A note from Erin about women & embodiment:
I’m thinking of what can happen for women when we learn to trust ourselves in an embodied way. Not trusting that we’re right all the time – but growing trust in our embodied experience, trusting that we can learn from what unfolds, and trusting we can keep evolving and responding in a life-giving direction, whatever happens. This learning ripples not only through our personal lives and close relationships but in our work and communities. This work ripens the kinds of humans the world desperately needs during times like these.
A few years ago, a dear student underwent such profound change and transformation through the movement and other somatic practices I teach, as many people do. She started saying, “I’m so free I’m dangerous.”
What’s unique about the approach in my upcoming 9-month circle,
Women Embodied, is that we’re not emulating someone else’s movement practices. We’re not trying to replicate a “right way.” We’re using slow and gentle movement as a way to come closer to the direct experience of our aliveness. To feel ourselves more clearly. To improve our brain’s map of our body. To get to know ourselves in a felt way, free of judgment or comparison.
To remove outer authority from our inner lives. (You really can do this in your own body!) To move in ways we actually enjoy. To retire from the grind of continually pushing and dominating this body. To begin pouring love and care into every move you make. Isn’t it time to pour some generous love and attention into this body, this soul, this being alive?? The harvest from such an approach is so rich and life-giving.
This learning is so hugely impactful on all levels of life. That student felt it. And so she said, “I’m getting so free, I’m dangerous.” Not dangerous to other people, but dangerous to the status quo. Her willingness to simply follow directions without question or to go along with what was expected of her had evaporated. She was embodied and feeling herself and following her inner guidance. If a physical therapist said “do this” and it hurt, she was empowered to say, “Nope, not gonna do that, it hurts.” (Amazing how rare that skill is!) If she were invited to make a decision, she could pause and feel what was most true for her. This is not about living in opposition to others, but liberating ourselves from a culture of domination. This embodied freedom is dangerous to the overculture. Dangerous to patriarchy. Dangerous to capitalism. Dangerous to normal. She freed herself. Her freedom, as it often does, helped others in her life feel more free. Freedom can be contagious. Once you learn to remove outer authority from your inner life – it’s a kind of personal decolonizing – (and as I said, this is not philosophical, it is a felt, somatic practice) – and you learn to practice “bowing to what is and finding the most life-giving relationship to it” – so much more becomes possible!! I want this for all of us.
It will help you stop being overly focused on other people’s expectations.
It will help you to slow down and really savor your one precious life.
It will help you stop feeling bad about yourself when you make mistakes, and instead nurture kindness and a sense of humor about it all, as we honor our last mistakes as our great teachers.
It will help you grow more confidence in following your own way – becoming a wayfinder, as one of my friends says.
No one else’s path will be right for you because there has never been a you before.
Instead of giving you a map for the journey and telling you where to go, Women Embodied gives you the tools, the support, the perspectives and the soul roots you need to make your own path by walking it.
Women Embodied can help you slide gracefully between attending to the inner life and the outer life, so you can engage with others without deleting or sacrificing yourself, and vice versa.
Women Embodied will help you grow compassion for self and others, big time.
Women Embodied will help you grow a sense of belonging in a warmhearted community of courageous beings, committed to kindness as they liberate themselves and walk their own path.
Women Embodied helps you to befriend your inner critic and grow a deep friendship with yourself.
Women Embodied helps you to be far more gentle and kind with your body – and wow, the body just laps that up, and is so responsive to our attempts to befriend!!
Women Embodied helps you to be a better friend and listener to not only yourself but also the others in your life.
Women Embodied helps support you in embodying your role as a wise, kind, free, good-humored adult, dedicated not only to personal well-being but to feeding a time of beauty and hope beyond our own.
I feel so lucky to be a part of such a circle!!!
There is a space for you if you’d like to join!
I have just 4 spots left in the online cohort and a few more than that in the local cohort.
I’ve been collaborating with my friend Francis Weller, dreaming up some potent ritual additions to this round of the course, and I’m so damn excited about it!
To be clear: this is not self-improvement. It is homecoming. It is stepping, again and again, out of the conditioning of a dominating, patriarchal, disembodied worldview and into your deeper, natural self – in body, mind, and soul.
Homecoming requires practice in a world that encourages us to be ever more speedy, ever more lost in our heads and on our screens, ever more distracted and distressed, or chasing happiness in so many unhelpful directions. Let’s practice together over the next months.
From beloved poet Jaiya John:
“It is not that we have so much to learn. It is that we have so much to remember. We are alive in the colonizing centuries of the Great Forgetting. Let us journey now into this new era upon us of the Great Remembering. We need teachers gifted not at cold instruction but at Loving reunion. We need homecoming.”
We start on 9/24.
Apply today. I’d love to be a support for your embodied freedom and homecoming.
Cheers to the Great Remembering!
From my heart,
Erin
p.s. A poem for you below…
