"Somatic Expression is best understood through personal experience. In a Somatic Expression session, you explore a range of possibilities with the five somatic languages and bring habitual patterns of moving, feeling and thinking to the surface where they can be unraveled and transformed."

“Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.” - CG Jung

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Somatic Expression in Nature ~
Individual and Group Retreats

Life is movement – movement is life. As modern industrialized human beings, we have begun to limit our movement participation with life, increasingly gluing our attention to computer screens and confining ourselves to cubicles and cars. A consequence of this paralysis is it becomes increasingly more difficult to unhook from the inner chatter of the mind and settle into present time. One of the antidotes to this situation is to cultivate the somatic arts of proprioception (your body’s inner sensing mechanism) and kinesthesia (your movement intelligence). These inner arts give you a base of support and an inner compass that, in tandem with creative expression, can unthaw personal habits of movement and mind to restore your fluid nature.

Somatic Expression is dedicated to the exploration of the inner ecosystem with the five somatic technologies of breath, vocalization, movement, contact and stillness. The major way I am currently transmitting this work is through individual and group retreats on the California coast, so people can immerse themselves in the language of their bodies within the container of the larger body - the natural environment.

The natural environment amplifies the potential and power of these five somatic-expressive technologies. You are able to inhabit more of your own personal rhythm within the larger rhythm of nature. By temporarily disengaging the self-conscious, rational mind and relaxing into a more sensate consciousness, you can receive the sensory richness of nature and, by extension, the richness of your own inner world. The spaciousness of the California coast naturally stimulates your own sense of personal space, which can open the psyche to fresh perspectives. Within this large space, there are also sub-spaces that can support, for example, containment and holding, whether it is a rock enclosure or a tree to sit against on the bluff.

By using a somatically based, action-oriented, and reflective strategy of interacting with the environment, you have access to different parts of your psyche, discovering insight while moving in non-ordinary ways or through assembling a sculpture of found objects in the sand. As Einstein famously said: “you can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it”. Or, in other words, changing your state of mind/body allows you to perceive the same landscape - whether the inner one or the outer one - with different eyes.

Once we change our state, it is easier to reconnect with our natural ability to play. There is also an implicit safety that accompanies being anchored in your body, and an emerging freedom of movement and mind that arises when you are in the flow of your own rhythm. Your innate creativity can surface and flourish; the metaphorical mind comes forward through this process of “active imagination” in the natural environment. Each element can evoke different responses that reflect aspects of your being: the softness of sand, the stability of rock, the expansiveness of sky, the turbulence of ocean, etc. All these diverse elements coexist in the same environment, serving as a mirror for the complex interrelatedness of our inner experience and how all of who we are dance can together in the outer world.