I have been struggling over the past year with the fact that my private practice has too much talk therapy and not enough embodiment or energy tracking. This has been coupled with a crescendo of vitality evolving in my personal life. As a practitioner who holds the awakening of the individual soul as a core intent for all my clients, I have found myself wondering how to bring a greater sense of my own aliveness into my clients’ potential enlivenment.
At the end of this series of posts, I will be offering an opportunity for those of you who are interested to either attend embodiment classes online or engage in a hybrid of embodiment classes and group relational processing.
I find myself wanting to cross two worlds - my own private experience of what I know life can be and the everyday struggles of an individual caught up in the rigors of their own minds. The solution I have come up with is quite simple. I have decided to share more of my embodiment practices with my clients during sessions and group meetings in order to enable people to shift out of their minds and into their bodies.
Today I am announcing that anything I create from here until my next evolution of being is going to be based on the intent to bring enlivenment into people’s lives through a deeper connection to the body.
New one on one clients, new groups, and future retreats will all be based on the structure of embodiment followed by a mutual experience of relating in the embodied field.
While many of us know that we should be able to allow our bodies to talk to us or that a more fulfilled life requires deeper embodiment, the methods most of us use to do so is research, studies, facts, opinions, media, mind, thoughts, head, mind. To learn how to silence the mind. To recognize thoughts and even emotions as transient states of being. To be able to hold the self as an incredibly complex being made up of many parts. These are the needs behind a fulfilled and connected life. I have a deep desire to teach people how to walk the walk of awakening, not to simply be fixed and live in the paradigm of disease and cold depression.
WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?
Okay. I realize right away that some of my statements are only going to resonate with people who have experienced my work. So I am going to TRY to simplify what I am talking about into a few words.
Think kundalini style movement and breath work therapy mixed with self guided energetic awareness building instead of simple talk therapy. I know. Just that!
Consider the concept of allowing breath and faciliated embodiment movements to bring you into the choice of experiencing the wisdom of the body without the constraints of the ever present mind. Add to this the importance of being witnessed and guided through the experience of the body into a way of being with another person that emerges as a dynamic inter-relational field.
Dynamic inter-relational fields have all those things I’ve been writing about for years inside them - compassion, interest, curiosity, and most importantly aliveness within the unknown. This field has the potential to bring people into a felt sense of relating to support the movement of defense into self and child awareness into the container of an adult mind.
My Own Sadhana Journey
Before I get too caught up in bringing my future intentions into this post, I want to share my past two years in the light of my practice, my own sacred Sadhana (daily practice).
I was first introduced to a kundalini style movement and breath work practice through a mentor decades ago. I loved the practice but never at that point thought of it as a every day need. I used what I was taught when I felt disconnected, stuck or simply tired by the burden of life. I knew that the practice made me feel better in the moment, but in no way did I carry that through to doing it regularly.
My regular practice was mellow - a more vinyasa flow type of yoga with meditation after usually holding a crystal to open me into a deeper state of trance. I saw practitioners to help support me through my body’s injuries and diseases and I met with therapists to support me through my mind’s inconsistencies. I studied and in the course of those studies discovered transformation in group therapy, engaging in elements of the hero’s journey myths, and allowing myself to have breaks from every day life to get centered into my own truth. I assumed that some of my health issues would be with me forever and some of my deeper ingrained mind and defense patterns would never go away.
After all, life is really about practicing being an every day human, not a perfect human.
Somehow in allowing the ordinary life to be present in my healing journey, I let go of demand. I stopped wanting yoga, meditation, transformational groups, and retreats to solve my problems or heal me. Instead I began to see that all of these tools work together to allow me to become me. This drop in to my core self without idealization, demand to fix, or push to be something I’m not happens to also be the core turning point for my own vitalized life.
In the midst of all this shifting, I decided I wanted to get my Kundalini yoga teacher training certificate. Really this was about me wanting to do something just for me. I never planned on teaching, I simply wanted to have more tools for my own practice. Yet the discovery of joy and fullfilment is connected to the daily practice I had to adopt to get my certificate.
The ability to feel satisfied and joyful with my life is intricately linked to my daily practice. It is this that I want to share with you - the transformed me and the possibility that lies within all of us.
Eventually my own relationship to my Sadhana has done what it, I think in its essence, is supposed to do. I have amalgamated the practices I have found a ground in over decades. This is what I seek to teach. These practices that have been invaluable to my own life are what I seek to share.
Over the next few posts, I will be sharing a bit more about my journey and offer a free video kundalini STYLE class for those of you who want to feel into my version of this practice.
At the end of this series of posts, I will be offering an opportunity for those of you who are interested to either attend embodiment classes online or engage in a hybrid of embodiment classes and group relational processing.
Stay tuned.
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This is so exciting Nessa! Count me in!