Courage always begins as an inner movement, an inner revolution to resist, transform, or transcend. Courage may take the form of a resounding “NO” that challenges what is unhealthy, oppressive, or harmful. Courage may also be a motivating “YES” to create, to shift, to evolve.

Dynamic Embodiment Practitioners trained in yoga/tantra do this through touch, as well as by using sound vibration, such as the chanted bija mantra. Tantric practices can facilitate change in the chakra system when we set clear intentions and direct our energy towards releasing and/or receiving. Similarly, one can arouse the lymphatic fluid with strong or bound direct vocal choices or movements to support our boundary-setting capacity in our own defense. Bringing awareness to the lesser trochanters and the hidden six inches through touch and movement releases tension and brings attention to this center of weight and power, thus a robust healing channel for trauma survivors and health for all.

I started attending classes because I had reached a place in my studies where I needed personal feedback about the experiences I was having. I took group classes for about one year before being approached to teach. I was completely ignorant of the culture of yoga building in the West and its historical context in the East. I was only interested in the practice as a psychology… as a way of spotting and shifting patterns of thought and behavior.

Yet materialism, which has dominated our intellectual culture since the Victorian age, covers fewer and fewer bases of life in the twenty-first century. The natural sciences are increasingly defined by quantum data, interdimensional formulas, and fields like neuroplasticity, which uses brain scans to demonstrate the capacity of thought to alter neural matter. Our ordinary reference points of life are in greater flux today than at any time since Darwinism upended what it meant to be human in the Victorian era.

“What does spiritual citizenship look like through a feminist lens?”

Existence is bondage to bodily experiences of emotion, excrement, illness, pain, and death.

…ways that contemplative performance art serves to interrupt the intergenerational traumas associated with genocide, colonialism, climate change, and environmental injustice.

….and experimentation with psychedelics is becoming increasingly mainstream, and considered in a positive and hopeful light.