A BraveSpace Online Evening Class Wednesday May 18th 6pm-7:15pm Mountain Time on Zoom
Offered for $22.22, or for FREE
Link Below

Your pleasure is key to your healing power, and your spine is the primary generator for it.  The nature of the spine is connection, transmitting energy and motion through the body.  There are many names for the life force energy that travels this conduit, and many systems that study it:  The spiraling snakes of the caduceus are the symbol of modern medicine.  They also represent the flow of Kundalini and sexuality.  From Yoga to Chiropractic, we communally understand how important our spinal motions are.  Yet, the pleasure of moving the spine and its power to heal is less often discussed; perhaps this is communal shame around pleasure.  

In this BraveSpace Online Evening Class we will explore motions of the spine to find sacred pleasure within our own wholeness.  You will leave with practical tools for your own pleasure and healing that you can use without shame anywhere you go.

As a BraveSpace workshop you will have the opportunity to move, witness, and be witnessed by others in your authenticity.  We will hold space together for vulnerability in the safety and comfort of our own homes.  Please have a bit of space on the ground where you can move without the interruption of others and where you can have screen, sound, and camera on Zoom.  Nothing else is required.

Sign up at this link.  You will be emailed a zoom link for the class.
$22.22
Use the Coupon Code FREE to join for free.

Technique is the how-to; the practicalities of alignment, weight shifts, timing, and overall coordination of the body.  Coming from a professional dance career I learned a lot of dance technique before coming to Ecstatic Dance.  One of the things I love about studying technique is that it increases the range of possibility within my experience of my body.  I have always danced for the experience of dancing–for the feeling of it.  Ecstatic Dance is a wide open palette for improvisation where anything goes.  My experience with technique gives me a lot of options within that freedom.

One technique that is fundamental to so many different styles of dance is the ability to get down, literally.  We bend the knee, hip, and ankle joints to lower the body toward the ground.  If you’re an Ecstatic Dancer and you’re wanting to get more into the feeling of a dance, it’s probably a good time to get down.  Use the technique to give you options.

My friend Kelsey and I are interested in supporting Ecstatic Dancers to go deeper.  If this is you, please write back with topics you’d like us to cover!

If you’re in Boise please join BraveSpace Company for Dance Technique most Monday nights.  Join the text list by texting DANCE to 877-796-1680, and find the events calendar at https://soma.works/events/.

Being alive is sometimes a lot to manage.  The most powerful tool that is mine to share with you is rolling around on the ground.  I have seen it offer healing in the face of physical, psychological, and even spiritual imbalances.  Its pretty much as simple as it sounds, and there are also innumerable layers of greater complexity that can deepen the effects.  My practice arose through the lineage of modern dance–an art form that I now frame as medicine.  Some of you reading this take this practice for granted, and surely a number of you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.  Why didn’t we learn the significance of this in grade school?  Perhaps it degrades authority…I’ll let you decide on that.

I’ve created the above video to share the simplest and most profound experience of this work with you.  It may or may not feel profound at first, but I promise that in time it will bring you gifts…perhaps during heartbreak, after hurting your back, or while tripping on mushrooms (legally in Oregon of course).  I like to call it Somatic Flow Meditation, or Moving in Sensation–surely there are at least as many names for it as there are people teaching it.  There are a number of us; the technology of this work is as ancient as our bodies and inherent to them too.  

There’s another piece that I share first in the video, and that is Heart Center Meditation.  This is another universal and profoundly powerful practice.  It’s much newer to me, and my initiation into it has brought new wholeness to my life equal to what I have gained through Somatic Flow.  I begin this video with Heart Center Meditation because I believe through it you can hold yourself safely through the experience of feeling in new ways.  Given that I can’t hold space for you to explore in person (not in this video anyway), the Heart Center Meditation will help you hold yourself in the Somatic Flow. 

In BraveSpace we engage with both of these activities on day one.  Then we go deeper, layer by layer, relating with each other from the ability to feel ourselves.  There’s still 5 spots and housing available if you’d like to join May 6th-8th.  Apply here.

In meditation today my spine rippled.  I experienced waves of pleasure as I felt inward to connect with divinity, life force, the great mystery, existential grieving, and my sensory drama… they’re all reasonable descriptions for an experience that can only be hinted at.  They’re also forms of intimacy.  I’m currently experiencing intimacy as vibrational connection across polarity.  In intimacy there is simultaneous singularity and duality.

I spoke yesterday with one of you–a dear reader of these emails.  We spoke for an hour resonating around the experience of our bodies, intimacy, and the feeling that arises moving in community.  We spoke about a longing to be met and taken beyond what we already know.  We also recognized that intimate exchange is a form of transmission through which our nervous systems might upgrade each other; like sharing files on a network.  We acknowledged the simultaneous importance of boundaries–not everything is an upgrade.  Intimacy is vulnerable and vulnerability requires discernment.

I hold BraveSpace retreats in order that we can dive into intimacy as safely as possible.  We all have transmissions for each other.  It is my job to create the container of BraveSpace, and then we hold it together.  The transmissions come through each of us; through the innate intelligence of our bodies.  I shared a video in my last email introducing BraveSpace.  Below is a Q and A in which a friend who has never attended asked me for more information.  Her questions are excellent.

Dear ones-
I took a workshop last week that was edgy for me–it asked me to drop my shame around sexuality.  Through the experience I witnessed the essence of eros at the root of all creation.  On my way home from the workshop I listened to an Aubrey Marcus podcast with Dr. Marc Gafni that helped me refine a bit of what I was given:  Sex cannot actually bear the full weight of such an incredible erotic energy.  And, the basis of eros is intimacy–an ecstatic interplay of our energies within and between each other.  To fully experience the fully divine force of eros we benefit from larger and more diverse containers than just sex.  We need containers that support intimacy within ourselves, with each other, and in relation to divinity.

I have felt the eros within the BraveSpace container and have been thus far unwilling to speak to it; I’ve been afraid to name it.  So here’s a coming out–BraveSpace is at least as intimate as most sexual experiences, and often more so.  Moving together produces an incredible interplay of energies.  BraveSpace is a container for eros–our divine sexuality–and yet it clearly and simply isn’t sex.  The energy circulates through other ways of relating.  I believe moving energy in this way also facilitates a great sovereignty…one I haven’t necessarily learned to hold sexually but that comes quite naturally to me as a dancer.

Below is a short video sharing the experience of BraveSpace.  I hope it offers a window, and might incite you to join us.  The early-bird price of $375 for the May 6th-8th BraveSpace retreat expires this Sunday; thereafter it is $500.  Learn more here, or apply now via this link.  Once you apply the next step will be to find a time for us to speak and answer any questions you may have–your application does not obligate participation.

As a dance artist my fascination is with the experience that we have when we come into authentic presence with each other through our bodies.  The vulnerability of being together seems directly proportional to the ecstatic reward–an intimacy with the divine that comes through our intimacy with each other.  

I’d like to introduce BraveSpace Company, a dance company building experiences of Ecstatic Intimacy.  We want to let you in on our experience, and we dance together in the hope of motivating you to play in your body.  We want to marvel at being alive with you.  We want to share the vulnerability of being present.  We’re even willing to be unimpressive…that one’s hard for me as a trained dancer and choreographer.  It’s worth it to be real.

Please join us on Instagram.  We post daily about each week’s experience–‘The Play’.  We are @bravespacecompany

I’d also like to invite you to the next BraveSpace weekend retreat in Boise, March 6th-8th.  It’s built so that you can drop in from out of town.

Love and gratitude,
Matthew