THE WILD SOUL MOVEMENT

I wrote the first edition of this toward the end of October 2019. At that time I was reflecting on the immense amount of challenges, complexity, and volatility in the world.

I revised it in September of 2020 – when the collision of an upcoming US Presidential election, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter Movement made the world feel even more challenging, complex, and volatile than I could have imagined not even a year prior. 

It was clear that our capacities were being stretched on every level – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. 

But since the Earth hadn’t given out on us yet, I trusted that we must be meant to be here, working it out and getting through it.

The questions I was  asking in 2019, remained relevant in 2020:

How do we thrive? How do we feel free and find joy? 

How do we avoid being mired in hustling, struggling, or just getting by?

I believe in paradox and that we can hold many things at once. Even amidst frustration, stress, feeling overwhelmed, fears, doubts, or “not being where we want to be” – which we can maintain passion, hunger, enthusiasm, and excitement for living?”

You can’t find the answers to these questions in your mind or in a text. The answers to life’s deepest questions always have, and always will live in the body.

The answers to life’s deepest questions always have, and always will, live in the body.

You don’t learn this growing up, because you’re too busy learning to pick your body apart in an effort to get it to be pleasing, desirable, or perform – likely for someone else’s benefit or approval.

It’s just how most women are socialized. This orientation is practically in the air you breathe. 

The specifics of the beliefs and inner dialogue about the body may vary, but the result is the same – living disconnected from your body, which also means disconnected from your soul.

This looks like having no idea how magical and wise you truly are and lacking tools, practices, and skills to tap into your innate power, magic, divinity, and wisdom. 

Since nothing exists in isolation, these beliefs about the body trickle into other life areas, too.

Lacking a connection to your body can also translate into lacking:

• Intimacy, closeness, and support in your relationships,
• Fulfillment in your role as a parent or in your career,
• Health, vitality, vibrancy, passion, joy, meaning, purpose, or fun in your life as a whole.

In 2013, when I shifted my work entirely towards helping women get out of their heads and into their bodies, A LOT of women started asking me, frustrated, But how?!!  And why?!  I live in my head!! Logic is important!

Yes…and!

It’s not about abandoning the mind or logic. It’s about ALSO exploring the wisdom of your body.

When you can get that dance down between the body’s wisdom and the mind’s logic – life gets so much better. Even when it’s already good! 

Tapping into the wisdom of your body helps you develop resilience, and emotional literacy, maturity, and intelligence.

It helps you develop discernment and self-trust, cultivate inner freedom and authority, and embrace your full-fledged power, creativity, essence, and WHOLENESS.

If you know how to perceive your body’s unique language of the senses, your body will show you patterns, habits, people, places, and things that trigger both desirable and undesirable emotions. 

You can process and release these emotions through your body without getting stuck.

Your body will tell you what to move towards and away from, AND what to say yes and no to based on what kind of energy you have available. This is why the benefits of embodiment work are endless.

Your body is constantly giving you valuable, and even essential information. 

Through the simple concepts and practices in this guide, you can experience more pleasure, joy, aliveness, vibrancy, wonder, awe, sacredness, depth, appreciation, truth, and magic in your life. 

You can come home to yourself.

It is possible to meet yourself in your wholeness.

You can find the self-confidence and faith to face uncomfortable things, be who you really are, and do what you need to do no matter what’s going on in the world around you.

You might not want all the things, but you need to know just how much is available to you so you can choose what you do want and get to work cultivating it.

I’m excited for you…getting into your body is going to open up so much.

They each work well on their own and they also combine for great results.

Concepts are the kind of things you sometimes hear people say as if they’re easy and no big deal but you may want to scream, “HOW!!??” or, “WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!” 

Ask me how I know…? 

The first concept (Softening) was suggested to me back in 2011 at the end of a retreat and I remember feeling so pissed off because I didn’t know how to do it. Then I felt shame for not knowing how to do it. Like it was something women were supposed to know how to do and I was less of a woman for not knowing, or because it didn’t come naturally to me.

Let me tell you something…

The first three concepts (Softening, Observing, and Feeling) come naturally to all of us as babies. Life “deconditions” us from what we come in knowing. 

The fourth (Naming) requires some cognitive and emotional development.

So again, the value of this guide is to give you tools, practices, insights, and understanding to reacquaint yourself with what is in your human nature, and more specifically your nature as a woman. 

Just because something is in your original nature, doesn’t mean it won’t feel foreign to you right now.

Don’t beat yourself up, take it personally, feel ashamed, or like less of a woman if any of this feels foreign to you before you practice it a bunch.

We’re really not taught to honor or preserve these natural things. 

That changes now…

Breathing

What is it?

It feels kind of silly to define breathing since you’re doing it right now and you do it all the time without even thinking about it. 

Breathing is the process of inhaling and exhaling air, either through the nose or the mouth, to get oxygen into the lungs and distribute it throughout the cells, organs, and tissues of the body via your blood. 

Breathing also has enormous healing benefits when engaged for those purposes. It affects your emotions, your nervous system, your response time to things, the quality of your responses, and so much more. 

Getting started:

I very often get asked in interviews where I would tell people to start with embodiment and I always say the breath. Three deliberate breaths, specifically. Deliberate meaning, breathe slowly, take your time, and pay attention to the quality and sensations of your breath. 

Since this is so simple, let’s try it right now.

Take three deliberate inhales – allow your belly to soften, relax and fill up with air, and then exhale the air all the way out without forcing or pushing it, kind of like you are a balloon that’s deflating naturally.

Then notice how you feel after.

Calmer?

Lighter?

More present?

Did your emotions get amplified? (sometimes breathing will bring our attention to what needs our attention most!)

Ideas for deeper practice:

In Wild Soul Movement I guide people through intentional breathing like this…

Allow the in-breath to massage your insides, fill you all the way up, breathing as if you can fill your entire stomach, all the way down into your pelvic bowl with air, then slowly and gently release the breath, imagining that on its way out it is taking any tension, tightness, stuckness, negativity, constriction or anything else you don’t want to hold in your body.

Repeat this a few more times, each time intending to create more internal space in your body and release anything you don’t need or want in your system.

When people need to get grounded, I suggest they do this kind of breathing with their feet on the ground, either seated or standing and on the out-breaths imagine the air traveling all the way down the body, through the legs and out the bottoms of the feet, rooting and grounding them into the earth.

(If you’re a few floors up or not directly on the ground, use your imagination – it still works!)

Give that a try and notice how you feel.

I also love the 6-3 Breathing Practice that I learned from a teacher many years ago. You inhale for a count of six, hold for three, exhale for a count of six, hold for three. Repeat this three to five times, again, to ground or simply drop into your body, get present, and connect with yourself. 

How to apply BREATHING to the four concepts:

Treat your breath as an exploration of your inner terrain. While it’s not physiologically possible, through your attention and energy, as you breathe you can imagine directing your breath throughout your body.

So if the intention is to soften, use your breath to soften by “breathing into” the areas you want to soften. One by one, inch by inch, breath by breath. Close your eyes. Take it slowly.

Then, through observing, notice when and where the softening occurs. 

Breathe more…

See how you feel, what comes up, what sensations –important note here, you don’t need to analyze anything, just feel it. 

Breathe more…

Can you inhale more deeply and exhale more fully? Or just slow down your breathing and allow yourself to feel every delicious sensation of breath and being alive?

Again, practice, explore experiment.

And finally, through this exploration of breath, name the experience in your body, again, no thinking, just knowing, through the softening, observing, and feeling.

Where was there tension, tightness, stress, constriction, or even pain? 

How does it feel after intentionally using your breath to soften, observe, and feel?

Be descriptive and remember to touch on all the feels…sensations, states of being, and emotions, where applicable.

Sensual movement

What is it?

As a person with a long history in fitness and athletics, I had no idea sensual movement existed because I was only familiar with movement associated with the sports I played and the fitness classes and exercises I did, all of which were based on performance or appearance. 

I had never used the words embodiment, discernment, or boundaries prior to my late 20s…and when it came to self-trust? Well, I had some natural instincts towards that BUT, the “self” I was trusting was not one who was living embodiment. 

I knew dance was available but had never associated it with sensuality because that was not something any of the women in my family talked about or embodied. 

I didn’t know free dance or movement was a thing either. For years, I really thought all dance was either choreographed or people just “knew the steps.” 

To be honest, I spent most of my life into my twenties thinking sensuality meant sexuality without realizing that of course, the two can overlap in beautiful ways, but sensuality is a powerful thing all on its own.

I consider sensual movement to be any kind of movement that is done specifically to engage with and increase, your perception of your senses.

The focus isn’t on form but on feeling in the body and finding reasons to love your body. 

By focusing on a greater experience of your senses you become re-attuned to all of the ways your body uses your senses to communicate with you and deliver important information.

The main point of sensual movement is not to express any kind of sexuality or connect to that – the point is sensuality for the sake of consciously inhabiting your body and enjoying a fuller, more alive experience of it.

Sensual movement shifts the majority of your attention to your feelings and sensations. Most people spend most of their lives with their minds running the show, bodies along for the ride.

Sensual movement helps to relax the mind and give you the experience of the physical body being in the front seat, driving the car and the thoughts being along for the ride. 

Sensual movement can and often does bring up emotions, allow you to feel them and move through them or move them through you. (More on this in the next section…)

If you want the truth, 

I’ll tell you the truth:

Listen to the secret sound, 

the real sound,

which is inside you.

-Kabir

Getting started:

Before you even get into moving, you can start by engaging your senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

More specifically, approach it with the intention of delighting yourself through your five senses. (Hint: This is one really easy way to experience more joy in your life, daily).

Relish in the richness of connection, tenderness, beauty, awe, and appreciation that instantly becomes available when you intentionally work with your senses. This is embodiment!

Ideas for deeper practice:

SLOW DOWN.

Everything listed above can be enjoyed even more when done slowly. You can also combine things. A former podcast guest called this “sense drenching,” a term I instantly fell in love with. It’s essentially when you engage all five senses at once. 

MOVE YOUR BODY.

If you want to get into the movement part, I recommend starting by slowing down doing anything you normally do…obviously when you have time for it. It sure would be pretty counterproductive if you were in a hurry to try slowing down at that time!

Walking is a great example. When I first got into sensual movement in 2010, I was living in New York City. I’d put on some music that turned on my senses and go for a slow walk. As you can imagine, not all of my fellow New Yorkers were feeling my practice!

The types of movement I use in the Wild Soul Movement practice that is easiest for people to connect with immediately are:

• Circling
• Gentle stretching
• Shaking
• Self-touch and massage.

Each of these movement forms can be done with, or to, any area of the body that feels safe and accessible for you. 

For circling, experiment first with the hips, shoulders, neck, wrists, and ankles. 

For gentle stretching and shaking, arms and/or legs are great, to begin with, then feel into anywhere else that might want to be stretched or shaken out.

And finally, areas to begin applying self-touch and massage and really feel a difference are your forearms, head (the whole top, temples, and jawline especially), belly, and thighs.

If you’re especially anxious or in your head, a lot, any movement, touch, or attention that you can send to the lower regions of your body – meaning hips or below, is extra helpful for grounding. 

As with any kind of movement you want to be mindful of any injuries, limitations, or conditions that might inhibit movement and work with them. 

An important reminder here: this is never about beating yourself up for what you can’t do. Wild Soul Movement always invites you to focus on and relish in what you can do. 

The best part about sensual movement is there’s no right or wrong way to do it, it’s literally based on what you can do and what feels good in your body. 

Sensual movement lends itself beautifully to combining the four concepts:

• Softening,
• Observing,
• Feeling,
• Naming.

Observing and softening always go hand in hand, and once you do those it’s much easier to feel and name.

With sensual movement, I recommend slow gentle movements wherever you feel tension, tightness, stress, constriction, pain, or stuckness.

Circle, gently stretch, shake, massage the area if you can reach.

Sensual movement also combines well with the breathing practices…you can do both simultaneously, or focus more on one at a time. I love to notice how much more easily I can breathe after moving a bit. So try alternating a movement with more intentional focused breathing.

I also recommend not overthinking the concepts, just exploring the practices, and seeing what happens.

THAT’S A WRAP! HOW DID YOU DO?

Did you try some of the concepts and practices?

What did you notice?

I’d love to hear from you. Or, join us in the Embodied Living Center and put it all together for your own deep, thorough, and integrated self-love, healing, wholeness, and liberation!