context.  Today calls for frameworks to help us listen to and trust our bodies so that we can connect with each other and spirit.  That is what I am driven to do with the principles of BraveSpace®. I often ask myself who I think I am to offer such a thing.  Certainly I’ve gotten it wrong at times.  With so many incredibly capable people in the world, what’s so important about my perspective?  There’s lots of ways I can justify; I do have a very unusual background and education.  Yet, the deepest truth is that in my search for meeting I simply can’t let this go.  As I sit here writing to you about eros, divinity, and meaning, sharing this work is my way of making love with the divine.  I ache with desire to contribute, and feel integrity in the work. Here’s my revised principles of BraveSpace®.  I invite your reflections and discussion.  I will call soon for a group of people curious to apply these principles in their own lives and facilitation.  In the meantime I will be offering them at The Field Festival outside Amsterdam in August and at TRUSTLab, a part of Unison Festival in New Mexico in September.    BraveSpace® is a way of being together that acknowledges the primacy of the body for navigating how we relate, generating an environment safe enough to take the risk of being vulnerable.   Holding BraveSpace® together has fundamental principles: 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 the truth of the body cannot be manipulated away by our minds. De-shaming:  We recognize our bodies as nature, both wild and civilized.  We suspend judgement 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. Trans-formation:  We recognize that our movements and personalities are comprised of patterns that take form in our bodies and behaviors, and that change in these patterns is often uncomfortable.  We are willing to change our form 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. 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. Response-ability:  We reposition ourselves in relation to others and the world in each moment seeking our consensual 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. 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. Tensegrity:  We recognize tensional integrity as a systemic property 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. 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.  We embrace fear without being led by it. 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 physically on others into making love with spirit in its many forms. 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.

https://youtu.be/gJqtRqHDGXk Finding wholeness in the tension of opposites. I marvel at the tension between the sacred and the profane.   While not universal, people will typically only tell us to go f— ourselves if we penetrate their space or energy in a way that has not been invited.  You can surely imagine a scenario where you might offer this bit of profanity to someone.  Don’t be shy with yourself here… what’s the situation where they would really deserve it? Having imagined the context for profanity, let’s consider that this phrase can also be a truly sacred invitation:  To fuse with oneself in divine union; to make love internally.  To do so I recognize a polarity or tension of opposites within.  For example, I write here using my thoughts—sharing ideas—and yet this part of me that writes struggles to comprehend or express anything below the surface of my mind.  The emotional and spiritual depth of being is—at least in my experience—not mindful.  The mind observes, but actual depth is in my body, my energy, and in my emotions—energies in motion.   Emotional power is something profanity excels in, as the power of profanity actually relies on the sacred.  In profanity we make fun of the sacred in order to catch a glimpse of the divine.  I’m consciously directing it here to evoke and point to a heightened state of being.  I know in my body the experience of making sweet love with myself internally, but to communicate this possibility to you we need common ground.  You may or may not have had this experience, but chances are you have some level of emotional response to the suggestion that you “go F— yourself.”  So here’s the tension in action:  The profanity makes the sacred more available, catching your attention. Imagery is a very powerful somatic structure capable of organizing energy and holding its tension.  I’ve written here about the masculine and feminine polarities within:  I’m drawn to a neo-tantric definition of the masculine as structural consciousness, and of the feminine as an embodied experience held by that structure.  Sure, it’s simplistic.  We could call this division the Alpha and Omega, Bindles and Stenets, or P’s and Q’s.  The point is that there exists a tension of opposites inside us all, and by engaging playfully with this tension joyful wholeness is a natural result.  Imagery for me is masculine.  I can hold inner images of the direction my arm is reaching, the possibilities for my hip, or where others are in the space around me.  I can make moment-to-moment choices about what I’m doing with my body by inhabiting these images.  Inside of this structural container I can feel my body moving, releasing into the sensory experience.  This is the essence of all somatic practice—movement and awareness in relationship.  It is also a basis for inner lovemaking. Sometimes I work with imagery very literally with my sexual energy.  In meditation I can be both masculine and feminine; both man and woman, in the same body.  I can do this with my breath, my spine, my sounding, and my dance.  It amazes me that we don’t talk about these possibilities more, and that despite knowing the power of this work I am still so often ashamed of my sexual energy.  I shared some of this work in a tantric men’s group and was ridiculed by my peers there for expressing the power of making love with myself in my movement and energy.  It’s not for everyone.  And yet, when I’m anxious, angry, sad, lonely, or otherwise ‘triggered’, coming back to this inner meeting of polarities has helped me be more loving, capable, generous, and whole.  I am also more cocky, penetrative, and daring at times when it seems called, more comfortable with my own masculinity having received it within myself.

Honestly, I get kind of claustrophobic in most cuddle puddles, squirmy and uncomfortable being in one position for long.  While there is surely plenty I can learn and practice here about yielding into the intimacy given by these situations, it kind of cracks me up to see how often Contact Improvisation Puddles manifest at events I hold.  These are a bit like snake pits, with bodies twisting, turning, and tumbling in multiple dimensions all at the same time.  For devoted cuddlers I imagine it might seem silly to expend so much effort.  As a dancer, however, I find these so much more interesting, with the ability to play with where I wish to be in each moment—where I’m going.  I like the feeling of activating my body and receiving the experience at the same time. Sometimes it is my turn to be still and receive the group, or to assist someone else’s motion through my relative stability.  And then I’m often back in motion. The video above is from the last class of a Contact Improvisation skills series I taught in Boise.  I pushed the group to be up and moving in larger ways much of the time, building skills with each other in time, space, awareness, and the sharing of weight.  For this last dance I let it puddle—as so often seems to happen when a group of humans drawn to such things are given the permission. I’ll be offering a short BraveSpace Workshop—the Art of Wholeness, and a Pleasure Spine Contact Improvisation Jam in Portland, OR on April 1st.  If that’s your part of the world please find the details and signup here.  The next BraveSpace Immersion in Boise is scheduled for April 21-23, and a new 3 class contact improv class and jam series runs April 20th, May 4th, and May 18th.

Preparing for What’s Coming The building of trust and play, cacao, and letting relationships arise in their own mystery. These are wild times—we are riding big waves in the texture of humanity’s earthly journey.  There is so much tension among and between us:  Topics of health, food, race, gender, climate, war, and perhaps most deeply purpose are aching with charge.  It’s easy to blame, shame, and judge, both ‘other’ and self.  I watch myself do it—my way of seeing makes sense to me.  I ‘know’ better, yet the experience of righteousness is by nature one sided. Mysticism is a practice of holding the unknown with open hands.  My mind wishes to grasp—to determine what is and what’s coming.  My mind is a pessimist, so if I let myself hold on then I expect the worst.  If I try too hard to counter it then I paint the world with roses.  To immerse myself in mystery I simply sit in awe, holding my own heart with unconditional love in presence with the unknown.  It is a vulnerable, embodied state.  As I approach it I tend to shake, shiver, and start.  It’s an internal making of love–sometimes subtly orgasmic—and at times feels like a death through which I’ve thus far been reborn. I have been leading events I call Somatic Mystery Journeys.  We drink cacao, work our breathing, move in awareness, and eventually turn up the music for ‘ecstatic’ dancing.  Through our bodies, and in the group field, we invoke the sacred space of mystery.  We let our bodies move in the permission and intention that we don’t know what’s coming.  I imagine that people have always done this, yet it seems particularly important right now.  The body has a way of knowing and being with others that’s very different from the mind.  Even thinking about it barely touches the power of the experience. To prepare for what’s coming, especially as we don’t know what that is, we benefit from ways to hold and channel the intensity of emotion.  Anxiety is rampant, and when anxiety controls my actions I rarely make the best decisions.  We are communal beings, and the deepest anxieties often revolve around being isolated, shamed, and otherwise left unloved.  The power of journeying together in ceremonial movement is finding out who we are when we take off the masks (as many as we are aware of), dive under the anxiety, and perhaps let ourselves die.  As I read this it feels dramatic.  It may in fact be boring and banal—just a human being.  And yet, this is exactly the whole of it—humans consciously navigating our drama together.  

https://youtu.be/E-S7lQegdD8 That pain is evidence of vitality came up yesterday in an Advanced Ongoing BraveSpace group I hold. We were mapping our experience of our bodies and then sharing what we discovered there. Pain was a theme. This isn’t unusual in my experience with groups. Perhaps it’s because culturally (universally?) we tend not to bring attention to our bodies unless there is pain. Yet, one of the things that has helped me make ‘sense’ of pain and how to engage with it is recognizing pain as evidence that I am alive. When I come from this place I am better able to hold my pain with grace. Pain is a form of longing–a longing for healing–and longing is a key way vitality manifests. I share this not to minimize the sometimes excruciating experience and effect of pain; yet pain is most likely affected when we understand that it is not objective. Pain is an experience. It is often linked with the physicality of the body, but it is not a quality of the body itself. Pain exists in the subjective realm of consciousness. To affect my experience of pain, I use practices that shift my consciousness. Movement, breath, and meditation are pretty effective. I’m offering a free Online Movement, Breath, and Meditation class Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:30am Mountain Time for the foreseeable future. Here’s the class link–you will need to signup in advance to get the link.

Callie Ritter and I being in the physical art, with discussion. Dave Jones on handpan. Teaching Contact Improvisation(CI) in a community that has had little experience with it I have learned to teach social aspects first.  To me this is consent work in the body—learning to navigate where we choose to be in relationship to someone else, and how to actuate those choices, moment by moment.  Our social training and cultural norms around touch, movement, and power don’t necessarily prepare us for this kind of interaction, so engaging consciously with these dynamics has proven to be very empowering for people.  I do this work in the BraveSpace® workshops I teach. I’m about to offer a more technically focused contact improvisation (CI) workshop in Boise in which we’ll dive directly and deeply into the physicality of CI—sharing weight and organizing ourselves in space and time to create the art of the moment.  This division that I’m drawing—between the physical and the social—is of course artificial: The two are fused in practice, yet useful when considering pedagogy.  I’m excited to have enough of a contact community in Boise now to have critical mass to dive directly into the physical.  I think it takes a few people who have been initiated into the consent aspects to hold the social field with people who have had less experience.  Consent (typically 1-1) and consensus (group fields) co-create in this way.  In my experience the social aspects arise from the physicality—from what our bodies are doing, learning, and creating as art.  That’s the primary way I learned and continue to learn CI.

I write about this all the time, and it bears repeating. As a somatic therapist my role is to connect people with their body from the inside of their experience. I help people become more aware of their sensations, patterns, emotions, images, and stories. Often we also explore how this internal experience integrates with the objective reality of anatomy. We experiment together through movement and awareness, opening up the gap between what is known and unknown. This is a powerful spot—a place of mystery: It is here that new solutions to common problems and patterns emerge. In this video Kelly and I find that her ribs have been held tight, use touch to help them move, and explore implications for her and all of us.

When I was a child I learned to equate masculine and feminine dynamics in an effort to be sure that men and women had equal opportunities and rights.  I learned—whether or not it was what anyone was trying to teach me—that the differences between genders, sexes, and the energetic dynamics between them, were completely social constructions that should be ignored.  From this I gained a willingness to integrate feminine dynamics within my masculine identity.  This is part of what made it possible for me to explore dance so deeply.  And yet, neither masculine and feminine forces nor men and women are actually the same—equal value need not imply sameness.  By recognizing only the same-ness of sexed/gendered architypes, I had missed the value of polarity and difference.  It has been potent for me to differentiate the masculine and feminine dynamics in myself and with others as I have matured. It’s key to recognize that as men and women we all carry both masculine and feminine dynamics.  These are elemental, archetypal energies that generate polarity with each other.  I shared a video in my last post that explored these dynamics through the lens of Pilates, conceptualizing the masculine as the structural elements of the movement, and the feminine as the experiential ‘dropping-in’ within the container of that structure.  I’d like to acknowledge that this is a limited way of seeing, yet that this limitation offers some benefits—it’s a simplified starting place to dig into something both deeper and ineffable.  The point of sharing this is not that you need to adhere to these dynamics in any way, but rather that if you notice them taking place in your life you may have greater power to affect your experience if you use them consciously. In this week’s video my friend Jessica Maitri and I explore and speak to using these energies while dancing/moving together.  It has been fascinating to play consciously with this together particularly as Jess doesn’t have much background with Contact Improvisation, yet she has worked extensively with these sexed/gendered dynamics in herself.  We set up these roles physically in our dance and then consciously reversed who was in each role.  The exercise helped us drop in with each other, bringing our dance to life in enjoyable and surprising ways. Jessica and I will be offering a workshop for those of you in Boise based on these ideas on the Sunday before Valentines day.  Check it out:  Somatic Sexuality:  Intimacy and Power in Polarity.  

Masculine and Feminine Aspects of Movement On one level the masculine and feminine forces within are ineffable—experiences that can only be felt.  And yet, there is a simultaneous intersubjectivity:  Our internal experiences may overlap with one another and inspire each other when we attempt to describe them. Definitions of energies, like descriptions of divinity, are mysteries that disintegrate when grasped.  They also point back to source—that which manifests through each of us.  I offer the following short investigation from my own body, initiated in me by teachers across disciplines including dance, Pilates, Laban Movement Analysis, and tantra. For me the masculine in my movement is the direction and containment of my form.  It is the structure by which I organize myself in time and space.  I engage to meet the conditions of the environment and assert my will to participate.  I lengthen my leg, connect through my core, and generate the force that lifts me off the ground.  I may also embody my masculine simply through energy alone, holding space with my intention.  My power is my presence. The feminine aspect of my movement is receptive and sensory.  I allow myself to drink in the experience of any moment.  I am permeated by my own form—taken by it.  I dissolve into being moved; into being breathed, slipping into the gap between formlessness and form.  As I repeatedly disintegrate, I am simultaneously given myself.  I am beyond form.  My power is my openness. These two states within me co-arise.  They are a tension and play of energies.  Sometimes I am conscious of one or the other, and at times I can feel them simultaneously.  I am drawn to the image of these energies making love within me—this practice brings me wholeness. I offer you the permission—as much as you may allow me to hold this for you—to feel these energetics in your body beyond the limits of your sex.  We all carry both energies, and each serves the other.  I think it’s worth speaking to the fear (it has arisen in me) that diving too deep into either of these polarities could take us through a point of no return—one from which we’ll become unrecognizable to ourselves or unable to function.  Perhaps this risk is real, but my experience has been one of intrinsic balance.  As one side of me has grown so has the other.