I wrote you last week about the dynamic between Healing and Play. I’m grateful to be able to offer both through the gatherings below. It would be an honor to have you with us.

The New Years BraveSpace Playshop

will be a celebration of togetherness through dance and embodiment at SomaWorks Studio in Boise, Thursday Dec 30^th in the evening to the afternoon of Sunday Jan 2^nd. BraveSpace is an embodied practice of being authentically ourselves, together in movement.  In this BraveSpace Playshop we will explore the mycelium network of fungi as a metaphoric and imagistic way in to connection within ourselves and with each other.  You will always be at choice in how you participate; contact improvisation, somatic movement mediation, open ecstatic dance jams, hands-on bodywork trades, and sharing circles will all be offered.   Leah Nelson from Salt Lake City (not related, but great name right?) will be teaching CI with me.  

More information is at THIS LINK.  15 participants max.  Housing can be made available for out-of-town participants by in-town participants.  7 spots remain as of this writing.  

$300 not including housing donations ($100 suggested) or co-created communal food possibilities.

Text me at (208)985-0331 if you’d like to join us.  I’m happy to chat more about it too. 

The BraveSpace Healing and Bodywork Retreat

for 5 participants for 5 days (not yet set) in January is particularly well suited to people with a clear healing objective, and a desire to simultaneously address physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their healing journey. Participants will have the opportunity to dive deep into the healing wisdom of their bodies through daily individual work with me and collective witnessing and interaction in a focused and intentional group.   Traumatic patterns live in the body, and we rarely generate or heal those patterns alone.  Myofascial and CranioSacral Bodywork teach the body directly how to release patterns that no longer serve us so that we can grow.  Somatic Movement Therapy offers empowerment as we practice new patterns and find flow in our bodies and minds.  Group BraveSpace somatic movement/dance sessions affirm our healing in relation to each other, amplifying the potency of each person’s individual journey.  This retreat will be particularly well suited to people with a clear healing objective, and a desire to simultaneously address physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their healing journey.  Some housing will be available—air BnB and other options close to the studio are also plentiful in downtown Boise.

$1200-$1500

Apply at THIS LINK

Here’s feedback I’ve been honored to receive from my clients:

My somatic sessions with Matthew have been an amazing journey of reconnecting to my body. Some key things I worked on was how to identify and set boundaries, foundational body movement and connection to the earth, and how to process things going inward. I HIGHLY recommend SomaWorks with Matthew!  (Charyl Shoumann)

Simply put working with Matthew has helped me answer some of the biggest and most challenging questions of this time in my life. Along the way it has been fun, powerful, inspiring and so freeing compared to other styles of ‘self work’. I always feel that I have his full attention and care. Can not recommend highly enough, no matter what questions you are currently facing. (Colin Koach)

Matthew makes me feel seen, heard, valued, and accepted. From this foundation of trust, and using his intuitive Somatic Ideation process, I have grown into a deeper understanding of myself, and a deeper connection between body, mind, and spirit. Through his gentle and insightful guidance, I have grown personally by leaps and bounds, and have discovered skills and tools that are helpful to me in my everyday life. Matthew’s deep and broad knowledge of the body makes him uniquely equipped to lead clients down paths of personal inquiry, welcoming the participation of the client’s whole self each step of the way. (Hannah Ruth Brothers)

I am drawn to wonder about two axes in interaction:  

One axis is the continuum of Healing and Play.  I experience healing in play and vice versa—they are not opposites.  There are aspects of healing that need to be serious.  Deep sadness and mourning cannot be bypassed.  Critical times of healing literally bisect life and death.  Yet there are also moments, even inside of such times, when it serves to drop the seriousness of healing, wounds, or trauma.  There is great benefit in the lightness of play.  Another way I think of this dynamic is a balancing between darkness and light.  Each has its time and phrasing, and like yin and yang each is held in the other.

I hold a lot of spaces for embodied group healing and play through open Ecstatic Dances and guided BraveSpace® workshops.  (Please check out 4 day New Year’s BraveSpace Playshop) As I’ve been feeling my movement along the Healing/Play axis and in speaking with my community about it I’ve also wondered at the relationship between Pleasure and Pain.  Once again each may be held in the other.  On the surface Pleasure seems to affine with light and Play; Pain with darkness and Healing.  However, in dance, sports, and even video games exertion and pain form a texture within the play.  Conversely, there is also great healing offered through pleasure.  Sometimes the four qualities of these axes seem to meet simultaneously:  A moment in the intimacy of meeting another’s gaze can simultaneously bring me tears of sadness and joy; our eyes meeting both playfully and in deep healing.  Analysis inherently fails to do justice to these lived experiences—I share primarily as a supposition that there is a great mystery within these relationships.

The axes do help me embrace a diverse set of physical, social, and emotional experiences.  Below is the grid these axes form.  What is described by the entire grid?  I have yet to name it, but for me it has something to do with acceptance and spiritual capacity.  What does the grid describe for you?  What experiences might fall in each quadrant for you (A, B, C, and D)?  Are there some quadrants you resist or prefer?  Let me know what’s there for you and I’ll share responses in a future post.

Dear ones-

It has been some time since I have been willing to speak.  In the past two years it has been difficult to know what to share.  My views of what is taking place in our world, in our bodies, and in the relationships that define my daily experience do not fit with what I am told I should see by my family of origin, some of my friends, and certainly the mainstream media.  It is easy to become flippant in the face of polarized positions on topics so important as health, equity, and ecology.  I must constantly acknowledge that I know less than I think I do—and that is largely why I’ve stayed quiet.  And now I also see that it is important to speak up.  I learned sometime this year that consensus is not agreement—it is instead an acknowledgement and coalescing of the many voices in the collective.  I am honored to have your eyes on these words, and I aim to speak with humility, integrity, and reverence.  

Our bodies have an intelligence that is too easily ignored in our culture.  We are enamored with our technological endeavors, and they are indeed fantastic.  Yet, most contemporary methods of communication, production, transportation, and healing reliably bypass our bodies’ intrinsic capabilities.  Sometimes we even actively damn them and stand in their way—I see this in the general rejection of natural immunity to you-know-what.  Often we ignore the mysteries and capabilities of our bodies out of fear, easily driven more deeply into distrust of our bodies by collective systems that profit and survive because we disregard the wholeness we already have. 

Listening to the body is not a fix-all; that is also a fantasy.  If you have read my posts over the years you may recognize a theme of death.  None of us is immortal.  Collectively this is a place of incredible discomfort, and I see us giving away our personal power and sovereignty to corporate interests in the hope that technology will save us from death.  Neither technology nor our connection with our own bodies can do this.  Both appear to support life when used consciously.  There are many states of consciousness.  A healing state arises for me once I have acknowledged my fear and have stopped allowing it to lead.  My deepest healing states arise when I allow death and stop attempting to control it.  From that place I can embrace the vitality coming through me, and make conscious choices about my actions, including what I place in my body.  Without this step I find I am acting through my addictions.  That happens too.

So this post is a re-beginning.  I will start to share my journey more freely again.  I will speak for and from the intelligence of my body.  I will name things that may be uncomfortable for me, for you, and for us, in an attempt to go beneath my fears.  I will do my best to let go of attempts to get your approval while simultaneously showing up in service to our shared journey.  I offer this to you out of love and gratitude for being alive.  Thanks for meeting me here.

Matthew Nelson

Prime Mover, SomaWorks

To be effective in my relationships with others—and especially if there’s something I wish to stand for–it is important that I know what I’m standing on.  The root of ‘humility’ is ‘humus,’ or earth.  My ability to stand is fundamentally generated on the support I have available.  Standing in mud is slippery.  Standing on one leg gives more reach, but less stability.  Standing on one leg in mud and trying to reach for much of anything is likely to fail.  My support gives basis to my authority; the power I have to generate an effect.  It pays to be honest with myself about the ground on which I stand if I want to have any effect on the communal field.  

Each of us has a part to play in the communal field of consciousness.  I never have anything ‘right’ on my own—no matter how enlightened I may feel.  How could I when so many of us believe we’re the enlightened ones, and yet we don’t all have the same answer?  So if I zoom out a bit and look at consciousness communally, I sometimes catch a glimpse of the integrative process within which each of our perspectives contribute to something more whole.  Any, and possibly each of us, may choose to stand for something.  Standing for something can be an act of service when it is done with humility.  I believe it is a kind of channeling:  That what I stand for comes through me as the amalgamation of my life experience.  It includes that which I have learned, felt, witnessed, and in some way integrated.

Standing for something contributes to the more diverse communal field.  For context I imagine this process inside the microcosm of my own body:  If I eat a big meal and my stomach is full then it will send a message to other parts of my body saying “I think we should stop eating—that was awesome and now I’m full.”  Yet other parts of me may feel differently.  Perhaps there’s still food on my plate and I don’t want to offend my host.  My body as a whole may behave differently from how my stomach would prefer, but my stomach’s voice still matters.

If my stomach is full and I try to eat too much extra to honor the person who served me, I might become sick and embarrass everyone more than if I had just stopped eating.  To honor the communal consciousness is both to stand for what is mine to express, and to honor that I can’t know everything.  If I ignore or belittle the person I disagree with I’m no longer honoring the integrated process of holding different views.  To have genuine authority requires this humility; without it I’m not standing on true ground.  Without humility I may mistake that which I stand for as the ground on which I stand.  My identification with my own viewpoint may lead me to believe I’m objectively right rather than channeling a particular possibility.

I’m curious about what it means to ‘Take a Stand’.  It strikes me as easily arrogant.  With ‘taking’ comes the implication of ownership, and the forceful transfer of it.  Perhaps this is the manifestation of identifying that which I stand for as the very base I stand on.  I see the tendency to take a stand in myself all the time—it’s comforting to think I know ‘the’ truth.  And certainly in our culture of ownership, where ideas and information now command some of the highest prices, we are encouraged to take a stand.  

There is a lot of competition these days to take stands that appear to be freely given.  Each political party would like for me to take theirs, and I have even been shamed for failing to take a stand by and with people I care about.  If you’re not with us you’re against us, they say, directly or indirectly.  Yet don’t we all stand on shared ground?  Might our arguments actually be musings about what we think we’re standing on?  And so here I am writing to you, standing for idealogic diversity.  I will continue to practice respecting our disagreements.

In my email to you a week ago–Not Enlightened–I bordered on arrogance.

I presented the line “We are definitely the woke ones,” as a joke. Some saw it and others didn’t.  It doesn’t matter–in every joke is a morsel of truth.

The point I was attempting to make is that when I get fired up about something it’s like waking up.  My body comes alive.  That feeling of enlivenment, even if it’s through the overwhelming discomfort of deep sadness or righteous anger, pulses with longing.  Like high-voltage electricity such charged energy seeks a path into motion.  

To be witness is to hold the energy of what is seen without rushing to judgement or action.  Yes, there is danger in witnessing something terrible without calling for what is right, but there is also at least as deep a danger to rushing in.  The clarity that comes from a shot of adrenaline may well be an illusion.  All is not as it appears. 

What I did not make clear in my last email is the message to listen to what your body tells you and then to wait.  Do not take the first impulse as the only message.  Notice the process of desiring to act.  I say this because it is difficult.  I screw it up all the time.  For example, I sent that last email before I’d sat with it much. That was my arrogance.

Fascinatingly, Not Enlightened had the highest open rate of any email I’ve ever sent, garnered many appreciations, a few challenges, and a number of unsubscribes.  Thanks to all of you who responded—I wish you could read each other’s comments.

I am triggered by arrogance, and I am it.  I forgive it in myself today.  Who else may be forgiven?

I do not know what happened at the Capitol this past week.  I wasn’t there.  Yet, I had someone very close to me tell me yesterday that it is ‘dangerous’ for me not to have a strong opinion about it.  I’ve received emails from organizations calling for me to take the moral high ground with them against other people.  The polarization continues to intensify.

So many of us believe we are the enlightened ones.  I know better, and yet still there are many parts of my personality that believe I see more clearly than the ‘others’.  I’m grateful for whatever clarity I have, and the truth is that I have no way to discern what is true across the many sources of information at my fingertips.  I have found my way through much of the censorship to channels of information that help balance the corporate information network, and yet every one of these sources is just another story.  It’s a game, and it’s deadly serious too.  If you want to know some of the information channels I’ve found just ask—I’ll share what I can.

Consider this blog—I look for subject lines that I hope will gain your attention.  I write in the hope that you will read it.  You are reading this because you have some trust, or at least curiosity, that I’m not leading you down a path of insanity.  I also almost universally point you back to your own body as a source of reliable and even spiritual information.  Here’s how I would like to do this today:

Note if your pulse rate rises when you witness information about political discourses such as elections, vaccines, climate change, wealth distribution, race, sexuality, or one of my personal favorites—our food system.  How does it feel when you get riled up?  Inside of the discomfort is there a feeling of purpose or pleasure?  Do you feel increased clarity?  

We are definitely the woke ones. 

One of my favorite teachers recently told me that she’s happy to fight with me.  I didn’t see that I wanted to fight until she pointed it out.  I didn’t see that I enjoy fighting and that it feels good to be right.  My personality believes I’m peaceful, maybe even neutral, and that’s my moral high ground.  Oh my–I believe I’m enlightened. So are you with me or against me? (LOL)