Last week, Janice spent time in the high desert completing advanced psoas training with international somatic educator and author, Liz Koch. Liz calls the psoas an organ of perception. Janice reflects, “I am transformed each time I study with Liz. Her brilliant influence shapes the living, healing systems design of our work at Ha.Lé.”
Let’s Cultivate A New Body Ecology
Land is where we belong, not where we come from.
Primal to our inner being is the fluid dynamics of a long lived ancestorial line of wavy spirals and the curvature of rivers. We are shaped by the landscape in which we live. Not long ago, but long enough, we have forgotten who we are. We’ve become colonized and structured, where our mechanistic functional beings are molded by our furniture. Our chairs dictate how we sit, and the concrete sidewalks inform how we walk. Within rigid edges, we lose our capacity for nuance—a mechanistic world hungers for mechanistic plans.
Our sensitivities and sense of tracking ourselves have been lost. Do we know who and what we are?
“The body is a shore on the ocean of being”- Sufi (anonymous)
We live in sophisticated bodies, even when there has been long-lived trauma. In the midst of the impossible, the body has the innate ability to heal. Psychology is hyper focused on the effects of the mind. “Without the body and mind accessed together as a unit, we will not be able to deeply understand or heal trauma.” Peter Levine PhD
We’ve divided ourselves into pieces, separated from our unique wholeness and atrophied by exhaustion and overwhelm, yet if you listen deeply, there are echoes of belonging. The agents of despair would prefer you stay muffled and fearful. If you are reading this essay, you are one of many passionate beings longing to become whole. To nourish ourselves toward the essence of our true nature. Our blueprint cannot be damaged; the soul longs for healing.
“If all our experiences made up our essential selves, then there would be no healing.”
– Zhenevere Sophia Dao
