Shiné: mind/body/spirit

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Shiné: mind/body/spirit

Yoga & somatic practices for centering, with Katy Hawkins at Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting Live classes: katyhawkins.com
Recorded classes: movingpoetics.com

07/08/2025

Aw man… love it when teachers are off for the summer and come home to practice! These two happen to also be yoga teachers - who I met in yoga teacher training back in 2006 😍

07/08/2025

Wednesday restorative yoga is for folk who want very few words. Just rest & music & touch. Grab your spot for tomorrow night - last chance to get in on this luscious series till September (all other Wednesdays are full).
6:30-8pm
Registration info here: http://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

07/03/2025

Yep, classes run as usual today!
9:30 flow
11am gentle
Class details: http://www.katyhawkins.com/classes.html

07/02/2025

2 rooms left for September's Ancestral Healing Retreat on the Eastern Shore (September 19-21):
-King room with private full bath & private balcony overlooking the pond (pictured below)
-King & double bed with shared hall bath
Are you joining us?
Check out retreat info here: http://www.katyhawkins.com/retreats.html

More about our work in Ancestral Healing:

Before colonialism and Christianization, we all had rich and complex cultural traditions for deepening our relationship to nature, the more-than-human realm, and the wisdom gleaned from embodied and ritual practices. What if we get curious about these lost traditions of movement, song, and trance, and the states of perception they invited? Could we build inroads to experiencing modes of consciousness that heal the fear-based patterns that we've learned from domination culture?

Together we'll explore how we might awaken parts of us long quieted, by engaging somatic practices of rhythm, repetition, and soul-spelunking, to open ourselves to ancestral memory and repair. These emergent strategies for listening in new ways will refuse the overculture's labels for intuitive and somatic awareness as irrational and weird. Whole-self practices have been suppressed for a reason. Reviving them holds potential for de-assimilation from control, individualism, emotional numbing, and contempt for vulnerability. But - but!- in somatic work we're operating from more than our disdainful repudiation of a set of vices we've intellectually identified as shameful. We are devoting our whole self to something else. We're giving our bodies and minds to practices that shift our way of being into reverence for land, full embodied and emotional expression, and authentic relating.

It's worth saying that this retreat is not some kind of ancestral cosplay for those oblivious to or in denial about the harms perpetuated by systems of oppression and how we might materially benefit from them. This work is not blind to the nuances of complicity and how we are impacted disproportionately by these systems based on our identities. There's no claim to innocence here. And this retreat is for BIPOC and q***r and trans and neurospicy folk. It's for those who have put time into reckoning with white supremacy culture and its continued impact; and are hungry for more experimental modes of inquiry. If you want to co-create relational, embodied practices that interrupt inherited patterns, open us to what has been lost, and imagine new ways of being together, it's for you.

06/25/2025

Thank you for your capital-P Presence at our sweet solstice celebration, beloved Shiné folks. Here are 2 new moon blessings for you today:

“Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it’s impossible to think at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.
In my own worst seasons, I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learn to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.” - Mary Oliver

“We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers. …For every forebrain solemnly cataloguing the facts of a harsh landscape, there’s a rush of intuition behind it, crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.” - Barbara Kingsolver

06/22/2025

REST. MUSIC. TOUCH. CONNECTION.
JULY 9, 16, 23, 30 (no class July 2nd), 6:30-8pm
June filled up as quickly as May, so snag your spot for July! As we’ll suspend this series in August and spots are limited, you’ll want to register early for July Restoratives, devoted to stillness and hands-on TLC. We’ll hold for 3-4 minutes simple yoga poses (supine or seated), with lots of hands-on attention from me and not a lot of words. Just the sounds of soothing music and doors open to the beautiful summer breezes, at least until the bugs arrive. To accommodate travel plans, we’ve added an option to sign up for fewer than 4 weeks for a reduced price. Check out the workshops page of katyhawkins.com for details☀️

06/18/2025

This Thursday we'll feel our way into the consonance of Juneteenth falling right alongside the sun cresting at the height of its power. If you're intrigued, here's a little more. Solar fire, somatically speaking, is said to be manifest in the circular current of digestion/transmutation. We are all called to metabolize righteous anger into action and tend the flames to keep our passion alive. Deliberate, discerned action is a way of processing and metabolizing righteous anger, putting it to good use. My own model for this is the Quaker charge to speak truth to power, giving a place for anger inside spiritual practice. To be clear: anger is not hate, and is not an antonym for love. And although many spiritual traditions consider love another name for God, in Quaker thinking, another synonym is added: Truth. What is true (early Quakers called themselves "Friends of the Truth") is all-encompassing. Following this associative yellow brick road: Quakers believe that if we behave in accordance with Truth as it is revealed to us, then as we love, so we act. Rage teaches us when and where. Maybe Juneteenth, in this peak moment when we experience the sun's brightest, most burning fiery clarity, invites us to get gutsy in exploring our own anger so that we can speak our own truth to power.

The chapter of Thinking Feelingly devoted to Juneteenth explores two poems -- "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr" by June Jordan and "Surrender" by Gbenga Adesina -- that place anger in the body in really different ways and locations. We could engage this work for ourselves, from our own interoceptive compass, and find where it lives in us. Can those of us who have been socialized for comfort distinguish between the tummy-burbling of a threatened ego (Ross Gay calls this his "sad little annoyance monster") and the knot in our belly when our gut tells us something is really wrong? Can we develop metaphors for the relationship of anger and grief, and how we experience each in our bodies, so we can get to know these signals and be more ready to act on them?

The "Practice" section of Thinking Feelingly offers a few strategies for this work, one of which is what Resmaa Menakem calls "Warning and Warding." I learned this from Menakem in an Embodied Social Justice certification program, and in a particularly intense week of Bayo Akomolafe's "We Will Dance with Mountains," I was inspired to see him engaging this practice, defying the expectations that we all remain seated and still in our little zoom boxes. Animal pacing, growling, widening our eyes, even baring our teeth can tap us into our gut felt sense of anger. This week, right on the heels of No Kings Day, might be an excellent time for engaging this practice of Warning and Warding. And once we've felt it in our bodies, we could take advantage of the bright sun's ability to shine a light into the dark shadows to "soul scribe" our inner experience of rage. A writing practice that includes the body's intelligence is presented in Menakem's most recent book, The Quaking of America, using the acronym VIMBA: vibrations (any felt charge or energy), images (memories, fantasies, or visions), meanings (like explanations, connections, stories), behaviors (what the body does, or wants to do but doesn't), affect (emotions), and sensations (pressure, tightness, temperature, or numbness, for example). Writing from all these centers will move your pen differently.

Come circle up with us on Thursday to engage these somatic and writing practices for exploring what your body knows of anger, to discern where it wants to take you. And don’t forget to bring an object for our altar to the sun’s piercing, clarifying light!!

05/26/2025

What a beautiful day!! Come celebrate with us☀️

05/25/2025

It’s tomorrow! Bring peeps… mats & props provided - no need to sign up, just drop in ☀️

05/23/2025

Come celebrate Shiné’s birthday 🎉
Raji has been my musical soul brother since Shiné’s opening more than a decade ago. We’ve done so many social justice benefits together that I feel like i can kind of sense the where he’s going, musically, and we can just ride the flow together. Hope you’ll come out - $25 bday gift suggested, mats and props provided, chairs available, EveryBody welcome ☀️

02/17/2025

Classes run as usual on Presidents Day. At Shiné we circle up and dive down within - together. We synchronize our movements, we “phase lock” our neural patterning with one another, we remember what it feels like to belong - the feeling state of shining unique but held inside the collective. Josh Schrei says: “The environmental crisis, the crisis of meaning, the crisis of ethics, the crisis of new tribalism, the crisis of conspiracy, all can be understood crises of resonance. We need the intermediary world. We need rituals of resonance through which to replenish and renew. We need mutual phase locking between the body the community, the watershed, the valley… and this resonance can only be accomplished through somatic ritual enactment. It cannot be accomplished through words on a screen. Facts only matter if they resonate. Truths only matter if they resonate. Science [or any claim to progress, including activism] will only occupy the central place it wants to occupy in culture if it resonates. If it translates directly to practices of resonance that allow people to feel. ...Sense-making is only going to impact culture if it is anchored through somatic enactment - over and over again - that gets deep into the connective tissue, deep into the marrow. We won’t change culture the way we want it to change by typing. We won’t even do it by talking. Cultural movements need to be musically, rhythmically, somatically reformed around the basic understanding of mutual phase locking. Resonance. We need in very real terms to circle dance together until we sweat our quarrels out and start to feel things synced in phase.” Bruh. Preach.
Shiné newsletter here: https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=__test_email__&u=e2c17b1425a8cb6ac4566a750&id=8fccd2e95b&fbclid=IwY2xjawIfbddleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHc-uY2_1-RXpRzw2ZHXvIHwQVLlFtNjiylRDWDDJPhwbd6LCc7HmOs5BKw_aem_QinnaTNoOi_dr7s_vsBMZg

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Chestnut Hill, PA

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http://katyhawkins.com/

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