About
I came to this work for myself first.
I went into massage therapy and personal training with one hyperfocused goal: to heal my own trauma, and to make my body somewhere I actually wanted to be.
Hyperfocused isn't a figure of speech there. I have ADHD, and it pointed itself at this for fourteen years — which turns out to be a reasonable way to learn a body.
Fourteen years of craniosacral work and somatic practice later — including five years running a wellness clinic — the things I picked up along the way stopped being a job and turned into how I live. I'm the happiest I've ever been. That isn't a marketing sentence; it's the reason I teach.
So what I teach now is that, handed over. Not a discipline to take up. A set of small tools that most teaching makes far more complicated than they are, for anyone who wants their body to be a more enjoyable place to be.
The premise
There's a line I've carried for years and have never managed to source:
The mind is where the soul goes when the body doesn't feel safe.
That's the whole of it. When a body doesn't register safety, everything moves upstairs — you live in your head, planning, checking, narrating.
The work isn't to think your way back down. It's to give the body enough evidence to reassess — to check its actual circumstances now, rather than the ones it learned to expect.
You don't need to do anything else than what you're doing right now.
Notice what your mind does with it. Mine tends to ask back — well, what am I doing right now? — and then it has to go and look. What it finds is usually something small, bounded, and typically already happening.
Nothing needs arguing with. That's the part I didn't expect.
Where the material comes from
Some of it is my own practice. Some of it I gathered from other people's work along the way. I'm clear in every class about which is which, and where each one came from.
Elsewhere
I write about attention, the body and how people come back to themselves in the AnEvergreene Newsletter.
Portland, Oregon · travelling to Seattle and Olympia