AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Why me?
My personal proclivities have positioned me as a being able to bridge the residual rift between the body & mind. My family’s mantra of “school comes first” was reinforced young in my rigorous academic training beginning in grade school at a selective elite institution called Morgan Park Academy in Chicago, Illinois. My penchant for intellectual inquiry and discourse grew by leaps and bounds in the mentally fertile environment at Northwestern University where I studied psychology through Human Development and Psychological Services (the subject that I found most fascinating was group dynamics where I found Tavistock trippy). Finally, my thread of thought development led me to graduate studies in transpersonal psychology / expressive arts therapy.
Above and beyond my officially sanctioned schooling I am a ravenous bookworm and would read psychology textbooks for fun. My family went so far as to ban reading books at the dinner table because of my obsession. I would even try to combine reading with physical activities, such as biking with a book balanced on the handlebars. (here is my college entrance essay demonstrating my dedication to the written word *)
This desire to gather and synthesize information from a diversity of sources was initially prompted by my need to understand myself, my ancestral patterns, and seek greater wholeness of being. I was raised in a very high reaching environment where my academic pursuits were rewarded and reinforced. I got very good at the school game, and I have an endless capacity to tune into and please the needs of others.
Soma Diploma
As a refocusing academic on the study of interconnection, intimacy, somatics, expression, ecstatic group technologies (Burning Man among gatherings of lesser groups), global roaming, cross cultural similaries and carrying on of favorable differences, celebration beyond tolerance of diverse expressions of personal inspiration, culture, holding a heavy tradition in my body (Lithuanian ancestry), systematic and surpise somatic destruction (dermatilomania, ACL tear on apple tree), accounting for my life up until now – how can I most deeply serve? How to let go like the mist, feeling chanelling diffusing into mirco persperations respirations of rest, carrying and sharing medicine (songs, sensations, techniques, shortcuts, ), magnifying beauty.
Ecstatic Education
In the process of active somatic compassion we re-write the story from ‘the body is an painful unsafe place’ to ‘the body is a sense organ for endless unfolding ecstasy’. Through the soma-tech of schwirling we enter a group flow state in which we tap into the wellspring of knowledge of the unconscious as it speaks to the body. Through connection to flow we gather the filaments of distributed perception and enter the deep now, finding heaven within.
Although I rapidly and painfully realized that book-biking was not going to take off as a national pastime, I enjoyed exerting my body through team sports, hiking, biking, swimming, skiing, cavorting/building in the forest, and traditional Lithuanian dance. I believe that the size of my somatic vocabulary (body language dictionary**) and my openness to expressing myself physically stem directly from my eagerness to dance ever since I could walk. I was fortunate to be trained in traditional Lithuanian dance and toured the US and Lithuania performing in the highest regarded youth group in the nation. This formal expression through group dances was coupled with my life-long passion for using movement for communication and catharsis. I still reminisce about coming home from school after a draining day and dancing with abandon outside under the oak canopy to decompress. Remembrance of a profound judgement of my movement style occurred at a highly-pressured* dance at Lithuanian Summer Camp in which I asked my neighbor and lifelong dearly secret crush. sitting next to each other playing video games or sharing attentional awareness and proffering performance of our digital and data skills.
Some of my earliest memories are of trading massages with my mother – an avid fan of massage therapy in all forms. I was fortunate that my mom would often gift me massages for birthdays and as a present for good grades. As I lay luxuriating in simply receiving sensations, my body would absorb the physical knowledge of pressure points, strokes, and delicious spots and would come away from a massage feeling like I was in body school. I suspect that my mother continued to provide me with the gift of massages because she also benefited from my increased skill and sensitivity during our frequent trades. It was one of my few memories of culturally accepted and socially supported extended touch.
Only after using massages as barter offerings in high school and college did it dawn on me that not everyone was able to naturally tune into the body of another as I could. I was met with only blank quizzical looks after asking friends whether they too had the experience of their consciousness concentrating into the point of contact then flooding into the recipient’s body when touching someone else. I realized that what I often attributed to flattery after giving a massage – “I have never felt so listened to before” and “that was the best massage of my life” – was unadorned, naked truth for those on the receiving end of my touch. Once I understood I was deeply somatically empathic, small experiences I never understood became clear – such as why I would forcibly shudder and cover my ears when anyone told a story of bodily pain, for I could acutely feel the sensations of the shocking stimulus within my own body.
Just as I was just beginning to bloom into being comfortable and powerful in my body, I lost my virginity to nonconsensual penetration at the age of 20. Although psychological counselling helped me understand the patterns present in my mind, talk therapy was unable to touch the trauma and patterns in my body. Fortunately, I moved to the Bay area for graduate school – a fertile environment for contact improvisation, conscious dance, radical bodywork, evolutionary gathering, artist collectives, and housing cooperatives.
Through dance, platonic touch, massage, contact improvisation, and the body-celebratory culture of the bay area I could finally release these imprinted body patterns and guarded, frozen trauma. Now that I live a somatically-nourished life I feel a duty to share the skills I have painstakingly gathered on my healing journey to accelerate our collective evolution. Due to my training as a writer and communicator and my gratitude for the immense transformative effect of these technologies I feel compelled to translate ephemeral embodied teachings into the written word to expand access to the somatic healing realm across the globe.
Solution to violence due to touch isolation
I believe that violence stems from a feeling of disconnection on the part of the aggressor. This disconnection is amplified due to the touch starved nature of mainstream US culture (especially for males who live in a state of touch isolation outside of sexual partnership). Compounding this touch isolation is the blanketing paradigm of emotional numbing which judges those who express ‘un-palatable’ emotions such as sadness, and shames sensitivity as a sign of weakness. These issues are large, pervasive, and pernicious, and although I affect life-long positive change with my private bodywork and embodiment clients, I am limited in how many people I can reach as an individual working simply one-on-one (or one-on-two in the case of couples). I feel an obligation to do justice to the privilege of my life path and expand the number of people who can access these techniques. Sharing my compiled wisdom more broadly honors my intended gift to humanity – exponentially multiplying the love and connection on the globe. The world is crying out for compassion, and I hope that through our earnest sharing of these teachings we can increase the peace on our planet.
Why I became a bodyworker
I started earnestly practicing in the field of massage because I delight in making your body a place that you want to be ! I create and compile spaces, tools, and techniques that deepen, encourage, and propagate embodied living. I seek to normalize body bliss being supported in the structure of mainstream culture in all spheres of life (eg. replacing smoke breaks with stretch breaks). In the pursuit of this goal, I am a touch activist lending my talents to galvanize a movement of body awareness, body positivity, and to normalize platonic touch through a foundation of safety that emphasizes consent and clear boundary management.
Before it had a formal name, I originally started exploring and creating the technique of the { somatic magic } style because it felt wonderful to me, and when I played with others their moans and positive feedback made me realize that the world was eager to learn.
For more detail about why embodied / bodywork { everywhere } and { somatic magic } were created read my personal consent history **
History of my involvement with the Squish Squad, founding Bodywork { Everywhere } and the { somatic magic } style and the connections between them : **
My personal consent history / somatic healing journey
Touch / consent history of inventor – why { somatic magic } was created:
I began life in a Lithuanian bubble in a forest preserve outside of Chicago, learning English when I began kindergarten. Living in such an isolated place meant that there were no neighborhood kids to play with – I spent my time devouring books and roaming in the woods mostly alone (and occasionally building forts or wrestling with my younger brother). The depth of my empathy for the earth and its creatures is evidenced by the fact my TV consumption consisted solely of Animal Planet / Discovery Channel and my declaration to be a veterinarian when I grew up.
My capacity for compassion was so all-encompassing that I often lost my sense of self in the presence of another with strong needs. As I learned in my study of psychology, this was likely because in my formative years doing so served a survival imperative – for me to attune to my primary caregiver (psychology parlance for my mother) to remain in her favor lest she abandon caring for me. I was so good at taking care of and pleasing others that I often subsumed their interests and needs into myself – making our needs the same in my mind.
This concentration on what others thought of me was also reinforced by the small size of the Lithuanian community I grew up in, within which keeping up appearances was paramount lest your family be the subject of that week’s wildfire gossip. Over time I became so externally validated that I lost my own inner sense of guidance, allowing those around me to determine what constituted success and setting the agenda for my life. In turn I internalized this hyper-awareness of status and position as a critical and stern internal judge. Another shadow of this extreme alertness was that I would often know what people wanted to hear, allowing me to be extremely manipulative if I so chose – luckily for the world, I am not interested in evil.
School comes first
The Razmas were a small and insular family with a mantra of “school comes first”. Fortunately, due to my penchant for rapid reading and comprehensive comprehension I earned High Honors marks in the academic game. My perfectionistic tenancies which caused me to abandon projects before they developed momentum and I frequently waited until the last minute to write essays, forgoing outlines and drafts for lack of time. These behaviors likely had a common cause in an extremely harsh inner critic. This inner critic also made itself known through destructive physical acts such as dermatilomania (compulsive skin picking) and overeating to self-soothe and ‘trance out’.
In therapy at three
To unpack these personal proclivities and familial snarls I have been attending therapy since I was in grade school (starting with family therapy). Unfortunately, due to my capacity to understand the motivations of others my mind constructed or spun the narrative to match what my listener expected. For me, the therapist’s office was not a neutral place because I was so paralyzed by the fear of the fallout I assumed would come from telling the unvarnished truth – I wanted the therapist to accept me! This tension was heightened in family therapy because my parents would be present and participating in the session itself so it was in my interest to get the therapist to be sympathetic to my cause.
The main reason we were going to family therapy was the tension between my mother and father. A short synapsis of the crux of the ongoing 20+ year argument : Both agreed to the structure in which my mother would end her work as a pharmacist and act as a stay a home mom full time while my physician father fulfilled his social programming as the family breadwinner. My father would wake up early and come home late, and was mostly absent from family life barring his omnipresent filming during family vacations. Alas, this left my mother feeling lonely and emotionally unsupported. Additionally, being a stay at home mom completely consumed her identity, tying her worth in the world to the accomplishments of her children and leaving her feeling personally invalidated, unappreciated, and unseen.
Throughout the time I lived with my parents, I acted as my mother’s best friend and confidant, absorbing her opinions and struggles as my own in my typical pattern as ‘emotional sponge’. This caused me to hate my father even as I barely knew him, and in turn not respect his typically absent artificially imposed authority for which I received belt spankings. As I matured my role changed into peacekeeper and unofficial family therapist when my mother frequently and vocally harangued my father for his absence and lack of emotional support.
A family uninterested in touch
Although some of my first memories are of trading massages with my mom, we were not a cuddly family (my father hates massages). In fact, when my father leans forward in to kiss my mother, she responds by freezing, and he leans all the way in to reach her, almost falling off balance in the process. This familiar physical pattern encodes a message of male pursuit and female compliance. Like a gosling, I imprinted my mother/father’s model of touch, in which physical contact was infrequent and only grudgingly acquiesced to.
This was a pattern I encoded into my own physical nature – never initiating physical contact with those whom I fancied (Was I just shy? Did I assume they would chase after me if interested?). In my young adulthood, it became clear that I was not ‘average’ – never having been in an intimate relationship or having gone on a single date. I self-sabotaged the attempts of others to including me socially. For example, if a friend at lunch extended an invitation to the table to attend an event I would automatically assume I was not included unless my attendance was specifically requested.
People like me ?
Despite all my introverted characteristics, I was surprisingly in relatively good social standing, likely due to my aptitude as social arbitrator – acting as the neutral counsellor resolving spats that emerged between friends and couples. Starting from age 10 I was also well-received as a photographer, delighting in documenting occurrences through stills, video, jottings, and doodles. However, even if someone I fancied would express their romantic interest in me I always decided it was ‘not worth the energy’ and potential downsides. I would mentally calculate the ‘cost / benefit ‘analysis of what may come of the potential relationship and decided my time was better spent engaging in pursuits beyond what I judged to be simply ‘wasteful’ pleasure. I was consciously cutting off expressing my sexuality because I was uncertain of the effect voicing it would have on others (would they feel pressured?) and I was fearful that if I let it out I would never regain control over it. I was also on alert to avoid hurting my vulnerable heart: what if my love was unwanted, rejected? The safe choice was channeling my Eros into art, creativity, and mind-work.
I kept to myself in the realms of love, feeling it to be safer to be alone and alien to it all then enter the fray and risk damage. Unfortunately, my personality patterns selected out for the nice folks and selected for self-focused men only interested in their own pleasure. These men would doggedly pursue me, uninterested in whether their advances were met with receptivity. When alcohol entered the mix, times grew dark.
Stolen first kiss
My first kiss was taken by a male friend in middle school who, when on a hike deep in the woods, spun me around, pulled me close, and stuck his tongue down my throat. This, in a place that I was acutely aware that no one would ever hear me scream, and after a conversation about the most painful way to die (he informed me it was burning to death because all the fluids in your body must burn away before you lose consciousness). My body responded with repulsion and I immediately ran home, tearing through brambles and underbrush like a startled deer as he shouted ‘Wait…wait!’. Later, as a semblance of an excuse to his behavior, he claimed he had ‘done a few shots’ before our walk (although I had not tasted alcohol on his breath – I think it was an excuse to save face in our social circle). To this day, I am completely dumbfounded as to why so many people enjoy kissing on the mouth.
Sadly, this was not to be my last unwanted sexual advance – I had several close calls due to alcohol. In my first in high school, I was brownout drunk at New Years a male friend loomed over my body when I was lying on a hotel bed, saying he “wanted to be inside of me”. As he groped at my nether regions his desire was only deflected by the girdle I was wearing. Several subsequent experiences in college occurred where, even as I was slurring my words, frat boys plied me with the promise of more alcohol in their rooms. Slowly, after realizing I was alone with them, my hazy mind realized the unstated intentions behind getting me away from the herd and I would rapidly try to flee, hurriedly excusing myself several times as they casually stood in front of the door, denied the validity of my statements, and insisted that I stay.
Although I escaped from these encounters with little more than hangovers and lost articles of clothing, my final experience at a frat had me tumbling down a flight of stairs and permanently scarring my shin. The scariest part of that night was the morning after, when I woke up feeling like I had been run over by a dump truck with a terrible black gap in my memory leaving me clueless to the cause. Fortunately, that night my roommate had gone out with me and when she noticed the advanced stage of my intoxication, had pulled me away from the frat boy feeding me alcohol and escorted me home when I promptly fell down the frat’s long staircase. That day I committed to being a teetotaler, deciding that alcohol was not an expanding or enlightening substance for my body/brain chemistry. However, alcohol’s possession of males claiming my body did not relent regardless of my own abstinence.
Maidenhood mishandled
I lost my virginity to nonconsensual penetration a week shy of my 21st birthday (I have been encouraged to use the term rape by my therapist, as it describes what happened to me, but have also received feedback that my use of ‘rape’ in labelling my experience minimizes the ‘bruised and bloody’ situations of rape survivors. These conversations were painful and I was made to feel shame and I wish to not have such an experience ever again). This was a case of near-stranger violation, as I had met him two days prior. He had been a friend of a friend of my housemate and had asked for my phone number which I gave to me, startled by his forwardness. That weekend, I had been commanded by my parents to babysit my 19-year-old brother at my family’s condo in Chicago and felt unsafe alone in the city. This new-to-me man had been incessantly texting me for the past two days and so I, thinking him a new friend in the making, invited him to keep me company on the trip downtown from Evanston where I was attending Northwestern University. We had a pleasant train ride downtown and he followed me to the condo where he proceeded to consume most of a bottle of wine he had brought as a gift to me (a testament to how little he knew me, as I had not been drinking for 2 years at that point).
After my brother had left the condo to party with his friends late in the night (I could not stop him even if I wanted to – he’s huge), I announced that I was tired and going to sleep. My guest claimed that he wasn’t sure if the trains were still running (implying he was stranded with nowhere to go) and asked “can I sleep over?”. I retrieved a blanket and pointed him to the couch in the main room flatly stating “well if you need to you can sleep over, but I am going to sleep now”. I went into the bedroom and he followed me in. I had had a very long day, and lying down I said “I’m exhausted and going straight to sleep”. Everything from there happened so fast. My exhaustion combined with the speed with which his weight was on top of me left gave me no time to process. As he penetrated me, I gasped in shock and my spirit fled my physical vessel – where I watched from the ceiling.
Had he asked I would have said no – no way! Alas, I was never asked. I was astonishingly naïve and inexperienced sexually for my age, having said no to all suitors and never having been in a relationship. This was nothing close to my reverie of what ‘making love’ could be and I felt immense guilt and sorrow at losing my virginity to someone I did love or even know and who didn’t care enough to include me in the decision making process of choosing what happened to my body.
Why did I freeze ?
Through processing with therapists, I began to understand on an intellectual level what had happened to me psychologically, but the trauma was still stored in my body as cemented energy. I fiercely guarded this raw place full of mistrust and old deeply carved patterns as if I was a wounded animal – assuming the worst intentions of those around me. I realized that being nonconsensually penetrated was simply the last in a line of traumas that had begun before I was born. The most ancient trauma was the historic inter-generational tragedy of Lithuania’s occupation during World War II which saw my relatives captured and deported to certain death in Siberian concentration camps for attempting to preserve our culture through Lithuanian book smuggling. Fearing for their lives, both sets of my grandparents fled Eastern Europe for America. This mistrust of the world was transmitted to me through the worldview and beliefs of my biological family- that everyone was out to get you and the only person you could rely on was yourself.
This deadening paranoid view was compounded with the Western cultural ‘norm’ of judgement and pervasive body-shaming aimed at women. Topping this was the classic Roman Catholic guilt around original sin, the baseness of the body, and the judgement of pleasure as frivolous and impure. Through unpacking these layers in psychological counsel, I began to comprehend why I had responded by shutting down emotions, freezing, and dissociating from my body –I had a belief that my body was not my solely my own, and merely an instrument for the fulfilment of the desires of others. Therefore, with sovereignty over my own space rescinded, my body became an unsafe place when actions that I did not consent to or want were bring inflicted onto my physical vessel. This coupled with the belief that my Godly goal was for the body and its desires to be transcended left me feeling confused and guilty about the complex emotions coursing through me, overloading my circuits into shocked stillness.
How I healed from nonconsensual penetration
I was first able to open myself to understanding the factors leading to my pressured penetration through the help of a transpersonal psychologist named Rami Henrich in Evanston. My favorite aspect about Rami’s style was the emphasis on embodied knowing where I could connect to my animal body through movement and drama. I also chose to study psychology at Northwestern University to meta-analyze my own mind and understand my family’s dynamics. My favorite courses were in the subjects of group dynamics, developmental psychology, and children’s culture. I dived deep into my own psyche and got as far as I could through an intense combination of my therapist’s compassionate presence, words, and bookish studies, but I still felt shut down in my body.
As much as talk therapy helped me understand intellectually what had transpired, I was only able to heal my body and shattered sense of boundaries through conscious movement practices. I was fortunate because I relocated to the mecca of therapeutic movement – the Bay Area – to attend graduate school for transpersonal psychology / expressive arts therapy. In remembering how to celebrate my body the curative effect of contact improvisation, radical bodywork, and relationships in which I was listened to and respected by those touching my body were paramount.
This process – of allowing myself to feel fully free in body and safe sharing skin and sensation with others – was reinforced by participation in evolutionary cultural zones openly sharing tools to advance our collective evolution. Some of the most alchemical include : alternative healing rituals, Burning Man, Ecstatic dance, the west coast conscious/transformational festival circuit, the Bay Area’s deep contact improvisation scene, BDSM, kink, permaculture, artist collectives, housing cooperatives, intentional living communities, sacred clowning, social justice performance, and grassroots media production. Through participation these in cathartic cultures, gatherings, and events I was able to contribute to creating a world that was moving closer to one that I wished to wake up in. I was fortunate that those whom I danced, interacted, and grew with in my formative years were (for the most part) conscientious and respectful, modelling a new way of being with others. However, even though ‘we have it good’ in such communities, there is still a gap between the all-pervasive beauty and compassion that we know is possible and the systems that we are embedded in. We still have work to do on ourselves and have a duty to practice and evolve techniques to support the realization of our highest hopes.
With the inertia of this history flowing through time I feel the weight of responsibility in sharing what I have been privileged to learn through my personal healing process. This frame helps me harvest motivation from my trauma – that I lived through this so others would be spared – perhaps even because in the fire of that trial my strength, resilience, and compassion were forged. Due to my own personal experience with sexual assault I am moved by sadness, righteous indignation, and the desire to do all I can to create and embody a new future that celebrates consent through teaching somatic attunement.
So many of my first physical experiences of intimate connection with others occurred in spaces where I felt unsafe, was not initially asked (nor checked in with either verbally or somatically), and was not given abundant (or even adequate) space / time to respond. Through the { Safe, Loving Touch } program I teach tools that help establish a safe foundation of consent and boundary identification / management that is essential to supportively engage with other humans. I seek to consciously create a safe container in which people can put their guard down and re-imagine their relationships to their own bodies as well as the bodies of others. These workshops are a space to explore and gauge what you do/not enjoy, the specifics of how you do/not enjoy it, how to express your needs & boundaries, and how to read the expressions of others and support their needs. I have invested significant amounts of time, energy, and resources into my healing path, and my offering to you is of the most effective and concentrated methods to move into post traumatic growth.
Bay Area chapter – SomasenS and Somanauts are born
After moving to the Bay Area, I immediately found my fellow body folk in the contact improvisers, bodyworkers, and ecstatic dancers of the Bay Area. I am at the heart of the Squish Squad (SS) as Queen and the founder of Bodywork { Everywhere } : Bay Area (BE:BA). I had found other beings who were as somatically sensitive as I! We gathered together to explore and expand the practice of bodywork – melding, mooshing, and manipulating, we managed to meld styles and strategies into an altogether new synergy.
The Squish Squad is the space curation crew that creates the container for the practitioners of Bodywork { Everywhere } : Bay Area (BE:BA) to play in the a diversity of styles, my own personal flavor being Somatic Magic.
Exponentially multiplied collective healing fields
I have noticed an amazing phenomenon when members of SS and BE:BA gather together in shared intention – we create a magnified healing field in which our powers to channel therapeutic movement and clear physical and energetics blocks are exponentially multiplied. I noticed the most during my travels, when clients would fly my to New York and I felt as though I was the lone member of my body tribe attempting to hold the resonance of the group field on the other edge of the country. Although my clients in New York did not want me to leave, I missed collaborating with a crew which allowed me to with others who understood the language of the body . My frequent world-wide wanderings also helped me understand just how rare and unique the communities I was a part of in the Bay Area were on a global level. My academic interest in group dynamics also made me realize how precious this synched up state was, how hard it was to hold onto and the possibilities for utilizing the collective field for creative, constructive purposes (think groupthink but for the common good). This in turn catalyzed my sense of responsibility to create media about the { somatic magic } style I developed while in the Bay Area to share this gem with those who do not currently share physical proximity to my location. Through the media I am privileged to produce, now people anywhere around the world can benefit from this body wisdom (I know that I frequently reflect on how different my life would have been had I known the life I live now is possible).
When SS and BE:BA gather together in mutual respect and intention, we collectively form a super organism, symbiotically filling in any individual’s spaces or gaps through the overlapping combination of our discrete strengths. When we gather together in shared space and reach critical mass, we catalyze a chain reaction amplifying our collective composite field. When you consider the fact that we often literally stack bodies on top of each other for maximum therapeutic impact, we are not only emotionally or socially supported, but also physically entwined. Throughout time we holding each other in deep medicinal space and are confident in each other as chosen family. We have vetted each member’s inclusion in our trusted circle and vote with our continued commitment of time spent together. Additionally, through knowing each other’s strengths, flavors, specialties, and proclivities, we direct seekers of healing to their closest therapeutic match without personal attachment to any specific client. We recognize and honor that each has to take the medicine they need in that moment. *values principals
Bodystorming
Additionally, together we act as advanced professionals in a therapeutic laboratory when which we prototype techniques and tools among each other. Due to the open nature of disclosure and interest in each other’s personal and professional development we act as transparent respected peers and scientists of the shared discipline of bodily harmony. Due to each member’s honed body sense we can provide exquisitely detailed feedback on new ideas so that they may rapidly iterate and evolve. We bounce both ideas as well as bodies back and forth through our bodystorming sessions – a new method of co-working we developed that involves physical contact combined with discussion (a brainstorming thinktank with movement). *kinetic café
Scribe of the Tribe – the difficulty of translating bodysense into wordform
Fortunately for this movement movement, I have a penchant for documentation (hence the inscription you are perusing). I would record jottings of interesting metaphors to seed movement patterns, contemplate consent with the collective, and record intriguing informal interviews. Not much has been scribed about these groups or behaviors because by their very nature most members are more interested in movement, action, and immediacy rather than the more static process of writing and other documentation forms.
There is an additional consideration of translation – between the experiential realm of the body and the postulations of the mind. There are many words about words, but precious few about motion, emotion, and bodily experience (especially considering how much data, and depth of data, the mind is taking in regarding these aspects of experience) . Not only is there a dearth of language communicating the felt bodily experience, emotion, and its nuance, but the parts of the brain used for movement and those used for intellectual discourse and documentation are also different. I can physically feel the shift in neuron energy flow when I have been deep in bodyspace and someone asks me a question requiring a verbal response. Mentally, I feel as though the bubble of my body bliss has been popped and I rapidly surface from the depths of my subconscious sensate ocean attempting to hastily gather the foam of form in the slippery spoken shallows.
Occasionally phrases would float to the surface, and I would attempt to repeat them as mantra while I moved, recognizing them as verbal seeds to sensate experiences, bringing an unexpected harvest back from the world without words. However, as is often also the case with dreams, the words would wiggle away unless I diligently broke out of the body trance and doggedly downloaded the details in my digital device or analog notebook. In these moments I felt caught – was all writing an attachment to the past or a prayer of gratitude and remembrance for the flashing fleeting moments of inspiration?
I realized that it was my personal path to write about the felt bodily experience in service to the acceleration of collective evolution and expanding the circle of healing I had found safe harbor in. I recognized the precious gift I had alchemized within my being –a capability to clearly convey with the written word as well as sense deeply with the body. These pursuits often feel diametrically opposed (especially when I am antsy and attempting to steel my resolve and write…then they seem like antipodes). At first I thought one was stillness and the other movement – but really they are both a dance between the two – both the stillness of inner solitude waiting for a spark, and the motivation of the muse to movement.
So I toil, teasing out translations, building bridges between disparate disciplines and demure in my demanding doggedness to hold onto the smoldering snapshots long enough to share them (and ensnare them in eternal expression). I intend nothing short of creating therapeutic thought forms, values which inform our forms, motivational memes for the masses. Catalyzed from conversation, contemplation, and careful composition I coalesced a sketch of the skeletal structure of bones upon which was built our way on being together – a shared philosophy. Find the culture code here*. My evolution lies in the convolution of multitasking between sensation channels, merging the mind with motion, the body with brushstroke, and finding ways in which we do not have to choose between the mind and matter, but uniting both into masterpiece.
I set it upon myself to be the scribe of this tribe because I felt a sense of responsibility to my previous self and what a gift it would have been to know how to create the delight, connection, and ecstatic bliss I am privileged to frequently experience. The communities of the SS and BE:BA have radically altered the course of my life for the better – towards an expanded compassionate holistic mindset, greater intimacy, and generous openness. In a spirit of gratitude, I share with you the healing work we have been doing and how to create communities of the same for yourselves. I pray that our compassion and values turn viral.