Tending the Dream Seed:
Embodying Your Vision, a somatic exploration
Thank you to all who joined me at the RVHHC-sponsored April self-care class! Please use the following as resources for continuing your self-care and personal inquiry into inner-outer landscapes of body-being.
Overview:
Intro to Somatic Movement Education & Therapy
“Ways of Seeing” exploration (not included in this post)
Group Exploration: see below for more!
Resources: quotes used, further links, etc.
Group Exploration:
Sounds —
Thetas (“th” sound, keeping tongue gently behind teeth as you make the sound; ends up being a cross between a “th” and an “ss”);
Lunar breaths (similar to a whispered “aahh” in the back of your throat with your lips gently closed, like the sound of the ocean that you hear when you hold a conch shell up to your ear. allow the sound to fill your whole body).
Exploration —
With or without Thetas, you may start at your head and let your fingers/hands wander along the shape of your body, feeling the landscape of skin, bones, flesh. Allow your fingertips/hands to feel your body…..and your body to feel your fingers/hands.
Rest whenever you’d like— in silence or while sounding the Lunar breath— feel the shape of your body breathing.
At various points, imagine yourself within the inner landscape of your body— perhaps from your throat, your heart, your belly— notice the sensations, colors, images that arise. Spend some time in open attention, merely observing all that you are experiencing.
You may decide to allow a few words to form within you to describe your experience. Hear those sounds/words as they form. Give yourself an opportunity to name small pieces of your sensate-experience.
Once you have sounded-explored-observed-rested, you are encouraged to repeat the exploration again, revisiting places of curiosity and/or discovering new and perhaps deeper layers of your body-being. I often give myself 2 -3 rounds of the exploration.
An additional option is to enter into open movement, allowing all that is awakening in you to move and sound as you explore the precious shapes and expressions of your dreaming body-being.
Give yourself time to REST at the end before you journal and/or move into the rhythms of your daily activities.
Resources:
Beginning of class:
David Whyte, excerpted from the poem “What To Remember When Waking.”
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
End of class:
”Stories” quote by A Traveling Jewish Theater, quoted in EVERYDAY SACRED by S. Bender
I would love to hear anything you would like to share from your personal experience within the class and/or since then! Reach out in person or here.
Breathing-Sounding-Moving-Dreaming-Being
With You,
Jeni
Thank you for your presence here.
photo (cover): M.Parker
photo1: C.Ascosi
rest of post photos & video: me.
NOTE: please credit any and all writing/photos/video appropriately if used/repurposed in any way. Thank you!