← The Nourished Nervous System
The Nourished Nervous System
All of Our Bodies: Exploring Somatic Experiencing, Authentic Movement and Cultural Somatics with Daniel Bear Davis
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to the Nourished Nervous System, an exploration of stress, the nervous system and resilience for parents and other humans through the lens of Ayurveda, somatics, herbs, and a whole lot more. I'm your host, Kristen Timchak, an Ayurvedic health counselor, stress and resilience coach, somatic stress release practitioner, and mother of a tiny human. Please join me for information and insights, deep thoughts and small steps to help you nourish your nervous system. Hello, hello, welcome, and welcome back to the Nourished Nervous System. So happy that you're here today. I have a wonderful conversation with a dear old friend of mine, Daniel Baer Davis. I met Daniel many years ago, maybe in Western Mass. We both have some roots in the Western Mass area and we had a overlap of living in California. He lived in the Bay Area and I was out a couple hours away. And most of our friendship revolved around dancing. We were both in the contact improvisation community and so we dance a lot together. And he's one of those people who, who I've danced with him more than I've talked to him, but I feel like I know him really well. And that's such the beauty of contact Improvisation or any of the Somatic work really is all of the information that we get through our bodies and through our senses and how real and valid that information is. And I think it becomes really apparent when you can really feel like you know somebody, but you might not know the little details about their life or their history, like the verbal knowings. So that's just to set you up for today's conversation with Daniel. He's a Somatic Experiencing practitioner. He's been. He began training in somatic experiencing in 2012 and he brings an understanding of the body that's informed by 17 years of experience as a body worker and a lifetime of experience as a dancer and movement educator. He sees clients one on one and in groups, online and in person. And his one on one work is also influenced by cultural somatics, which we'll get into in this episode. And it's just so interesting and I really love this perspective of the different layers of our bodies. There's our physical body that we're in, but then there's all the other layers that are made up of that larger web of human and non human relations. We'll get into all of this in the episode. So I'm going to stop talking now and get into the conversation. Welcome, Daniel. I am so thrilled to have you here today.
- [03:19]
B
So happy to be here.
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A
So to start, I'd love to have you introduce yourself and talk about your path to where you are right now.
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B
Sure.
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A
Or as much of it as you want to share.
- [03:34]
B
Yeah. My name's Daniel. I'm a father of a six month older, a three and a half year old. My work right now is doing one on one somatic experiencing based coaching work, supporting people to be in their bodies and in their world in a good way. So the Somatic experiencing background comes supported by a long history of dance and movement, performance and practice and interdisciplinary performance making as well as bodywork. So I can track that back all the way to my parents. My father worked with Meredith Monk, who was a postmodern dance and music and vocal pioneer. And my mother was doing slow motion walks along the Brooklyn Bridge with K T K. So I have in my blood this curiosity and interest in how movement and movement as ritual, movement as a context to create experience. And yeah, I've had many careers and I can see, though many others might not, I can see how they all weave together in what I'm doing now. I've taught access syllabus and contact improvisation internationally. I have done performance work with military veterans and non veterans, making original pieces in collaboration and working with incarcerated men and women from their own stories, making work from their own stories. And all of that work really brought in ideas from Somatic experiencing and how I made directorial decisions, made decisions that I thought would support the experience of the performers as much as the audience. So that's a pretty unconventional use of somatic experiencing that was strong in my background actually before I got into the one on one work. And then also my study of contact improvisation and improvisational dance. I often say that my teachers from that field are my primary somatic experiencing teachers. Even though that's not what they do, that's not what they teach. They teach how to be present in the moment and be open to the mystery and follow what's happening and trust what is arising. And those are strengths and kind of keystones in my understanding of what makes trauma renegotiation possible and how I engage in the improvisation and collaboration with the people I work with.
- [06:19]
A
I love that. Can you talk a little bit about. Some people might not be familiar with what exactly somatic experiencing is and also what cultural somatics are stories.
- [06:30]
B
Somatic experiencing is coming from the work of a man named Peter Levine, who of course sourced it his understandings from many other places, including observation of animals and how they moved trauma or stress through their system and it's approach to that acknowledges trauma as a bodily experience that's not in the events, it's in how we hold those events. How those events, however, have not been supported to move through our own bodies. And I often say that it's a bit of a somatic experiencing is kind of a totem for soul retrieval work that gets dressed up in a lab coat to make it accessible for folks who need some kind of polyvagal scientific stamp of approval to feel safe going into unknown places in their own experience. And so, yeah, we can explain some maps of what we're doing. And there's also, for me, a deep need to kind of bow to the mystery of the body and not think that we know it all so much as we're coming here with regard and curiosity to listen and discover and then cultural somatics. Cultural somatics, the term, as I understand it, jointly arose from Resma Menachem, who's well known for our grandmother's hands. And looking at how personal trauma is couched inside of cultural trauma, systemic trauma. That book is looking at how race and racism exists in bodies, moves through bodies, that the bodies changing, transform the systems, as well as, of course, the system affecting and shaping the bodies. And so Resma as well as Tada Hazumi is another thinker and practitioner and healer and let's say, wizard that I believe that term kind of co rose with. And Tada and their contemporaries talk about cultural attachment and the cultural body that we are a part of, but also secure attachment to ancestors and to spirit and to the land, and that all of those are part of our body and our body moves with and through those bodies. For me, it brings in a real animist perspective that it's all bodies inside of bodies inside of bodies. And what shifts something on one layer or wherever we have access point on one layer, moves through the strata. This idea of bodies inside of bodies inside of bodies, for me is really key because they're always multiple, right? We're in this moment in time where the government body that we are inside of is really destructively engaging human bodies in a way that's immediate and direct and profound. And I know my tendency can be to link into the democracy now all of the news channels that are reminding me again and again how much violence, how much destructiveness is happening to bodies through the larger power body of the US government and all of the larger bodies of patriarchy that that is couched inside of. And it can be really easy to forget that I'm also here surrounded by air on the earth and the earth with its, you know, dreaming of humanity that has these much larger epochs where there is wellness in the midst of strife and challenge. And that I'm also couched inside of this ancestral body that has gone through periods of history that have been unthinkable and has brought both the challenges and the gifts of that along. So that's for me, one of the big gifts of cultural somatics is it's never just this moment. It's never just me in isolation. But the understanding in itself is a working against isolation as a symptom of trauma and looking how to bridge into what else exists. Where else is there room for context?
- [11:03]
A
I love that. I love the bodies and the bodies and the bodies. And I think it can be so easy, like you're saying, to be in the United States 2025 and to really tune into all of the pain bodies. But I really love that you brought that. That's just a part of existence. And there's so much existence that's a part of all those bodies getting bigger and bigger. In Ayurveda, I think about how even our own bodies, we have all these different sheaths of existence, like the physical sheath, the prana, the vital energy sheath, the mind sheath, the bliss sheath. There's all these different sheaths. And then I almost had this vis the sheaths and just getting bigger. There's the local community sheath and then the country sheath. And it's just like bodies and bodies and bodies and bodies and it just keeps on going out. So I love that sort of expanded view of how I normally think of the body. It's really helpful.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And it's not just onion layers, right? Like they're imbricated.
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A
Yes, exactly.
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B
There's like this one, but also this one. Yeah. So that when one of them is overwhelming or one of them just creates kind of confusion, or we get stuck in our rage cycles around what's happening. All of that's important and to have some agency of attention in that context. So I can say, oh wow, I'm stuck. Can I also remember this other body and see if there's movement there? See if there's something that allows me to be with this stuck places from more choice, more capacity.
- [12:43]
A
You just mentioned the term agency of attention. Could you explain that a little more? Because that's a very interesting phrase. I like that.
- [12:53]
B
Yeah. It's a phrase I coined that I use a lot. Came out of the somatic experiencing approach to how to be with ourselves. You know, we talk a lot in somatic Experiencing about resourcing and that there can be a negativity bias that we humans often have programmed into us to always pay attention to what's wrong, to what the problem is, what we want to fix or change. And you know, I think of the word fix and fixate and fixated, you're stuck. Those are all woven together. So if I notice I'm in that fixing mode and my attention is getting small and narrowing and this kind of furrowed brow directive plays, the idea of agency, of attention is I can choose to look at, well, what else is happening that touches that stuck place, where is there something that nourishes it or something that gives it more room so it can express. It's a little bit of like the bodyworker's idea of tensegrity that we're not going to work poking and digging into the pain point that's already inflamed and agitated. But we can go through the fascia web and offer movement in a nearby place or offer some warmth and care and presence and curiosity. And by bringing attention to that which can kind of surround and meet what's stuck in a good way, then there's the possibility that things can move. If we're to draw it back to this is just showing up for me now, if we're to draw back to, again, the political climate, it's like the work of Rebecca Solnit. That's not just saying, here's the problem, here's this horror, here's this thing that shouldn't be happening, here's wrong, wrong, wrong. But also saying, here are all these people doing all this great activism work, standing up, making their voice heard against power. Look at all of the people coming together. And this I like to think in terms of kind of fight, flight, freeze, survival responses. I feel like Rebecca Solnit and the activist world is really good at the mycelial response, at the friend response, at the solidarity response of like the little fish getting together to chase off the big fish. I'm weaving and winding a little bit like I do. But that's the idea of agency of attention is okay, something you, something isn't working. And how do we choose where we put our attention to move towards the possibility of change?
- [15:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. Two things came up for me when you were talking. One was it reminds me we have a saying in Ayurveda that prana follows attention. So our life force, that vital energy, is going to follow what we put attention on. And so, yeah, it's like we can put attention outside of us on our phones and in the news. Or we can put our attention inside our bodies, and then I like how what you were saying just brings it even deeper that even inside our bodies, we can put our attention on that pain point, or we can put our attention. We can bring that prana, that vital flow to the areas around it to try to create some healing there.
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B
Right, right.
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A
Yeah. And then I also, when you were talking, had the thought of how that relates to the cultural somatics. And it makes me think about the work of Adrienne Marie Brown with the pleasure activism, and how we can focus on our communities, on the good in our communities, on what brings us pleasure in order to be able to show up more fully for the harder work that needs to be done.
- [16:45]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Adrienne Brown's work is totally inspiring and totally another voice to the necessity of pleasure and being with what's good and right and coherent and alignment in order to be able to move from a deeper place as we mobilize change.
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A
And I know you have some work coming up, some group work that you're doing that brings authentic movement, in which I have talked about on the podcast before, but I love hearing different people's explanations of things. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what authentic movement is and when you combine that with the somatic experiencing and culture of somatics, what they have to offer each other.
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B
Yeah, great. So authentic movement, as it's often practiced, is either a duet or a group form where there's movers moving with their eyes closed. This is the more traditional mover with their eyes closed and a witness who is being with that person. It actually immediately brings us back to this conversation around how do we focus? How do we move our attention? I would say, for me, what supports rich authentic movement practice is we're not watching, we're not looking, we're not seeing. Okay, like object. What's this person doing? Oh, this person is crumbled up. They're having this kind of experience and projecting with our fixing or fixated gaze, the gift of the witness. The reason why we want to witness. There is, again, this coming out of isolation. It's another form of how do we give more space for the thing to move? How do we give it a context to exist in? How do we bring company to it? I have a colleague who recently translated the term witness. They put a little parenthesis H in there, so it's witness. So if I'm going to be in witness, it's about being with you. What happens when we have company. As we allow the impulses to arise, what happens if we drop meaning down into the layers of sensation and behavior in the body and trust the body's unfolding and allow the impulse of my shoulders wanting to rise, then my spine wants to curl into my hands are also squeezing harder and harder. And how do I, in my own body and my own moving body, how do I trust and get curious and witness what wants to happen and invite the whole spectrum and all of the textures of experience into that and all of the images that arise? And then how does that get supported? And do I get extra layers of that kind of layer within layer within layer? How do I get supported by the withness of another person?
- [19:55]
A
Yes. Great.
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B
Did I weave it back in?
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A
You did. You did. You did it. Yeah. And so what does that have to offer the somatic experiencing and cultural somatics in the work you do?
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B
Yeah. Great. So when I started this inquiry, I had no idea. I started leading online groups during the pandemic, and I knew in my own authentic movement practice the kind of maps that somatic experience offers and the frames had enriched my experience. But I couldn't quite articulate why. And some of the things I think I knew at the beginning and have gotten kind of fleshed out along the way. Authentic movement can be really accessible to a lot of people. I taught at colleges and universities, and I've taught in a lot of contexts where people don't have a movement background. And it can be a lot to ask someone to move for even five minutes, never mind 10, 15, 20 minutes with their eyes closed, without a task, without knowing what they're supposed to do, and then add to that someone looking at them can be a recipe for overwhelm for a lot of people. And so creating a space somatic experiencing skill is supporting people with overwhelm and helping them to be in relationship to their window of tolerance, to their own capacity, and to the choices that they can make to. To build and increase that capacity. So right from the first class, I say, okay, the tradition is leave your eyes closed. And somatic experiencing offers that. Orienting through the senses and building a relational context to where we are and taking in the textures and particularly what. What we're drawn to and what surrounds us is settling and supports greater capacity. So I play with that right from the start. And along with that, giving a tool when things get to be too much, it's also an invitation to come as you are, that there's not a right or wrong way to do this. That along with the tracking of sensation and image and emotion and movement that is central to the tradition of authentic movement. We can also just track the movement of perception. And because it's our body inside of another body that we're valuing just as much that we're moving with and in and through, then being with the movement or the stillness of that larger body is still movement. It is still a way to be in mindful awareness of my own body. So, you know, from there we. Throughout the eight week series, I've done six and eight week series with that. That's always an option to be eyes open, eyes closed. And then another key piece in somatic experiencing is the idea of resourcing, which we've, we've already touched on this idea of what can be a support to what's stuck and bringing that concept into the authentic movement practice. That, that there's a choice to be with the loudest thing, or you can make a choice to be with the thing that feels good with the thing that feels less dramatic and thus kind of takes longer. Or is a slower, quieter process perhaps, and is played with the mover naming through language a resource to their witness before starting and asking that witness almost to hold that for them. So, you know, we get kind of playful and we end up in a territory that's neither somatic experiencing nor authentic movement because it's kind of playing in how they interrupt and agitate and offer to each other.
- [24:08]
A
I love that. And yeah, I just relate so much. I have been practicing improvisational dance forms and things like authentic movement for a long time. And when you were talking, I was just thinking back to that first time of being in the studio with a friend and then being like, let's do authentic movement. And I was like, okay. And just feeling, what am I supposed to do here? This is so awkward. This person is just watching me. And like you said, it took a long time to really drop into that space and really start to let go of all of the noise of how I'm supposed to be doing things and actually just listen to my body. And I haven't thought about that in so long. And it's so good to remember that. And I love that you're offering this thing that feels like an easier access point into that space. And it sounds like what is created with this mashup of these different methods or techniques is something that's completely new. And, and I think that's the point of improvisation is that that new things emerge.
- [25:23]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's new and it's ancient and it's people being together with our bodies in a simple way. And it's incredibly complicated in what emerges. And it's just been stunning. I've done now two groups online during the Pand pandemic and then one group that then kind of most of those people continued into a second round. So kind of two series in person, and that's that group. You know, I'm so honored who shows up. There are people that are new to authentic movement. There's also people who facilitated in their own right or who are somatic experiencing practitioners in their own right. And at the end of that second round of my last in person group, I was going on parental leave and there was so much wisdom in the room and so much trust and care that had been cultivated. I just said, y' all don't need me. And they went and continued to practice on their own. And that's the greatest honor, the greatest acknowledgment of what we built of like, okay, I'm going to step away. And there's a group culture and mind and trust and stability and possibility that's been cultivated. So that's moving.
- [26:41]
A
Yeah, I think our world needs that. I think people are hungry for this right now. I'd love if you could talk a little bit about how your history as an improvisational dance maker and teacher has influenced your work and your practice of trauma renegotiation.
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B
Yeah, great. I mean, there's very blatant ways like this workshop where I'm just taking things that I love and inviting them to talk to each other. And then, yeah, I feel like I named it briefly in the beginning. Feels like the one on one work with clients supporting their attention to move through the dance of our own psyche. We're in a collaborative improvisation together, looking at their composition, their general patterns of the movement of their mind, habitual patterns, and then what else might be possible? And that's always, for me, part of the inquiry of improvisation. It's embodied questioning what's possible here? What does this moment allow for? What wants to happen? So I often name my movement teachers, my dance teachers, as I think I mentioned, as my SC teachers. I credit often need a little. Who was there in the origins of contact improv, who talks about thin slicing awareness? How big are the chunks of your awareness that you're moving through? You already know the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. What somatic experiencing might call coupling. Is this sensation coupled to, oh, that means I'm automatically going to get a migraine or is there a Way to thin slice the details of what's happening and make a little space to see what. What else could happen. And so that's. That's primary in successful practice of somatic experiencing. To get to something new, we need to discover what's a assumed conglomerate, what's an adherence that's moving together when it doesn't need to. Or Nancy Stark Smith, also often credited in the origins of Contact improv. She speaks a lot about improvisation and the place of the gap. And the gap is that place where you just don't know what's happening. You don't know where you are. You don't know what to do. Maybe it's a gap that's full of mental noise, or maybe it's a gap that's full of terror of like, what's going to happen next. People are looking at me. It's a freeze, essentially. And the wisdom she brings to that freeze is something's already happening, something's going to arise. And how do we inhabit the freeze? How do we let the freeze? That's. She doesn't use the term freeze. She used the term gap. How do we fill the gap and know that there's aliveness there, whatever its texture? And so that's the wisdom that somatic experiencing brings to frieze that if you can be in it uncoupled from the terror or the should or the shame or the guilt or whatever is making that texture. Maybe it's a texture of slowness or of emptiness or of coldness or stillness. If we can be in that place without the coupling of terror, shame, then it's just another texture. It's just another place that we get to discover. And with time and attention and curiosity, then it'll move.
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A
Yeah. The gap has been such a huge teaching for me from contact improvisation because I can tend to move quickly, both physically in my body and also in my life. And the gap can be really uncomfortable. And it's so amazing to be able to take that microcosm of being with the gap in a practice and then be able to notice how in my life I can be in the gap more and sit with the discomfort more. And then when you were talking, I was also thinking about how that concept is bodies and bodies and bodies and bodies. Because we can have that gap that's just a moment in our day where we're disoriented or not sure what to do next. Or we can have periods of time in our life where we feel that. And then I think we're in a lot of Ways experiencing that as a nation right now, this bigger cultural gap that we're in. So I love all of the weavings of this work.
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B
Yeah, yeah. We're in a major practice of how to keep being present in the unknown that probably has some of those freezy spaces in it for a lot of people. I think that's the intent of enacting chaos and confusion. So no one knows what to do is present as a conscious tactic by those trying to. To seed power. And there's also, you know, thank goodness the. The other protective responses, the. The fight response, showing up in a strong way. And. Yeah, we could spend a whole other podcast right on that for sure.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And yeah, one more thought I'm having around what my history brings to the therapeutic context. Part of what, at least I think all performers, and I hope many improvisers outside of performance, there's a building capacity to be with wider and wider energy states, whether that's the very slow, the very fast, the very big, the very small. And there's the building trust that we can be okay inside of those states and building trust in the improvisation, you know, say contact improvisation. There's building trust that our bodies know how to catch each other, how to catch ourselves, how to get to the next place safely. So I think my deep trust in other people's bodies and in the okayness of a wide range of what humans can be, how humans can be more than human, and that those energies move through us just is everything. When I'm with a client who doesn't know if they're safe and doesn't know if it's okay either to be seen in this, you know, context that feels really activating to them, or if they're going to get to the other side of it. So I think that's training that performance and improvisational dance offers of what I mean, it's trust in spirit, in terms of the everything is going to be okay. We'll get to another place. Everything is time contained and inherently transforms. And then it's. It's an embrace of the more than humanness that moves through humans that just says, you know, show up as you are. Whatever's coming out of you, we can hold that together. We can honor that as deep wisdom and we can get curious and playful with it, even if it's kind of ugly or funky or awkward. Embrace of awkwardness was the best contact improv lesson I ever got. That it's not about flow, it's not about doing some idea of something. It's just about Showing up for the awkwardness to see what else can emerge.
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A
I agree. Yeah. That sparked actually one other question because I'm an Ayurvedic practitioner and so much of Ayurveda is based on the elements. Could you talk a little bit how you use the elements in your somatic work?
- [34:56]
B
Love that question. Yeah. Again, this is a little bit of the cultural somatics that we are. You know, elements are in us and. And we are in an elemental world. That same colleague who mentioned the withness also named me recently. Yeah. Ancestors includes more than just our human ancestors. It includes fire and water, earth. Those are ancestors. They're something wisdoms that are part of us, that we have access to, that we belong to and with. So often people have really strong affinities towards different elemental qualities, either affinities or habitual patterns. You know, something is too hot and fiery, so it's scary. So what is the nourishment? What's the medicine that allows being with that fire? Whether making it safe enough that it can have enough room to shoot out of the body and be as big as it is, or what's the thing that suits the dryness that leaves in its place? Yeah. What is the resource of being submerged in water? Just the thought of it allows for resting that someone might not have access to when they're experiencing themselves as, you know, an isolated body on top of the body of the earth. Right. That's a really different mythology. Or. Or even to take it more direct to something that is, in fact happening right now is we are surrounded by sky, we are surrounded by air that many of us perceive as nothing, as a, you know, the empty filler between the objects that are the important things. But if we elementally allow. Here I am with every contour of my body, even as I'm moving inside of substance, inside of this collective extracellular matrix that we call air when it's, you know, above land as opposed to water in the ocean. If we're inside of that, and we've not been born into a body on top of a body with a bunch of bodies around it, but if we're born from a watery place into a place that our entire life is gonna embrace us and hold us, that's just. That's working with elements. That's working with a completely different cosmology of our body's place inside of an elemental world.
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A
I love that so much. Yeah, that's. That's Ayurveda.
- [37:40]
B
Great. Tell me more.
- [37:43]
A
Well, in Ayurveda, we work a lot with the elements. Everybody's body is made up of the elements. But some people's bodies may have more of certain elements than others. And we're always trying to find balance. The balance is coming back to our particular set point. But just like what you're saying, if we have a lot of fire, we're either trying to work with how we move that fire out of our body or how we work with nourishing or cooling the fire so that we can be in relationship with it. And space is so important. Space is, you know, the air, the space. That's where. That's where the prana is. We get our vital life force from breathing in the air, from breathing in the space. And I think about space a lot in the body. If we didn't have space, we wouldn't have any structure. There wouldn't be any form. I think about the space of our rib cage and our pelvic bowl, the space in our cells, the space in our arteries and veins, all of the places where there's space. It's not just nothing. It's like what's creating the form of everything that we experience. And when you're talking about the water, water element is associated with what we call kapha dosha. And when I think about kapha dosha, kapha dosha is that grounding, sweet, nourishing, stable presence. So imagining yourself held in that water, held by the kapha dosha, it's like that safety, that sweetness, that. That nourishment that's there. So, yeah, I. I love that.
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B
Yeah, I love your naming. We have our constitutional, elemental organization, right? We have the place where each of us feels kind of the most fully ourselves. And that has a different shape to it, a different kind of quality and movement.
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A
And.
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B
Yeah, you made me think of one of my SC teachers, and I don't know who this was, but they would talk about the fight, flight and freeze responses and the different things that those tend to want. Again, this is a map. So it's always wrong somewhere that the fight response wants to be met. And the shape of it, as I understand it, is. It's really yang. It's really rising and filling and moving out into space, getting to take up space and kind of in the rising and filling, of course, there's also a rooting down. So often that outward moving has a fire and electricity or, you know, an image. It can be any element, but that shape is the really consistent thing in it. And then flight energy wants space to go, right? It wants to be able to, you know, not Be have the butterflies stuck in the stomach, but so that the butterflies have the whole meadow to flutter about in so they can get organized and kind of makes sense when there's enough room at the. The mind movement instead of kind of bumping up of all inside of a small skull. It wants like the streak of lightning to zoom across the the prairie to get to safety or that freeze energy once, once time. And it wants company. It's that, that kapha energy you're describing. It's.
- [41:09]
A
Yeah.
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B
Wants that withness and the foreverness and the trust that there's no rush, there's no obligation, there's enough time to not be ready to keep at bay and then eventually to warm up and to be with. So yeah, when I hear those like they've got shapes to them and those shapes can be really tactilely felt and through image, through element, through how elements move.
- [41:39]
A
Right, right. I think about that a lot. The correlations between the stress response and our what we call the doshas. And yeah, just what you're, what you're saying, what we have called the fight response, that moving towards response is a lot of pitta energy. And yeah, the moving away response is a lot of vata energy and the freeze response is that kapha energy. And just the same way that with kapha dosha in our physical body, the way that we pacify it is with some warmth, a little bit of movement can help to move. That's how we work with the free state. I love all the correlations because really Ayurveda, it's just looking at the world and saying we are nature and what's outside of us is also inside of us. And these are all the building blocks and matrixes of what makes up our existence. And so of course calling it the stress response is a different way of saying these are how these elements work. This is how the building blocks of what life is created from interacts with each other. So it's cool.
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B
Totally. Yeah. No one's going to look out at nature and say, you know, too much storming and you blooming too early.
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A
Right.
- [43:01]
B
It's this, this fabrication, the separation that western culture, the culture I'm of has. You know, it's that loss of connection and this attempt to fit things into much smaller acceptable boxes that pathologizes the movement of energy, that pathologizes what is. You know, some years there's huge amounts of whatever it is, whether it's seed pods or storms and snow. This year there is so much snow and we don't make nature wrong for that right years. It's just the grieving doesn't stop and the bigness of what's felt is really freaking big.
- [43:45]
A
Yeah.
- [43:46]
B
And so how do we build capacity to be with things as they are? And we don't want to get lost in them and overwhelmed in them, but you know, we want to welcome them as part of nature. And again to bow to Nancy Stark Smith and her wisdom. Like she says, how do we see each other as a flower? How do we bring that viewing, that embrace that welcome of natureness, our of the same thingness. So, yeah, I love that I got a little emotional, getting frustrated with how much trauma is just the box that society puts us in.
- [44:24]
A
Right. In the resistance that we have because of the lack of time, space, awareness we have in our society. The resistance we can have to just be with the things for whatever reasons because I don't have enough time to just sit with my grief. I don't have a safe space to sit with my grief. You know, all these.
- [44:45]
B
Yeah.
- [44:46]
A
All these things.
- [44:47]
B
Yeah. The cultural tools to sit with. Yeah, yeah. And there's, you know, whatever emphasis on industrious productivity that we need to keep going in a very thin range of what is acceptable as a contributing member of society.
- [45:03]
A
Right, right.
- [45:04]
B
It's hard to keep doing. It's hard to keep that up.
- [45:07]
A
It is, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why your work and my work is important right now in this world that we live in. So can you give the details and anything else that you want to share about the series that's coming up?
- [45:23]
B
So it's an in person, eight week series called Web Nest, Earth Home, Somatic Practices for Woven Bodies. It's a long name, but I like it.
- [45:37]
A
I like it too.
- [45:38]
B
Thank you. The first two weeks of the series, welcome drop ins. So that's April 9th and 16th and then I'm asking for commitment after that, which doesn't mean you need to be at every single session. We all have lives we need to live, but there's a commitment to ongoing participation in the group and building with that group of people. It's happening in Greenfield, Massachusetts at community yoga and it's Wednesday mornings, 9:30 to 11:30. I think that's it for logistics.
- [46:13]
A
Awesome.
- [46:14]
B
There's a, you know, sliding scale and then I really want to encourage people. If this work feels valuable to you and that sliding scale is the bottom of that is beyond your capacity, then just reach out to me and let's figure something out. I want to be with people who want to Be there.
- [46:31]
A
Yeah.
- [46:32]
B
And again, we live inside of this body called capitalism, but we can find spaces to also live in a body called valuing community and collectivity and ritual.
- [46:44]
A
Yes, yes, yes, yes. And are you accepting clients for one on one work? And do you work in person online?
- [46:53]
B
Yeah, both. I am accepting clients and I do a lot of work online. It's amazing what's possible online, even as our work is in bodies with bodies and I have space to see clients in person in Northampton and in Greenfield.
- [47:11]
A
Awesome. Yay. Is there anything else that you would like to feel like needs to be shared before we close?
- [47:20]
B
Just gratitude. What a delight to be exploring these ideas with you and yeah, I just appreciate re meeting in this way.
- [47:30]
A
Me too. It's such a joy and pleasure to get to share these words with a body that I've danced with so often.
- [47:40]
B
Yeah. Yeah. We have known each other primarily through dancing, it seems like, and. And it's nice to build some new layers, new ways of knowing.
- [47:49]
A
Yes. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you so much for coming on.
- [47:53]
B
Thank you.
- [48:00]
A
Hi, it's me again. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate you being here. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and if you want to connect with Daniel, I'll have all of his information in the show notes and I hope you have a wonderful week. Hey there. Thanks again for listening. I want to let you know about a couple of resources that I'm offering if you're interested in going a little deeper. I have a deep breath meditation as well as a nourished for resilience workbook. There'll be links in the show notes if you're interested in checking them out. And I'm also currently offering one on one coaching around nervous system health, self care, resilience. I like to weave in Ayurveda herbs, somatics if it makes sense, as well as ayurvedic consultations. So you. If. If you're interested in seeing if we're a good fit, I have a schedule for booking an exploratory call in the show notes. Hope to connect with you soon. Have a great week, Sam.