Body As Wise Healer

01/15/2025

Hello Dear Community, I invite you to a nourishing voyage this summer - a residential retreat on Salt Spring Island - movement, somatics, and expressive arts to support Vitality, Voice, and Vision: Earth As Body Song. Gathering together to feel and move with the hum of the murmuring deep....Today is the last day of the early early bird rate. There are limited spots for this voyage. Perhaps you might weave in?

Dance art and writing for vitality, voice, and vision, a salt spring island retreat body songs creative play in community

12/17/2024

windy magic
for those who long to see the ocean

12/08/2024

10/08/2024

The Booking Portal is Now Open for this residential retreat on Salt Spring Island, Summer 2025.

We are living in turbulent and painful times. Many of us are exhausted and needing solace, needing time and space to touch the Land and feel our hearts beating together. Even in the darkest of times there is a vitality current that moves through Life into form. Between each one of us is a vibrant ecotone yearning for unfolding - a wildly fertile place to kindle and strengthen creative life force. Come, gather around this generative fire and collaborate in the making of supple magic.

From July 31st-August 4th, 2025, we will gather at this beautiful venue to nourish our vitality, strengthen voice, and spark the creative callings that long to emerge into clearer and focused shapes. Movement, art, writing, somatic inquiry, playfulness, spaciousness, deep relations with Earth and Sky, resonant listening and quietude.

Salt Spring Island is gorgeous, and easily accessible from Victoria and Vancouver. Forested with majestic Old Cedars, Hemlock, and Douglas Fir, salal and ferns, and colourful Arbutus, this Island is a gem.

Stowel Lake Farm provides a lush setting that is steeped in intentional care through permaculture, bio-dynamic farming, and organic agriculture. The Land feels loved there and the deeply artistic community is welcoming and offers a place for restoration of soul, heart, mind, and body. The lodgings are cozy, the vegetarian food is delicious, and the studio space is Filled with light. There are cozy nooks to gather into for solitude or conversations with others, and trails, meadows, and beaches for wandering.

This retreat is a creative cauldron to nourish deeply. Folks who care for others need nourishment of depth. Folks on the receiving end of microaggressions and assaults to dignity need nourishment of depth. Folks who feel the profound pain of these times need nourishment of depth. Folks feeling called to step more fully into their own wisdom currents need nourishment of depth.

The door is open to step in, to tend our instinctive and improvisational creativity in a loving collective rooted in magic, in brave space, the arts, Q***r praxis, and love of Earth.

Dance art and writing for vitality, voice, and vision, a salt spring island retreat body songs creative play in community

07/03/2024

dear friends, these are times full of grief, full of fear, full of suffering. Here is a little beauty for the day, the song The Lost Words Blessing, whose lyrics are written this way:

THE LOST WORDS BLESSING
COMPOSER & COPYRIGHT
Original song by Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter, Jim Molyneux, Kerry Andrew.

RECORDING

LYRICS
Enter the wild with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you travel far from heather, crag and river
May you like the little fisher, set the stream alight with glitter
May you enter now as otter without falter into water

Look to the sky with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you journey on past dying stars exploding
Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light
And in the dead of night my darling,
find the gleaming eye of starling
Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter

Walk through the world with care, my love
And sing the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you stumble through machair sands eroding
Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing
Let the selkie swim you deeper, oh my little silver-seeker
Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker
And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus
And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home

Spell Songs is a musical evolution of both The Lost Words & The Lost Spells books by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator Jackie ...

05/13/2024

With so much suffering happening in our world right now, it makes sense if you are feeling grief, numb, angry, heartbroken, scared, flat, collapsed, activated, overwhelmed. It's very painful to be witness to profound suffering while being unable to prevent that suffering. We are resonant beings, who feel deeply with one another. The level of collective suffering is very very high.

When I am feeling grief, overwhelm, or fear, I notice I find some very deep heart-tending through being with living Earth, with bodies of water, with plants, visiting with small elements of Earth up close. I wonder if this practice might be helpful for you also?

05/13/2024

When we exhale to the end of our breath flow, we relax our body mind, calm the nervous system, help our muscles to find more supple states, release perseveration in our thoughts, find a little more spaciousness and ease. It's amazing how frequently we humans hold our breath, or breathe only a little. Perhaps it would feel good to try exhaling a few times out to the end of your breath flow, slowing and lengthening the exhalation as you go.

03/31/2024

“Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.”— David Abram

photos of the Land in the Lekwungan, Sc'ianew (Cheanuh), and T'sou-ke First Nations

02/28/2024

This sweet one. Dogs are so wise. Maya is a natural therapy dog, always interested and curious and caring when someone in the family is feeling down. Just today, as I was thinking about climate change and feeling sorrow she came over and gave me a very long hug. May we all be so fortunate to be hugged when we want to be hugged.

02/28/2024

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Training For Trauma Themes Coming UP!!
Hello dear colleagues. Would you like to learn an effective somatic methodology for healing trauma that is buoyant, improvisational, kind, titrated, and creative, rooted in wise nourishing principles (such as nonviolence, organicity, and mindfulness) as well as contemporary neuroscience? Jacqueline Compton and Katrina Curry, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Trainers, are holding a training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in Toronto, starting in the Spring (April 10th). This 3 module adventure is an opportunity to learn experientially within a kind, welcoming cohort, through social justice praxis and creative, relational methods.

You are welcome to visit our website to learn more:

Weaving a Gathering Place Support for therapists’ personal and professional development.We offer resonant collaborative teaching and mentoring rooted in improvisational creative arts, social justice praxis, and relational ecology. • liberatory praxis • collaborative arts • playfulness • mi...