BraveSpace®
Take the risk of being you.

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Dance your heart open...

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...and make love with life.

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In BraveSpace® we commune from our bodies to generate an environment safe enough to be vulnerable.

BraveSpace® is based in Boise, ID and available anywhere. Please join the text list for local Boise events and the email list for everything else including writings.

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Upcoming BraveSpace® Events:

BraveSpace® offers relational healing play.

Through somatic movement, dance, and awareness practices in community you will be given the tools to uncover your authenticity and build trust in yourself and others. There are so many aspects of who you are: BraveSpace® will support you to weave your verbal and intellectual intelligence with your physical manifestation so that the many aspects of your expression are consistent and coherent. In BraveSpace® we consciously meet the physical with the spiritual: The flow of divinity through your body is universal, yet your unique way of reading, interpreting, and expressing this flow is the essence of your sovereignty. Meeting in BraveSpace® offers us an anchor point to share in our physical, spiritual, and intellectual belonging.

You may recognize in BraveSpace® somatic practices and perspectives from Ecstatic Dance, Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, Authentic Relating, Permaculture, Modern Dance, Laban Movement Analysis, Myofascial Therapy, CranioSacral Therapy, and Tantric/Yogic traditions. BraveSpace is pan-somatic, integrating these many systems of somatic and spiritual practice with 10 interwoven principles. These principles are ecological in scope, recognizing us each as whole living systems, made up of living systems, and participating in living systems. In a time when it can be challenging to make meaning of our collective earthly endeavor, BraveSpace® frames the question of purpose as a mystery we can explore together in our bodies.

BraveSpace® Founder Matthew Nelson:

As a masters-educated contemporary dancer, choreographer, and educator I have come to see my artistic lineage as a spiritual and shamanic healing path within Western culture. I was taught to use time, space, and energy to bridge states of consciousness personally and in community. I have seen this powerful medicine heal patterns of disconnection and domination, shifting us into more loving, artful ways of being.

Our living bodies are charged with a powerful life force which longs for connection and expression in love. This power generates meaning in our lives. My experience of the life force has been inherently spiritual. I see it coming through me in ways I guide and partner with, yet also recognize I cannot control. This force is also inherently erotic. I feel it draw me into connection with others and the divine through the discomforts and ecstasies of my longing. Inclusive of, yet far beyond the scope of my sexuality, I experience eros in my direct experience of life’s spark. In the many years since my academic training, and since teaching in academic institutions, I have come to see how the institutions that shaped me have been systematically sterilized of spirit and eros. The false promise of this sterilization is safety, yet my healing path has required me to re-integrate with spirit and eros, de-shaming my vitality in the process. BraveSpace® is the result, and I offer it for and from my own imperfect place of healing.

The sterilization of spirit and eros in our culture has likely arisen because these qualities are difficult and even dangerous to engage if we don’t develop the skills and conditions to meet them consciously. If we can’t hold ourselves in our deepest longings we may be drawn to dominate and control others in the attempt to avoid personal discomfort. I have repeatedly found myself spiritually depleted and unmet by others when I do not prioritize coming home to myself, meeting my desires from the inside. I am a dancer because dancing has taught me to make love with the divine accessed within myself. In BraveSpace® I offer that we do this not in isolation, but in communion, so that we can better attune to and engage each other with greater integrity and joy. From here we may dare to meet one another in the creative unknown. This, for me, is making love with life.

Holding BraveSpace® together has fundamental principles:

1) Somatic Research:
We notice the sensations, emotions, images, and movements that we can perceive in our bodies. We collect this data without jumping to conclusions about its meaning or significance prematurely. Simultaneously, we recognize that the truth of our bodies cannot be manipulated away by our minds.
2) De-shaming:
We recognize our bodies as nature, both wild and civilized.  We recognize and hold our judgements lightly in order to openly witness ourselves and each other.  While we mindfully choose our actions, we release the need to control our experience, asking of our bodies and each other’s bodies what is being revealed through our perceptions.
3) Trans-formation:
We recognize that our movements and personalities are comprised of patterns that take form in our bodies and behaviors, and that these patterns may include traumatic responses. We are willing to change our form, face trauma, and invite discomfort in order to grow in alignment with purpose, truth, and community. We simultaneously seek to avoid injury to self, other, and world.
4) Improvisation:
We invite awe and wonder as we inhabit the mysterious gap between knowing and not knowing. We allow truth to emerge through us and recognize power as the ability to be with what is.
5) Response-ability:
We reposition ourselves in relation to others and the world in each moment seeking our consensual and coherent place of belonging. If we become overwhelmed, frozen, or otherwise unable to respond we do our best to speak to it openly and honestly. We do not attempt to control others’ actions in order to avoid shifting our own relationship to the external world, although we may share our perspectives and invite change.
6) Heart-Centeredness:
We recognize our hearts as portals to spirit and communal consciousness, with the potential to guide us through the limitations of our minds and individual identities. We embody qualities of unconditional love, healing presence, innate harmony, and compassion by calling our attention and energy back to our hearts and to the communal heart.
7) Tensegrity:
We recognize tensional integrity as a systemic wholeness of our physical bodies in space and also of the interpersonal and spiritual realms we inhabit together. We value and hold the tension of opposites as a necessary and healthy aspect of consciousness, and as a key to improvisational emergence.
8) Risk:
We recognize life as a place of inherent mortality and choose in BraveSpace the risk of intimacy with ourselves, each other, and the divine, knowing that none of us will complete our journey on this planet alive. Every phrase has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We embrace fear without being led by it.
9) Eros:
We recognize our bodies are charged with a force of life that is inherently erotic and which manifests differently for each of us. We celebrate our pleasure, vitality, and longing by meeting masculine and feminine dynamics within ourselves. In BraveSpace we direct sexual energy that may wish to fixate on others into making love with spirit in its many forms, including attuning with others.
10) Interbeing:
We recognize that we are simultaneously individual and collectively conscious beings in concert with an animate world. We attune to and contribute to communal fields of consciousness by noting our own values and preferences, voicing and moving them as they are given to us to share, and being willing to release them to impermanence.
You are invited:
BraveSpace® is available through online events, in-person events, retreats, and a facilitator focus group. To know what’s coming as it arises, please join the text list for local Boise events and the email list for retreats, trainings, online events and writings. Reach out if you would like to bring BraveSpace® to your community or institution.
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BraveSpace Temples

BraveSpace Temples are embodied practice spaces for healing play. They are an outer representation of our inner inquiry, upholding the sacredness and integrity of the life force flowing through each of us. In temple consciousness we meet the simultaneous wholeness of our individuality and of our communal interbeing.

BraveSpace Circles

BraveSpace Circles are processing spaces where we consciously share ourselves and witness each other to develop greater coherence and aliveness inside and out. Our personal traumas and patterns are never just our own—circle offers the opportunity to discover ourselves in one another and lean into the art of presence.

BraveSpace Retreats and Trainings

BraveSpace Retreats and Trainings mix Temple practices and Circling. Circles generally also include some practice, as Temples also include some circling.
  • Online BraveSpace Offerings:
  • Virtual Body Temple Be at home inside and out through a guided yet spacious practice of sensate movement, breath, sound, & consciousness
  • Boise BraveSpace Offerings:
    • Body Temple - Journey home to yourself through a guided yet spacious practice of sensate movement, breath, sound, & consciousness
    • Contact Temple - Commune and play through Contact Improvisation dance & physical relating
    • Ecstatic Dance Temple - Celebrate life through the power of Music, Movement, and Community
    • BraveSpace Circle of Belonging - Find yourself in your body with a brave community of somatic explorers

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