In BraveSpace® we commune from our bodies to create an environment safe enough to be vulnerable.  This vulnerability, held by the group, often generates an experience of belonging.

Sign up for Circle

A 3-payment plan is available at this link

The BraveSpace Circle of Belonging is an opportunity to come home to yourself with others in somatic healing play.  

This 6-week circle is for you if you’d like to:

->Stay centered in your authenticity and power while interacting with others

->Become more capable and comfortable with physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy

->Become more comfortable and skilled with touch, and practice it in a non-sexual context

->Connect with your intrinsic erotic vitality and pleasure, and practice it in a non-sexual context

->Process and move beyond the restrictions of physical and/or emotional injuries and trauma

->Dance literally and figuratively through life without worrying so much about the steps

->Befriend and find greater love for your yourself in your body

->Become more aligned with what brings you meaning and purpose

->Become clearer about and more skilled in claiming your boundaries

->Find greater belonging in community

->Deepen your own voice and skills as a leader in community

We are in the midst of a massive cultural shift from a paradigm of domination to one of co-creation:  In holding BraveSpace® our witness of each other in communion will deepen your individual empowerment and sense of purpose.  Your wholeness exists simultaneously with communion, and great joy is available in the play of relationship.  As you explore this joy, or even if you find yourself at a distance from it, it will probably become apparent that none of us generate nor heal our wounding alone.  Playfully doing our personal ‘work’ together hugely amplifies our healing, not only for ourselves, but also in healing collective wounding and trauma.  The world is itself alive and spirited.  The experience of meaning in our lives comes when we integrate the feelings arising within us—our sensations and longings—coherently with our experience of spirit and one other.  Genuine intimacy results from this alignment.  And, there are no better technologies for exploring this creative communal attunement than circling, movement, touch, and awareness.

The BraveSpace® circle incorporates somatics, ecstatic dance, contact improvisation, and authentic relationship practices.  These practices will increase your physical and emotional intelligence, and they will help you more genuinely orient yourself in relationship.  We will also be working directly with the 10 principles of BraveSpace, offered below, in our focus and discussion.  You will come out of this series with a working understanding of these somatic principles, and an ability to apply them in your life.

BraveSpace® has two complimentary aspects:  It consists of Temples and Circles.  Temples are practice based, open to all, and limited in regard to sharing and feedback.  The Circle of Belonging is a closed group so that we can go deeper in our explorations and processing, and the specific exercises in which we engage will be based off the emergent needs and interests of the participants.  The financial exchange for Circle includes one Temple experience per week (Body Temple, Contact Temple, and/or Ecstatic Dance Temple), and attending the Temples is highly recommended to get the most from participating in the Circle.

The spring circle will take place on Tuesday evenings beginning Feb. 27^th from 7:00-9:15pm, running for 6 sessions skipping the week of March 19^th to complete on April 9^th.  The cost for the series is $300, and includes attendance at one Body Temple, Dance Temple, or Contact Temple each week of the series.  Group size is limited to 14.  Some work-trade may be available by request.

Sign up for Circle

A 3-payment plan is available at this link

From Hanna, a BraveSpace Focus Group Participant:  

BraveSpace is where we explore authentic relating through somatic awareness. We learn more about ourselves and others through the language of the body and language of movement. Through a combination of practices, like dance and movement meditation (just to name a few), we learn first hand how the body reveals our true, authentic experience, beyond words and storylines that may take us further away from the truth of the moment. There’s a number of principles that bravespace centers around, like deshaming, transformation, taking risk and vulnerability, and we explore these principles through physical practices. This is what I enjoyed the most, that for nearly all conversations and topics, there was a physical practice that helped learn and embody each one; the focus is on embodied practice, where the body is the main teacher.

From David, also a Focus Group participant:

At the retreat, I experienced a deep connection with the other 8 people in the group. I felt totally transparent, like everything that exists inside me was revealed. I chose vulnerability and felt great rewards from it. Release from self-judgement, acceptance, recognition of the quality and power of my heart, recognition of my gifts. I felt like I was tripping for 2 weeks straight and no substances were involved. I was tripping solely on human connection.

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 that the truth of our bodies cannot be manipulated away by our minds.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.