Returning Home to Our Bodies
Join this course and learn practical tools to inhabit our bodies and the natural world that feed our awe and curiosity. You’ll learn somatic skills ranging from the foundational to the advanced and subtle that will enable you to better meet the challenges of our times by finding comfort and inspiration in your own body, and in the natural world.
hosted by Abigail Rose Clarke
Module 1MODULE One: Seed
In this section we will name our lineage, and our intentions. Like a seed, everything arises from something else, and by acknowledging our beginnings, we can move forward with clarity.
Module 2MODULE Two: Ground
We will rehydrate our relationship with place, gravity, and the relationship between the body and the earth
Module 3MODULE Three: Relate
Everything is interconnected, everything is in relationship. In this section, we will explore what it means to be changed by, and to change, everything.
Module 4MODULE Four: Observe
When we are relationally observant, then we are able to engage with the world, ourselves, and each other, from a place of patience understanding.
Module 5MODULE Five: Widen
As we increase our capacity to be present, we increase our ability to hold more and more paradoxical truths, and more and more conflicting realities.
Module 6MODULE Six: Love
Love, in the way we are exploring it, is embodied, and encompassing. As a result of our time together we will have deepened our capacity to hold desire as a force, to love from our centre, as Audre Lorde writes, to love from the inside.
hosted by Abigail Rose Clarke
Following the GROW/L Method, imagined by your teacher Abigail Rose Clarke, an acronym for GROUND, RELATE, OBSERVE, WIDEN, and LOVE, you will learn how to use the body as a guide through the complexities we face as a collective society, and as individuals within our own unique constellations of experience.
You are a multicellular organism. Our mainstream culture would have you believe you are an individual, but you are an entire ecosystem, and you are inherently part of the ecosystem that holds you. Our bodies, and the natural world we are a part of, tell stories of collaboration and mutual aid. They tell stories of deep rest and graceful effort, of space and fluidity. Above all, our bodies tell us stories of the awe and curiosity waiting for us as we turn our attention towards the truth of these bodies, and the natural world.
This is a course taught by a poet with a lifelong obsession with microscopes, and a deep abiding love of magic as well as the scientific method. We will use scientific research to guide our explorations into the miraculous truths of the body, practising deep somatic listening and presence. Resisting a consumerist somatics industry that makes the body into a product, we’ll remember that meaningful embodiment practice nurtures our relationship to self, nature, and community.
The body already exists beyond the reach of extractive systems of domination, and we can turn to the stories offered by the blood and breath to remember. The body understands how opposition can be a healing force - the muscles can tell us this - and the body, above all, understands support and comfort as a constant force. Our mind can remember what the body already knows.
This course is based on this book with the same name, written by Abigail Rose Clarke.