Living Terrain

What this is about

I've been thinking a lot about what it actually means to feel more.

Not necessarily to feel more emotion, or to become more sensitive to everything around us, but to become more available to the experience that is already happening within us.

When something uncomfortable arises, there can be a tendency to want to move away from it, understand it, name it, fix it or get beyond it. I know this movement well within myself, and I see it in the people I work with too.

But something I keep learning through dance, Craniosacral, yoga, somatic psychology and my own practice is that there is often another possibility. It's almost annoyingly simple: to lean towards. To take a look in and get a little closer. To slow down and welcome what's here like a guest in the home.

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I learnt so much about the body from the outside.

I spent years seeing myself in mirrors and photos. I learnt anatomy through flat, two-dimensional images. It became so normal to understand my own body through how it appeared.

In this series, I want to turn our attention the other way.

Not what does it look like, but what does it feel like to be inside it?

Underneath the surface of the skin is an incredibly alive landscape of fluids and tissues, bones and organs, spaces, rhythms and movement. All of it happening in there, all the time. When I began to come into a more dimensional experience of my body, something shifted. There was depth and space, and somewhere for my attention to land.

My body became less of an object and more of a place I was actually living within. My first home. A place from which I interface with the world.

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For years I couldn't see what was unfolding inside me. It was happening unconsciously, and I wasn't able to work with it. Over time, through many modalities (and lots of money later), I've collected tools that help me widen my view, and see what is happening without letting it play out on default.

And something surprised me. The more I was able to be with what was here, the more the people around me seemed to feel it too. People began telling me they felt calmer and more at ease when they spent time with me. In sessions, people say they can feel my presence before I've even touched their body.

I noticed it in my dancing too. As I deepened into somatic practices and became more interested in inhabiting the fullness of my body, audiences began to notice me more. Yet I wasn't trying to be more visible. If anything, my attention was moving the other way, further into my own experience, more interested in what I could feel than how I appeared from the outside.

I find this so fascinating. These sensations belong only to us, and yet something of them seems to move beyond the boundaries of our own bodies, changing the way we meet the world, and how the world meets us in return.

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Slowing down can feel like an act of resistance in a world that seems to be speeding up.

I've created these workshops as a place to soften into stillness, to listen, and to return to your own natural rhythm. I won't be asking you to try harder or fix anything. Instead, I'll help create the conditions for things to unfold, and we'll practise staying with what's here a little longer. An opportunity to feel our fullness, our volume, a shift in perspective, and move from this place.

Over time, this becomes a body memory. An imprint. A familiar place you can return to again and again.

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“For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Let’s feel beauty together.