BODY

A celebration of sensation, presence, and embodied wisdom—where movement, pleasure, and instinct ground you in the here and now, making knowing feel alive.

Laura Alyn Ornelas

One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusingly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind.

There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the

Slow down. We’re not meant to move this fast. We’ve developed all these technologies—cars, planes, rockets, the internet—where everything happens at high speed. But evolutionarily, our species isn’t built for this pace. We’ve created a speed in the world that our bodies, minds, and spirits aren’t truly functional at.

-Alexandra Beller

39. TRUSTING

One of the biggest things I try to help adults recover is the freedom of their head from their spine, which I think also liberates our thinking and perception. There’s so much curiosity and divergent thinking when we let the head move freely. There’s a somatic practice called the Alexander Technique, and its whole goal is simply to free your head

As part of the CMA, I studied something called Bartenieff Fundamentals. I describe it as the user manual for the human body. The human body is like an appliance you’ve had in your house your whole life—it works fine. You know what it does. There are buttons you’ve never figured out, but you don’t feel like you necessarily need them. It’s fine.

Then

There’s something called authentic movement. If you’re in a safe space and feel emotionally safe, you close your eyes and let your body do exactly what it wants. You’re not thinking, “Is this pretty?” or “Would somebody think it’s artistic?” Nothing like that. You’re not judging—just letting your body do the next thing, and the next, and the next.

Our intuition is actually our sixth sense. But we don’t have access to it in a profound way—not the way we do, if we’re privileged enough, with our other five senses. Intuition isn’t at that level for most people. But I think, as a species, it could be, if we were nurtured differently.

The five senses can help you access the sixth. When you turn

So, in America, with our education system and this capitalist, productivity-oriented culture, I feel like we raise children with a bias toward outer metrics rather than inner metrics.

We don’t really educate children to listen to themselves, and we don’t create spaces that honor their inner experiences. So we’re raised missing a certain sense—and

The type of dance I do is more metaphorical, an inner narrative. It’s my body being expressive. I think it does mean something, but I don’t want everyone to have the same story. I want them to feel, in their own bodies, that something important is happening. I want it to make them feel something—and they can create whatever story comes from what