It can be hard to stay with our feelings and sensations, so we often give into the temptation to doubt them.

My experience with breast cancer deepened my trust in my body. And yet, sometimes, I still find myself getting seduced by the illusion that questioning my body, instead of honoring it, will allow me to escape discomfort.

For about a year after cancer treatments, I gave myself near full permission to simply be where I was. To accept the lower energy and the persistent fatigue, without putting pressure on myself to get passed them. It was easier then, because I had a clear justification for feeling the way I was feeling. My body had, unquestionably, taken a hit. It was in recovery. I knew that I needed to be patient. The amount of time my body was taking to “get better” made sense.

Today, more than two years after concluding treatments, and back to “normal life” (in quotation marks because it is not, and I shouldn’t expect it to be, the same as before), it is tempting to doubt my body.

When my energy dips, or fatigue hits despite no great physical exertion, I sometimes question whether I should be feeling this way, even tough it’s clear, when noticing my body, that I am feeling this way. Even though I know, rationally, that I am still on hormonal therapy with a number of possible side effects, fatigue among them.

Last weekend I caught myself slipping into that current. My physical and mental bodies were out of sync. The physical was tired, wanting to stay quiet. The mental was restless, wanting to do things. The emotional reacted with frustration. And guilt.

I noticed that, unsettled by the discomfort of that paradox within me, I was starting to blame myself.

Part of me was questioning my felt sense, looking for a clean explanation to a messy experience. That part wondered if I was really low on energy, or just being lazy. It wondered if maybe I just wasn’t doing everything I could to feel better. Not trying hard enough.

Ouch. The moment I said that out loud, it became clear that I was being really hard on myself. My body, after all, felt what it felt. Doubting it made me even more uncomfortable, because now, on top of the fatigue, I had to deal with the pain of feeling like I was failing myself. I was throwing the second arrow, so to speak.

But doubting my embodied experience gave me something that I non-consciously thought I wanted: the illusion of control. If I were just being lazy, it would be easier to pull myself out of that place and escape what I was feeling. Lack of discipline or effort I could manage, I could overcome with greater willpower. If it was on me, I could control it.

It’s fascinating, and often irritating, the movement of the spiral. I had already learned this lesson through cancer; to let myself be in my experience as it is, without demanding that I be somewhere else. And yet, here I was again, very tempted to doubt my reality and pressure myself to “get better” in the timeline that made sense for my executive brain, but not for the rest of my body.

That’s how life works, isn’t it? We don’t learn something once and never have to meet it again. We are given, again and again, the opportunity to notice the old conditioning creeping in and choose to interrupt it and go a different route, to create a new pathway, a different reality.

I found myself thinking about how we doubt our bodies not because we lack understanding, but because we’re defending against a wisdom that the body is communicating. A wisdom that confronts us.

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My body was telling me: something is happening that is out of the ordinary. We need to rest. We need to slow down and be patient.

When I saw the doubt for what it was and stayed with it for a moment, looking deeper into it, I saw the fear beneath it, of not knowing what was going on. The fear that the fatigue would linger and become my new normal state. That I might be sick with something serious.

So I reminded myself I might be going through some hormonal shift. Maybe my body was struggling with the intense heat. It could be a combination of things, many things other than disease. Things that didn’t require fixing, but presence, tenderness, care. I wouldn’t be able to resolve the discomfort quickly, or with more effort. I would have to stay in it for a while, and accept my experience as it was, limitations and all.

It’s tempting to doubt the body because listening to it calls us into responsibility. Once we hear what the body has to say, we are faced with the choice of how we’ll respond. What are we going to do with what we notice, feel, sense?

This responsibility puts us at a crossroads. On one side, the familiar path: in this case, that of trying to regain control by placing blame, by pressuring myself, by telling myself that something that cannot be fixed right now is mine to fix. On the other side, a new path, less familiar (and sometimes entirely strange): in this case, that of acceptance. Of staying with the experience as it is, without trying to escape it, beholding myself through the discomfort of it.

That second path is a path of presence, and being present with what is can be confronting. Because without a clear plan of action, presence means inhabiting unknown territory with no idea of where it leads. This can be really frightening.

I chose, and keep choosing, the path of presence, even when it confronts me. I am aware that I don’t know where it leads, but I am willing to walk it anyway, because I know that the path of resistance only creates more friction and pain. But mostly, because my body deserves to be given grace. To have space to feel the way it feels without having to explain itself or rush toward some other state.

How about you? Have you been doubting your body or making space for it?

With warmth from my heart,
Ana Liz

I wrote a book.

Saying that still feels strange, but it’s true, and it’s time to tell you about it.

It’s called Whole-Bodied — The Beauty of Inhabiting Ourselves Whole in a World That Breaks Us Into Pieces (De Corpo Inteiro — A beleza de se habitar inteira num mundo que nos despedaça). It was born from a process that began long before I knew I was writing a book: in my own body, in my own fragmentation, and in that of so many women I've crossed paths with, as a therapist, teacher, artist, daughter, friend, sister

The book argues that growing up a girl, becoming a woman, in our society is, in itself, a fragmenting experience.

Personal biography and systemic violence - the trauma we carry alone, and the aesthetic pressures, objectification, silencing, and the demand to be endlessly capable and endlessly caring, that we carry collectively - intertwine and materialize in the body, shaping who we become.

That fragmentation makes us sick. Psychically and physically. This became clear to me when I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 36.

That experience became, without my asking, an initiatory threshold. It called me not only to look at my body, my history, and my life with more gentleness and care, but to write a book so that other women could, through what I share, feel invited to do the same.

But the wound is not the whole story. It’s a doorway to something deeper: restoration and healing.

I propose that healing isn’t simply about eliminating illness, or overcoming past pain and trauma, but about restoring wholeness to the fragmented self - and that this restoration happens in and through the body.

We must return to the body to reintegrate the parts of ourselves we abandoned to fit into spaces that preferred us in pieces.

I’m writing about it now because I’ve reached a stage where I need help figuring out the next steps toward publication, both in the US and Brazilian markets.

I have a request for you, who read and appreciate my work, and who may feel curious about what this book carries:

If you have contacts in publishing, know agents, editors, people who might be interested, I would love a connection.

Especially here in the US, where, despite living here for ten years, how things work still feels quite foreign to me, and my network is limited; I feel a bit lost heading into this next phase, and would deeply welcome your help.

Bringing a book into the world is a lot of work, and the fact that it will expose me also makes it a bit frightening. Its conception and gestation happened, largely, in solitude, with the support of the women I interviewed for research, and of a dear friend and first reader who helped me shape it. But I can’t bring it into the light alone.

Thank you for walking with me this far.

If you’d like to help but don’t know anyone in publishing, consider sharing this post and my newsletter with others.

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With warmth from my heart,
Ana Liz

Many of my closest friends live far away. Some of these relationships are fed by long voice notes back and forth, others by daily exchange of silly memes. With one of them, I have video calls that stretch on for hours. This week, toward the end of our conversation, I mentioned that two women living in Italy had reached out to me because they’re building a support platform for people in cancer remission.

Telling my friend about that conversation, I mentioned that after treatment ends, many women struggle with fear of recurrence. She immediately asked, “But you don’t have that anymore, right?” I didn’t understand, so I asked her to clarify. “Fear of recurrence, of having cancer again. You don’t have that anymore, right?”

I heard an unexpected urgency in her voice. She’s sensitive, a therapist, protective of everyone’s right to feel their feelings. And still, in that question, her own fear of my fear showed up. Her fear that if I’m afraid, there might be reason for her to be afraid too.

Maybe that was just my read of it, not what she was really feeling. Or maybe she didn’t even notice that this fear existed in her. The truth is, in that moment, I ignored what I’d picked up in her voice and just answered her question: no, and yes. I don’t feel afraid all the time, but I feel it sometimes.

Every six months, I have imaging scans for follow-up. In the days before the scan, fear stops by to say hello. In the room where the scan happens, it walks in with me. In the hours or days after, while I wait for results, it waits somewhere near me. I’ve made peace with it. I’d rather have it along than the exhaustion of fighting it off, so I make room and let it be.

But I don’t let it take the wheel. Feeling afraid doesn’t mean I have to hand fear the controls.

Fear can occupy a corner of my body while another part of me, steadier, more confident, keeps handling what needs handling: signing the form, getting in the machine, breathing through the scan, choosing to rest my attention on sensations of safety, caring for myself as I wait for results.

There’s a difference between fear that takes up some space inside us and fear that pushes to the front and starts making decisions for us. The first one, we receive. The second one consumes us. I don’t feel the second kind in relationship to cancer.

The call ended, but that question stayed with me. Yes and no. I feel fear, but not all the time. Every so often, in specific moments, it shows up, and I understand it’s part of that experience. Would it even be possible to live that experience without any fear? I don’t mind that the fear shows up at those times, but it would be horrible if it lingered all the time. And I am pretty sure that what allows it not to linger is the way I relate to it.

But what really got me was the assumption underneath my friend’s question: that we either have fear or we don’t. As if fear were something we possess. Or, put more simply, that you’re either afraid, or you’re not.

I don’t think it works that way. I think that the language itself misleads us. She asked, in Portuguese, “você não tem mais, né?” - “you don’t have it anymore, right?”, as if we “have” fear. As if fear were a thing we own, when it’s really something we feel.

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I’m afraid of snakes. I don’t like it when they show up in movies, and, to my dismay, they used to show up often in my dreams. But at the same time, I love it when they appear in dreams, because of what they symbolize. Anyway, I digress; what I’m saying is that I’m afraid of snakes, and right now, in this minute, I don’t feel any of that fear in my body. It’s an intellectual fear based on my knowing of what could happen if I were bitten by a venomous one. But that knowledge doesn’t live anywhere in my body right now. I’ve never actually been bitten by a snake. If I saw one, though, that fear would probably show up in a very physical way. I would feel it, not just imagine it.

So, am I only afraid of snakes when I cross paths with one? Or is the fear felt simply because of the idea that I have it?

When I see a snake in a movie, my body reacts. A shiver runs across my spine, I close my eyes. But as soon as I close my eyes, the shiver stops. Checking in with my body right now, as I write about my fear of snakes, I don’t feel any trace of it. What exists, in this instant, is only the information that it could be felt if the situation arose - not the fear itself.

Maybe the difference between the fear of snakes and of recurrence is that in the first one, my brain constructs the fear purely from the idea I have of what it would mean to be in the presence of a snake. With cancer, the imagined fear is grounded in an experience my body actually knows, that it did live, and that’s why that fear seems much more real to me. Right now, I don’t feel it in my body – but if I spend enough time with the images and memories of cancer, the places in my body that carry them will respond and I will feel a certain way.

If I don’t feel afraid of it right now, does it mean I am not at all afraid of recurrence?

What I know is that the fear shows up when I have to face the scans that will tell me whether I’m still cancer-free, because in that moment, my brain draws closer to the possibility of the pain and the lack of control that my body remembers.

I know this sounds quite abstract right now, and not very clear. Maybe, more than about fear itself, what I really want to say is this: the question “do you still have this fear?” has no possible binary answer. Neither does “are you afraid, or aren’t you?”, because fear isn’t a switch, on or off. And I don’t think it’s something we carry around all the time either. What we carry, when we think we’re feeling fear but there’s no real threat in sight, is the anticipation of feeling it or something else that hurts.

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Fear is something that happens in relation to proximity to whatever unsettles or unnerves us. And maybe the better question isn’t “do you have this fear,” but “when does it visit you?” and “how do you receive it?”

Sometimes it comes in strong, other times it comes gently. And maybe that, more than anything, is what we should be asking about anyone’s fear; our own, or those of someone we love. Not “have you gotten over it?,” as if getting over it were the measure of succeeding, of improving, but: what place does this fear occupy in you right now? Is it driving? Is it sitting beside confidence and hope? Is it just quietly asleep in a corner? Can you notice it at all?

Our relationship with fear shouldn’t be about never feeling it. It shouldn’t be about trying to reach some state where it stops existing. It should be about tending to our capacity to receive it when it visits - to feel its presence while also feeling the presence of whatever holds and supports us, so that it doesn’t take us over. This is true for fear of recurrence, and it’s true for fear of heights, of exposure, of abandonment, of not being enough, of being mugged. If we let these fears define how we move through the world, we become hostages to something that, at least for now, exists only in our imagination, at most in our memory.

Fear doesn’t need to leave for us to be okay. It just needs to know its place.

With much warmth,
Ana Liz

A friend was telling me something painful, and as I felt my eyes wet, I watched her lips pressing together, jaw locking, breath stopping. Something in her wanted to move, and something else was working to suppress it.

I know the shape of this from the inside. The ache in the throat that contracts. The effort to hold back the tears.

Holding back tears is work, emotional and physical. The whole architecture of the head, neck, and diaphragm reorganizes itself around the task of stopping us from crying.

The throat closes to keep expression in. The locked jaw stabilizes the whole lower face, stopping the trembling of the chin and mouth that precedes crying and holding back the sound an open mouth would let through. Breath gets trapped.

Some see holding back tears as being in control. I see it as shame being the one controlling us.

Shame tells the body that crying, an emotional signal, is dangerous.

From people’s negative reactions to our tears when we are little, and through the repeated corrections that so often follow - “stop crying,” “you’re fine,” “stop being so dramatic,” - we get the message, non-consciously, that our emotional experience and expression, who we are, is too much, out of place, and must be managed, held in, never shown.

We learn not only that crying can have bitter consequences, but that there is something wrong with us for needing to cry. We adapt by intercepting the impulse before it can fully move through us.

The need to hold back tears often ingrains itself into our identity, running in the background as a baseline orientation toward the self. It moves into our tissues - a way of holding the jaw, breathing shallow, contracting the throat - carried into our everyday life. The suppression becomes a constant bracing. An armor.

It’s not a voluntary armoring. It happens faster than we can make sense of, faster than our ability to decide whether we want to let the feeling flow or hold it in. Before we realize it, we reflexively interrupt the body's impulse to discharge what it's feeling. Repeated over and over, the interruption becomes an embodied habit, so habitual that even when we want to cry, we might not be able to - and that when we do cry, it feels bad.

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Ironically, this same habitual suppression can be the thing that makes us cry in the exact moment we most want to remain composed. When the suppression of tears becomes a habit, the muscles involved don’t just tense and release, they start holding a baseline level of tension even at rest. This isn’t only physical.

When we feel criticized, misunderstood, or pressured, and the tears rise reflexively like an uncontainable flood, it isn’t only the feelings of the present moment surfacing. It’s the emotional charge of every past moment when our feelings and tears had to be swallowed. We feel so completely taken by that charge that it becomes very hard not to cry.

Shame keeps the body braced against being seen. Crying is one of the most involuntary emotional signals, and very visible. That visibility, mixed with everything we’ve learned about what it means to cry, makes it socially risky.

I used to think mostly men had trouble letting themselves cry, because they grow up hearing that boys don’t cry. Suppression becomes part of how a lot of men learn to perform masculinity.

Doing somatic work with women has proven me mistaken. So often I sit across from women who resist their tears with an amount of effort that saddens me.

Even though girls and women are more often permitted to cry, they’re still punished for it. It’s allowed in some contexts, used against them in others. They’re seen as too emotional, dramatic, unstable, especially if the tears come during conflict, or in professional life.

If we suppress the impulse reflexively, it’s likely because somewhere along the way we learned that crying meant being week or out of control.

For men, the shame is often tied to a failure of proving masculinity or strength. For women, it tends to be tied to credibility, as if crying made a person unfit to be taken seriously.

For many of us, the difficulty in allowing our tears comes from feeling betrayed by them at the exact moment we needed to be seen as composed, credible, mature. We learn that a mature, strong person doesn’t cry, unless someone has died, and a kind of rupture happens between the body’s natural impulse and the social self trying to manage its image.

If we come to see our tears as proof of our inadequacy, of course we resist and resent them.

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It was only a few years ago that I became capable of sitting in conflict without reflexively crying. Of feeling misunderstood without reflexively crying.

It took acknowledging the tears I had held back for so many years, in situations where crying only made things worse. When I was told to swallow my tears, not to make drama. It took recognizing the pain of having had to suppress my feelings, for my tears to stop rising at the exact moment I wanted to speak clearly for myself.

Critically, it took learning to open my body and let the tears move - the tears themselves, and the grief of having had to hold them back for so long - to build a different relationship to crying. To become someone who can receive criticism or pressure without reflexively crying, and also who can also let herself cry freely when moved to tears, which is often.

If the way we block our tears is by armoring the body, the antidote isn’t insight alone. It’s the literal physiological opposite: softening the body, opening the throat, relaxing the jaw, letting the breath move when the emotion rises.

Even something simple as a sustained sigh or open “ahh,” does something that talking alone doesn’t. It encourages the throat – and the whole breathing apparatus – to relax rather than hold. This is one reason why including the voice in somatic work can be equally powerful and uncomfortable.

Emotional tears are thought to carry higher levels of stress hormones and natural painkillers, which is part of why crying can feel like a big relief. When it’s habitually suppressed, that loop of arousal and discharge never completes. The physiological activation happens, but the resolution gets aborted. Interrupted enough times, this teaches the nervous system that tears themselves are the danger, and the perceived threat is what makes it fire the brakes reflexively, faster each time, before we can decide whether we want to let it flow.

To reshape that, the work has to be somatic in both senses - working with and through the body, and working relationally, which is inherent to somatic work.

We have to relearn to sustain the vulnerability of being witnessed mid-emotion. Because the fear was never the crying itself, but what crying might reveal about us to whoever is watching.

The body that once had to brace alone can also learn, slowly, often in the presence of someone who doesn’t flinch and lets themselves be moved by our story, that it no longer has to hold it in.

That is what relief actually is - not only the absence of the bracing, but the remembering that it is safe to feel and express, and that doing so feels really really good.

With warmth from my heart,
Ana Liz

A regulated nervous system doesn’t always look like calm.

I’m stating the obvious, but almost every day, I hear people talk about regulation as something we do to calm ourselves down. This assumes dysregulation is always hyperactivation - fight, flight, vigilance.

Dysregulation is also collapse, freeze, dissociation. From the outside, those states can look a lot like calm. Even from the inside they can be mistaken for calm, when one has become so distanced from their felt sense that they can’t tell numbness apart from calm.

There’s also hyperactivation disguising as calm. The vigilance masked as tranquility, the “I’m fine” we learn to perform even when inside we’re trying not to fall apart.

This is similar to what many autistic people describe as masking - a constant effort, not always conscious but deeply felt in its cost, to manage one’s internal experience so it doesn’t show. Calm becomes the facade, while inside the person may be on full alert.

Keeping up that facade is costly. The cost shows up as chronic tension, insomnia, fatigue, a gut that doesn't work properly, physical pain, illness, irritability, and so on.

Hypoactivation is harder to mask, because it’s a shutdown. It moves us toward immobilization, which is harder to hide, because the body can’t access energy of action - especially at the more extreme levels of freeze or collapse. But it’s not impossible.

The person who has learned to hide their hyper- or hypoactivation keeps suffering. And they suffer unsupported, because no one on the outside notices.

The difference between real regulation and apparent regulation isn’t always visible, but it is felt, both by the person living it and by whoever is in relationship with them. A person in a state of regulation, anchored in safety, gives off an energy of availability and safety. That’s how co-regulation happens.

When we ourselves are regulated, connected to our own felt sense and anchored in safety, we can sense when someone is presenting calm while vibrating an energy of chaos.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling chaotic energy. The problem is denying it and masking it to look fine, to look together, to look calm.

Regulation shouldn’t be about calm, but about the capacity to receive and respond to physical, emotional, and mental stimuli while remaining present, connected, and in possession of our capacity to choose.

In certain situations, responding with anger is being regulated. If someone mistreats you for no reason and you don't feel affected, that means you're numbed out, or in dissociation. If you feel affected but pretend you don't, you're fawning. Both are states of dysregulation.

Staying regulated would mean feeling the anger without immediately reacting to it, and choosing your response to the situation without suppressing the feeling. Sometimes that means expressing the anger. Which doesn’t mean acting violently, mind you.

If feeling angry means being violent, then I won’t let myself feel angry, because I don’t want to be violent. But if feeling angry can simply be feeling angry - and I can remain anchored in safety enough to consciously choose how to respond -, then feeling angry stops being a problem.

The state of regulation isn’t fixed. It’s about having the capacity to move between poles - to mobilize when life calls for action, to rest when it calls for rest, without getting stuck at either extreme.

When we’re in a state of hypoactivation, we need to access mobilizing energy to get out of it. That ability to modulate how much mobilization and how much rest I need is part of regulation.

The problem isn’t nervous system activation, it’s rigidity.

Being calm all the time would also be a rigid state, a loss of access to feelings that may be confronting but exist and are there to be felt, because they offer us something important.

In the trauma field, this capacity is called the window of tolerance, a term coined by Dan Siegel. I like the term sphere or space of capacity, because it speaks precisely to the capacity to process the stimuli we receive through the physical, emotional, and mental bodies, and respond with access to choice, without leaving the sphere - which would mean entering hyper- or hypoactivation.

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It’s within our sphere of capacity that we can discern the best available response – and even notice that we have options.

The more we expand that sphere, the more we're able to feel and metabolize while remaining present, connected, with access to choice. It’s that sphere, not a fixed state of calm, that real somatic work expands.

It’s important to remember that freeze, collapse, avoidance, distraction, and even dissociation aren’t failures of the system, but part of its intelligence.

Often, in childhood, in the face of real threat, becoming dysregulated was the best response available. Dissociating during violence that couldn’t be avoided was, perhaps, what allowed one to keep existing. Avoiding conflict was, at times, the only way to hold onto some thread of safety. That’s brilliant adaptation to a context that offered no better alternative.

Today, as adults, we have choice. Recognizing the origin and intelligence of a response doesn’t mean validating it as the best response. It shouldn’t mean resignation, as if no other responses were possible now.

A strategy may have been brilliant in childhood and be, today, overgeneralized, firing in contexts that no longer call for it. Fawning in the face of real danger can be a usefull response. Fawning when someone disagrees with you in a conversation, when you say yes to something your body feels it doesn’t want, is the system replaying an old script on autopilot, and that doesn’t protect you.

Our effort shouldn’t be to eliminate the response, or to mask it, but to expand our repertoire so it stops being the only option.

Expanding that repertoire and capacity is both physiological and symbolic work.

Physiologically, we offer the body relational safety, co-regulation, conscious breath, somatic movement that guides the nervous system toward parasympathetic anchoring. We work with pendulation and titration to metabolize the charge from past experiences that were interrupted, and from current ones, teaching the system that it’s possible to move out of activation and anchor into resource.

These resources we discover and build gradually, identifying sensations of stability and connection, pleasant or neutral, that help us access a state of presence and connection, and training faster access to them.

When we encounter a challenge, a difficult sensation to hold that activates us, we need to work on completing the cycle of that energy so it can metabolize. Every unmetabolized charge takes up space in the sphere, leaving less room to hold what arrives here and now.

Symbolically, we work with the meaning we've given to sensations, the emotions and the stories tangled up with them - so when a sensation shows up, we can stay with it instead of being hijacked by the story. So we can notice the present context instead of reacting to the past.

The symbolic work only happens when we’re is in a rest-and-digest state, where we’re able to think clearly and learn. Somatic work can be essential in getting us there, where the meaning-making can happen with us anchored in the now.

Our body doesn’t always need to be calmed down.

It always needs to be listened to, considered in its complexity, and taught, little by little, that being affected doesn’t kill us; on the contrary, we feel because we’re alive.

Most of what we face day to day isn’t truly life-threatening. Which means it’s almost always possible to choose our responses, if we expand our capacity to inhabit our own bodies.

With warmth,
Ana Liz

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You may know how passionate I am about my work, rooted in the Life/Art Process®. It had been three years since I’d practiced with my teacher, Daria Halprin, and I was delighted to be back learning from her, whose work has greatly shaped mine, late last month.

I know this work. I’ve trained in it, I teach from it, I use it every day in my private practice. I’ve moved through some of the hardest moments of my life inside it. Still, being in the room with Daria, witnessing the way she holds herself, bathing in her wisdom, something lands differently.

I’m in the presence of a lineage.

Daria said she feels blessed that her family’s work has allowed thousands of people to experience themselves as creative beings.

My whole body vibrated in recognition. I am one of those people. One who has since invited many others to experience themselves as creative beings too – I am a witness to the power of this seemingly simple gift.

I could feel the thousands of people she was speaking of, as if they were present. In a way, they were. In that ground where they danced, in that deck that held their weight, in the work itself.

I felt the energy in the circle extending far beyond that one circle, carrying the stories of so many whose creative expression allowed them to feel, to name, to integrate what they’d been carrying, often their whole lives, without language, without support, without the participation of their own bodies and imagination.

I feel the length of this lineage, how far back it goes, how many lives it has moved through, how many lives it has transformed, including my own.

I love how she said it: people experiencing themselves as creative beings. Creative beings. Who let the mystery breathe, move through their bodies, until it becomes something they can touch and share with the world. Who remember how to create meaning, beauty, and connection from what life offers them.

Who remember, in this process, who they are. That what lives in them isn’t only pain, but also resource, opportunity, and aliveness.

The Life/Art Process® - the Halprin work – has been offering this since the late 1950s. Being in that room, I felt once more the strength of its lineage. I became more aware that I am part of it now, and of what it means to be someone who carries it forward. It means a lot to me. I want to share more about it with you.

Anna Halprin was a pioneer of post-modern dance who broke with everything dance was supposed to be. She was the first in the western world to move dance from the stage to the environment. She took it into nature, into cities, into community, into the real textures of lived experience. Her work was participatory, improvisational, rooted in the wisdom of the body and in ritual.

In the late 1950s, she carried her students outside - no stage, no technique to master, nothing to prove. Just a wooden deck in Marin County, the open sky, the tall trees, and I imagine, a question that she would spend the rest of her century-long life asking in different ways:

What does your body already know?

The Dance Heritage Coalition named Anna one of “America’s 100 Irreplaceable Dance Treasures” - and she was done with dance as something to simply watch or show. She wanted to know what dance could do when it stopped being only a performance act and became inquiry, a healing art, and a way of making community -

when it stopped being about decorating our bodies from the outside in, and started being about the truth of our lives expressed from the inside out.

She invited ordinary people carrying ordinary lives in ordinary bodies to move their stories. She invited trained dancers to remember they too carried ordinary lives, and bodies that though trained, were still human. She understood the extraordinary emerged from the exploration of our shared ordinary humanness.

She taught them to tell their stories through what she called pedestrian movements – movements that most of us already do in our daily lives, that come from the way the body functions, like reaching, pulling, opening, closing, walking, balancing, losing balance, falling, rising.

Anna understood the body as living art, where movement, images, and feelings exist in continuous conversation, evoking each other - that when experienced with awareness of physical, emotional, and mental aspects of ourselves, our movement can tell us about our inner life and our life outside the dance studio.

From those early experiments, something emerged that would eventually be shaped into the Life/Art Process®, with the understanding that the body holds our stories, art can make them visible, and movement allows us to articulate and transform them.

Anna was part of a larger movement. In the 1960s, she was collaborating with some of the most daring thinkers of her time. Fritz Perls, who founded Gestalt therapy; Moshe Feldenkrais, who was revolutionizing the relationship between movement and awareness; Carl Rogers, who was redefining what it meant to truly meet another person in therapeutic work; and Thomas Gordon, a pioneer in confluent education. Her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop also exchanged with the Fluxus artists of New York, who were dismantling the boundaries between art and life.

Her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, contributed the RSVP Cycles, a creative framework for collective process, and together they led the groundbreaking “Experiments in Environment” workshops of the 1960s, asking how humans move through the world: through cities, through nature, through one another.

This was a serious artistic and intellectual avant-garde asking urgent questions about what it means to be alive in a body, in community, and on the earth.

Daria was born into this work. She was a young dancer, moving in her parents’ orbit, in the workshops, the performances, the experiments. She was drawn into deeper study with Fritz Perls in Gestalt therapy and set out to understand the psychology of our expressive bodies, exploring the intersection of dance, psychology, and theater to understand how creative practice could support integration of lived experience.

She brought all of it to the forming of Tamalpa Institute, which she and Anna co-founded in 1978, and through which she continues to teach the Life/Art Process® today.

It was the first movement-based expressive arts therapy training program in the field.

Daria’s deepening of the psychological framework articulated what Anna had been discovering intuitively, building the bridge between movement, art, and psychology that defines the work today. Her book, The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy, remains a foundational text.

Since 1978, Tamalpa Institute has trained practitioners around the world. The work has moved into hospitals, schools, communities in conflict, prisons, grief groups, cancer wards...

Anna herself worked with people facing life-threatening illness, discovering that the body’s creative capacity doesn’t disappear in crisis, it deepens.

The Institute has branches in the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, and France. There are certified practitioners carrying this work into their communities, in their languages, in forms responsive to their particular cultures and needs.

I am one of them, here in Los Angeles, working from a multicultural and feminist perspective, as a mixed-origin Brazilian immigrant woman.

Learn more about the Halprin Legacy

This work first came to me in the beginning of 2019, through my own therapeutic process. It gave language to an intuitive understanding I’d been circling for years, that the body is not something to manage or bypass, but living wisdom, a place of knowing, a home that can always be returned to. That creative expression is both a shelter and a guide. It is our native tongue.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, my relationship with this process offered me ground to lean and rest on when the earth was shifting beneath my feet.

Ever since completing my training and becoming a certified practitioner, I have been learning what it means to carry a lineage. To receive something of immeasurable value from the hands of those who built it, and pass it forward through my own embodiment of it. To see it change me, then those I share it with, and then me again, in an infinite spiral that moves in and out.

Sharing the room with Daria, I felt that continuity. I am part of it.

Blessed, she said, and I think I understand what she meant, because it’s how I feel too.

Gratitude in the ordinary sense, yes, but also something more like awe. Awe at what the body is capable of, at what becomes possible when art and life are allowed to be in conversation, when imagination is valued. Awe at how far a question can travel, if we’re willing to listen inwards for the answers, follow the directions they point and the new questions they open.

It has traveled here, into my hands, into my spine, into my heart and my lungs, and into the rooms where I work and where I live.

I want to call it what it is: a gift I am responsible for.
A gift I am devoted to.
One I am learning to call my own more and more each day.
One I feel incredibly blessed to receive, behold, and pass along.

With warmth,
Ana Liz

Learn more about my work

The fiddlehead fern begins as pure interiority, curled in on itself. Slowly, with time and the right conditions, it unfurls. It doesn’t spring open, taking time from center to edge. It holds itself before it opens to the world.

If you cut a nautilus shell in half, you’ll see all the chambers it has lived in, one after another, each one larger than the last. Instead of abandoning the earlier chambers, it grows a new one each time, larger, with the space it needs to grow more comfortably in itself.

Life in the body, like the fiddlehead and the nautilus, moves in spirals.

We often think of our lives in a linear way, and behave as if this were true, charging forward as if we could get somewhere ahead where things are finished. But the shape life makes is a spiral, from the very beginning. The baby rotates and descends before they meet the light. The seasons return, but never identically. A woman’s body keeps its own cyclic time, month after month, never quite the same river twice.

I often sit with people in the tender moment when they realize they are touching an old wound again. They feel they have made progress, and then, one day, it’s here again: the familiar discomfort they used to feel when this theme was pulsing underneath conscious awareness and ruling their lives, here once more.

It feels a little different this time, but, at the same time, so deeply familiar. I, of course, have been there too. It’s a story we often know all too well, and when it resurfaces, it can come with surprise and, at times, a bitter taste. It’s a flavor of frustration called “I thought I was done with this.”

It can be annoying to be faced again with something we have already worked on, elaborated, processed; something we believed belonged to the past, until it shows itself again, right here, right now.

Though understandable, this reaction implies that healing is a project we can complete and be done with. That growth means moving forward away from past pain, and that revisiting an old theme is evidence of failure to heal, as though the work we’ve done hasn’t held, as though we haven’t done enough.

The spiral offers a different way to understand what that moment means.

We each carry what David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner call a personal mythology - a constellation of beliefs, feelings, images, and stories, operating largely below conscious awareness (until we become aware of them), through which we make meaning of our lives and ourselves.

These mythologies begin forming early, built at the very ground of our becoming, in the places where we first learned who we were allowed to be, what we were allowed to feel, whether we were allowed to follow and express our inner impulses.

Within each personal mythology live what I think of as foundational themes - the recurring patterns and deep currents that were present at the very ground of our forming.

They are the places within where something essential was wounded, or questioned, or left unanswered early enough that it shaped everything that came after. The way we learned, or didn’t learn, that we were lovable. That we were safe. That we belonged. That we had the right to exist as we were.

These early experiences leave organizing principles that remain with us. They become the invisible architecture through which we interpret everything that happens to us, the lens we don’t know we’re wearing.

Here we often find themes like abandonment and belonging, worthiness and legitimacy, betrayal and trust, the terror of being seen and the grief of remaining invisible. The chronic question of whether you are too much or not enough, whether you are capable of loving and being loved. The search for safety in a body that wasn’t held in safety enough.

A foundational theme does not disappear when we do the work. What transforms - what must sometimes be actively, deliberately transformed - is the meaning we have made of it, the story we have been telling around it, and the relationship we’ve built with ourselves, others, and the world based on this meaning and story.

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The story around a foundational theme is made of beliefs, rules, and early conclusions that crystallized under pressure - the only answers available to us at the time, formed by a self that was young, and doing its best.

A child who grew up having to earn her place has likely built a story around the theme of legitimacy: that she must prove herself, that belonging is conditional. That story was once a form of intelligence that helped her navigate life, but carried into adulthood, it can become a cage, contracting what’s possible, shaping relationships and choices without her even knowing it.

The story can and sometimes must change. But the theme underneath it - and the question it carries - stays alive.

- Am I worthy of being here? Is my existence, my voice, my body, my expression valid and allowed?

The theme of legitimacy remains part of the fabric of who this person is. It will keep returning, not because they failed at healing, but because the spiral keeps moving and life keeps giving us opportunities to become more wholly ourselves, freer from the conditioning that cages us.

A personal myth with the theme of illegitimacy is likely to first form through family dynamics - in the way a child learns whether they are considered a valuable part of that system or not, whether their inner experience and opinions matter in that environment. They might compensate by working relentlessly to prove themselves and show their worth, or, on the other hand, behave as if they had nothing valuable to offer.

This suffering eventually may compel them to seek to understand their own story, how they were shaped. It’s only then that they can begin to recognize and name the themes in their personal mythology and notice how they show up across their lives - in friendships, romantic relationships, work, creative life. The questions being asked in these different territories share the same root, the same primordial wound: Am I legitimate enough to be chosen as a partner? Do I belong in this friendship? Does my voice matter enough to be heard and respected in my field? Is my art worthy of being shared with others?

Each time the theme resurfaces, it asks the question differently. Each time, we’re not starting over, but arriving in it again, carrying everything we have become aware of and integrated, carrying what we’ve learned from the last encounter with the wound it was born from, which can eventually become a scar that throbs, but doesn’t bleed.

The spiral never brings us to the exact same place. It brings us to the same question, asked differently, from a different altitude, so that this time we can go a little further in, and see a little deeper.

This going further in is not only a psychological movement. It lives in the body, which, at each encounter, can learn to soften a little more around the wound, until it creates enough space that the wound can actually begin to heal, and become a scar that carries memory without reopening.

One of the beautiful things about this spiral movement is that, after many encounters with a foundational theme, we build a deep intimacy with it.

Think about the difference between the way you felt about a foundational theme in your own life some years ago, and how you feel about it now. If you’ve been working with it for a while, you will likely notice that though the theme is still there, and it gets activated at times, its pull on you feels different. Maybe it doesn’t feel so charged anymore. Maybe it doesn’t cause you to behave a certain way you used to.

The first time you met it, you didn’t even know its name. You might have only felt its charge asking for passage. It might have compelled you to do something, made you feel the urge to make it stop, to fix whatever was happening, to escape it. The theme, when you had less awareness and fewer resources, might have arrived as catastrophe.

Over time, if you can listen to the questions, this changes. You begin to recognize the theme when it’s here. You know its textures, what it sounds like, what it tends to cause in your body, what activates it. And hopefully, you also know which resources you can call on to support you with it.

Eventually - and this, I believe, is the healing - it becomes possible to meet the theme not with alarm, but with a friendly recognition. Oh. You again. And even, after enough encounters: Of course. Here we are, old friend. What do you have for me this time?

That shift from dread to recognition, from avoidance to curiosity, from the theme as enemy to the theme as teacher is not a small thing. It is everything. It is the spiral doing its work.

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The Life/Art Process® - the methodology that grounds my work, from the Tamalpa Institute - has taught me that movement toward wholeness is not linear. It is a spiral that moves in two directions: inward, toward the core of ourselves, toward the deeper layers of sensation and feeling and image and story and meaning that live below the surface; and outward, back into the world, carrying what we have found, applying it, letting it change the way we move and speak and create and relate.

And then the spiral turns again. Inward and out. Deeper and wider. Bringing us into contact with the same essential questions, but each time more capable of meeting them and seeing something new.

Each time, our shell has grown a little larger, and we can hold a little more of ourselves in it.

So, when you find yourself touching a familiar challenge - feeling the particular ache of something you thought you had already worked through - I want to invite you to pause before the frustration takes over.

Notice: you recognized it. That recognition is already evidence of how far you have come.

You are the same person who last encountered this, and you are not. What are you carrying now that you weren’t before? What resources, what understanding, what capacity can you bring to this turn of the spiral?

The theme is returning because there is more here for you. Not because the work failed, but because the work is inviting you into a new level of intimacy with yourself. What question is this asking you to move with this time?

The spiral is not a sign that you are lost, or stuck walking in circles. It is a sign of your evolutionary motion.

Go slowly with this passage of the return. Let yourself be curious about what you see here now that you didn’t see before. What you can feel now that you couldn’t before. What you know now, what you wonder, and what that might change for you moving forward.

The fiddlehead does not rush, and it is not ashamed of the time it takes to unfurl. The nautilus does not abandon the chambers it has already lived in; it carries them, and grows a larger one when it’s time.

The spiral will keep turning, and this is not a problem to solve; it is the shape of a life being lived from inside the body.

With warmth,
Ana Liz

Getting to know ourselves begins with turning an honest gaze at our own structures, to dismantle what was built by fear and lack, and rebuild in more sustainable, more beautiful, freer ways, through love and care.

If we are here to live with more peace, more joy, less suffering, some of what we carry will need to be examined. Some of it we call flaws.

Clarice Lispector cast a doubt on this idea when she wrote:

What if some of the traits we carry with shame are foundational to who we are? What if some of our flaws are exactly what keep us standing?

There is an important difference between two things we tend to throw into the same basket.

There is the flaw that causes suffering in ourselves, or in those around us, and when our way of existing inflicts pain, we need to look at that honestly. Not out of abstract moral obligation, but because if we want to live well, we must acknowledge that what we cultivate in ourselves and in the world directly impacts our well-being. And also, because suffering is part of life, but it shouldn’t be all we know.

Something else entirely is what others point to in us as a flaw, but which is, in truth, whatever refuses to bend to their preferences. What they call a flaw because they don’t understand it, or don’t agree with it, or don’t want to sustain the discomfort it causes them. These “flaws” tend to irritate precisely because they are part of our individual strength. They are not ours to fix, they are ours to protect. They are part of our foundation.

My intensity has been called excessive. My sensitivity has been called weakness. My directness and practicality have been called coldness by those who expected only feeling from me. Different people, at different moments, for different reasons, have been unsettled by these qualities in me, and if I had believed them when they labeled these qualities flaws, I would have had to work very hard to be less of everything.

This combination has taken me far. Sensitivity showed me what matters to me, practicality moved me toward it, intensity made sure I didn’t give up along the way, and my directness saved me from wasting my time too often. If I had tried to eliminate any one of them, I might have crumbled. I might not have been able to build the life I live – and love to live – today.

That doesn’t mean that my sensitivity never causes me suffering. Sometimes it does, but it also delights me, and it is part of the very fabric of who I am. If I wasn’t so sensitive, I wouldn’t be so perceptive. I wouldn’t be so creative. I definitely do not want to be less of those.

And yet there are qualities in us that cause real damage, that we ourselves recognize as problematic, and that may still be structural.

The need for control that becomes anxiety when threatened, the hypervigilance that protected us for years and now imprisons, the rigidity that was a shield and is now a cage. We suffer because of them, but they may also be what holds the building together, at least for now.

They are not sound columns, but they are columns, and it is better to have some columns sustaining the building than none at all. As long as there is no stronger structure to bear the weight with less effort and suffering, removing the column that causes suffering but also bears the weight does not free us, and it can destroy us.

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“Stubborn” is often what people call us when they want to shape us but can’t. It may be less of a description of our character, and more of a record of their frustration at our refusal to be manipulated, told what to do, gaslit.

And then we grow up hating our own stubbornness or thinking we have to hide it. Denying it, in some way. But if we can realize that, at least at times, what was called stubbornness was our self-assurance, our will to stand our ground, to protect ourselves, then we can see the strength in it. We can stop denying it and begin having a more conscious and discerning relationship to it – one that allows that quality to exist without causing us suffering.

What was flaw, then, becomes a resource.

In somatic work, we are constantly building and drawing on resources, both internal and external. Gradually, held by those resources, we expand our capacity to question the compromised structures and build new ones. This is important, because the body will not release what it still needs in order to hold itself together.

If stubbornness is both holding us together and causing us suffering, rather than eliminating it, it is much more effective to learn to draw upon the self-assurance that it can offer. To make small changes in the structure of the stubbornness itself, so it can become a resource – a sound column.

This is why real transformation takes time. It is cumulative, not sudden. Each small change contributes to the construction of new columns. Our building is being reformed from within, brick by brick, almost imperceptibly to anyone watching from the outside. This slowness is not a defect, but a condition for the process to unfold safely.

In our age of compulsive self-correction, where everything is personal development and people mistreat themselves in the name of “becoming their best version,” we must be deeply skeptical of anyone or any methods that promise transformation overnight. The method that dissolves trauma, the plant medicine ceremony without prior preparation, the kundalini activation process completed in a couple hours, could be not only ineffective, but dangerous. They might remove what sustains a person without first putting something more stable in its place. They might destabilize without anchoring. And when the person falls apart, the narrative becomes “you weren’t ready”, instead of “the process was irresponsible.”

What I know is that not everything that has been pointed out in me as a flaw is my problem to solve. Not everything I wanted others to resolve in themselves to make me more comfortable was their problem either.

So, the question that matters is: does this aspect of mine, that I’ve learned to call a flaw, cause real suffering in me, in others? Or does it unsettle because it doesn’t fit the space someone needed me to fit into?

If you find something in yourself that needs renovation, take time to strengthen some structures before demolishing others.

Warmly,
Ana Liz

I wrote this in the space between concluding be-held - the group I facilitated last weekend - and leaving for a four-day workshop that I’ll attend as a student. A space between offering and receiving, closing and beginning again, of not yet knowing what will come and trusting that the process will show me.

What emerged was a reflection on the threshold. On why we cross the spaces between places so quickly. And on what can happen when we slow down and stay a while.

There is a space between places we tend to cross too fast.

The space between what has ended and what has not yet begun. When a project concludes and the next idea has not yet revealed itself. The space that is at once an ending and a beginning of cycle.

We call it transition, we call it “this is temporary”, as if everything else weren’t. As if the form we know now will last forever, and only this in-between place is ephemeral.

Sometimes we treat this space like a problem, somewhere we need to leave quickly, because it can be uncomfortable to be there, between what has ended and what we don’t yet know how to name.

But the threshold is not just a bridge between two places. The bridge is a place in itself.

It is everything something can be - out of everything it has already been - before it decides what it is now. And this is such a beautiful and fertile place.

When something already has a form we recognize, it knows what it is. And to know what it is means to know what it is not. The edges of what is already known as form harden to hold its structure, and that is where form can be both an achievement and an enclosure.

The unformed has not yet decided what it will be, and that is its power. It still carries all the possibilities that form will have to abandon in order to exist.

The threshold calls us into responsibility for what we will do with what is not yet. And perhaps that is what we are fleeing when we hurry across the bridge - not the emptiness, but the vastness of possibility that frightens us.

At some point, inside the threshold, the shape of what will be begins to emerge through our choices. To choose what something will be means also choosing what it will not be, leaving so many possibilities without a body. As long as we haven’t chosen, as long as we don’t know, as long as we haven’t yet embodied this or that, everything is possible. And the infinite is too vast to inhabit without the anxiety of making the right choices, without the fear of making the wrong ones.

Hurrying can be a way of not feeling this.

But when we stop and stay in the in-between place a while, something precious opens. Not knowing begins to gain texture. The body begins to offer information that the accelerated mind cannot hear. An image arises like a question. A sensation points a direction. Something that was submerged begins to float and guide us.

Not knowing isn’t a state of not being. It is a state of listening to what one already is and what one is becoming. And listening takes courage, because what emerges may surprise us, may contradict us, may ask us to release what we already knew about ourselves and about the world.

I could try to cross the bridge running, to reach the other side faster. But I know that if I do, I will lose the richness of the journey.

So, I stop on the bridge and look around. I notice how the light has changed from where I was before to where I am now. I look at the ocean passing below, so vast. I decide to dive.

In the sea, I remain between places, now in direct contact with the ideas swirling in the water, fluid. I allow myself to swirl with them, to flow with them. To simply be there, without urgency to arrive somewhere else, letting the tide guide me.

When I come out of the sea, I carry the water with me. I return to the beginning of the bridge, but after every dive, the bridge is never in the same place. I trust that the process of crossing it will reveal what I need to see to reach the other side.

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The truth is that the other side is already here. The next project has already begun. It always has already begun.

Because projects are born from within, and what is within does not follow the temporality of the clock. When I see what wants to exist in the world through me, it is not the moment it first arose, it is simply the moment it revealed itself to me. And it reveals itself when it is ready, not when I force it.

What happened before I stepped onto the bridge stays with me as I cross it, shaping the form of what I will find on the other side.

When I facilitate a group, what the women bring into the studio continues resonating in my body long after I close the doors and walk away. It alchemizes with what was already inside me, transforming me. And that is why I find myself somewhat formless at the threshold.

The group ends, but not for the body. What we experience in a space of practice does not end when we leave it. It continues reverberating, seeping into the life outside that place, transforming us. The conclusion is real, but the non-conclusion is also real, and both coexist sharing the same space: the body.

The space of the body is always in flux, changing shapes. How beautiful.

So, I ask myself, and I ask you: What bridge are you crossing too fast?

Warmly,
Ana Liz

We live spirituality in the body.

There’s a felt sense to spiritual experience and a physiological state the body enters when it contacts a power larger than us.

You may have felt it in prayer or in ceremony, and you may have felt it in a moment of awe so vast it cracked you open. In the particular quality of light entering your room on a given morning, as you breathed in awareness, taking it in.

I feel it through dancing, chanting, dialoguing with land and ancestry through my body.

I felt it when I was navigating a cancer diagnosis and realized that I simply had to surrender to something larger than me what was not mine to control.

Spirituality was right there, in the tingly warmth in my spine that I felt when I was in prayer for my healing, and in the swallowing of my heart and the grounding in my lower body that I felt on Monday evenings, when people who cared deeply about me met me on Zoom to send me healing intentions.

The most profound spiritual experiences I’ve had, I’ve had in my body. That should sound obvious, as the body is the only place through which we experience anything. But it is not obvious when we look at how we’ve been largely approaching spirituality for centuries.

To begin with, spirituality gets mixed up with religiosity, and consequently, dogma.

The dominant streams of the world’s major religions have treated the body with suspicion, as something to be disciplined, purified, regulated, and transcended.

The female body has been cast as the most dangerous and most spiritually problematic: it grows life inside it, it is seen as temptation, and it is directly connected to the cycles of nature, which the dualistic view of body as separate from mind considers inferior to the intellect, just as it considers nature separate from ourselves.

In most religions we grew up absorbing, women are not allowed to become leaders. The enlightened people are men, and of the women, what is asked is that we control and punish a body that we learn is wrong from the very beginning.

There’s a common idea that the soul is trapped in flesh. Even in spiritual currents that are not directly linked to religion, there’s often an orientation toward transcending the body rather than descending deeper into it. As if the body were the obstacle to spiritual growth.

But the body is the ground of spiritual expression.

Soul expresses itself through flesh, it is not trapped in it.

It only becomes trapped when we tame our bodies so profoundly that they forget how to be the soft animals they are.

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When spiritual leaders teach distrust of the body, they are teaching people to be more dependent on them. To mistrust one’s own inner authority.

As we disconnect from our bodies, we weaken our capacity to discern whether people and places and practices are nourishing or harming us. We weaken our capacity to trust that when something feels wrong on a viceral level, it is because it is wrong for us.

This is one of the primary mechanisms of spiritual harm and cult dynamics. They teach people to distrust their body’s signals, to bypass discomfort, and to doubt what they feel in favor of what the leader considers appropriate.

I’ve noticed that the deeper one inhabits their own body, the less dogmatic they become. They realize they don’t need gurus or places of worship. They might choose to participate in these spaces - for the community, for the support, for the energy of the environment, but they know that they can nourish spirituality anywhere, because they can feel Spirit moving their own bodies.

We are not our bodies, as they say. But aren’t we, really? In this life, in this realm, what are we without our bodies? We are not only our bodies - we are soul, spirit, subjectivity. But where does all of this live if not in and through the body?

To be immersed in nature is a deeply spiritual practice. To breathe the river, to dance the trees, to surrender our worries to the ocean to carry them for us. To feel the warmth of another living being touching our skin, to watch a baby bird learning how to fly, to carry an insect carefully outside instead of killing it. This is all spiritual. It’s all about being in direct contact with the invisible force that animates everything. We could not experience any of it without our body.

To grow as a human being, to be good for ourselves and for others, to be kind, generous, loving, we need our body - to be aware of how we are touched and respond to stimuli, to put these qualities of being into action.

There are so many people who call themselves spiritual while practicing cruelty and avarice in the name of god. And there are people living a life of sacrifice and sorrow because they’ve learned that this is how they transcend, by punishing the dirty body so diligently that when they disincarnate they will finally be rewarded with peace and joy.

Peace and joy are available now.

Joy is spiritual, and this is something feminine wisdom has always known.

The women who cared for the sick and the dying, and caught the newborn, and tended the land. The women who gathered in circles of grief and celebration, who moved their bodies in ritual, who knew that the sacred was not above them, but within and all around them; many of them were punished for it. Burned at the stake, silenced, pathologized, called crazy.

The suppression was so thorough that many of us grew up not knowing this knowledge existed, not knowing we had been severed from it. Not knowing that our bodies are sacred. That they are part of the miracle of existence itself.

But the body remembers.

The body remembers how to dance the grief, to sing the hope, to find the medicine in the wound.

It remembers that near the water, and the fire pit, and the darkness of the night sky, it can breathe more fully and soften more deeply. The body remembers that a force larger than us is here, always, if we’re willing to inhabit ourselves fully enough to feel it.

This is my invitation: to meet the spiritual in your own body.

To notice what it feels like to be in relationship with the invisible force that animates everything through your own flesh.

To notice the felt sense of what brings you belonging, connection, and a feeling of love. To notice what expands you, what stretches your edges in a way that returns you back to the world more available to life.

To dance when you pray, to ask the ocean for protection and the river to teach you how to flow, to let the ground beneath your feet show you the way forward. To gather with others in a circle of witnessing and let that become the ceremony.

Spirituality lives in every body that dares to be moved and transformed by life.

How are you nourishing that aspect of you?

Warmly,
Ana Liz

One spot remains for be-held.

This Saturday, 20, from 2:00 to 7:00 pm, in Pasadena.

This is a half-day somatic and expressive arts immersion for women: an opportunity to be held by body, space, artistic expression, and one another.

We will move, draw, write, witness and be witnessed. Not to perform or fix anything, but to listen to the inner voice that gets muffled by the noise of daily life, let the body speak in its native tongue, and receive what it’s asking for.

If your body is calling for support, if your mind could use dropping down to meet what’s alive beneath the surface, this is your invitation to claim the last spot.

Email me at analiz@embodiedcreatures.com to register.

More information below.

be-held

Warmly,
Ana Liz

These are women who share their solitary lives online, many declaring they have no friends, and that they prefer it that way.

What they are saying is: I don’t need anyone, and that is freedom.

They live alone, with no one else’s moods to navigate, no one else’s strange habits to accommodate. Their time is entirely their own. They do pilates, explore coffee shops and boutiques, drink their wine on the couch watching TV without a single worry about anyone but themselves. Sounds pretty good.

As a Cancer sun who deeply loves the comfort of retreating into my own shell, I understand the appeal. But I also know that inside the shell, however comfortable it may be, we are still soft, sensitive creatures who need connection and care, from ourselves and from others.

Self-care, as I understand it, includes cultivating a nourishing social life.

Even today, the prevailing narrative about single women is one of failure. Something must have gone wrong, since no one chose to be with them. Surely she is too needy, or too difficult, or simply too much.

A woman’s aloneness has been historically treated as a problem, a symptom, a source of shame. Faced with that narrative, we now see a movement of women swinging to the other extreme, performing self-sufficiency to claim a sense of empowerment.

Celebrating loneliness as a choice can look like doing the disruptive thing. In some ways it can be, given that refusing the shame society puts on us is always a declaration of our dignity; but something about the way many are doing this unsettles me, and this aesthetic loneliness puts an image to it. Because it isn’t about celebrating the woman who is single and happy that way, it is about celebrating the woman who is alone.

This, to me, looks like a reaction to oppression that tries to liberate, but imprisons in ways that end up serving exactly what it wants to refuse.

And I wonder if, for women who frame their aloneness as a lifestyle, what looks like a choice becomes an identity that, in order to be maintained, requires that they never truly connect with others, which means they are never really free to choose to do so.

There is an enormous difference between enjoying time alone and being unable to sustain intimacy, unable to trust someone to lean on. The first is about solitude, and the second is about being unmoored. And being unmoored doesn’t feel good.

When someone who lives alone, has no friends, and moves through her days without real human connection also posts all of it online for thousands of strangers to watch, the gesture itself reveals what the narrative denies. That the need for others is right there, very much alive. She has only found a way to meet it without the risks of intimacy. But does it actually meet it? Or does it only camouflage it?

Parasocial relationships offer the illusion that it is possible to be in close contact with another person without becoming vulnerable, but there is no close relationship without vulnerability, and vulnerability creates friction. It is precisely that friction, though - the kind one tries to escape by choosing permanent aloneness as a lifestyle - that makes growth possible. The growth of our relationships, and of ourselves, which unfolds through relationships.

I’ve written before about how the idea of low-maintenance friendship already concerned me.

Read: Low-maintenance, high risk

The extreme self-sufficiency that solitude influencers romanticize feels like a more drastic step in the same direction, like one more justification for keeping your gaze fixed only on your own navel.

I feel sad when I see women romanticizing their lack of friendships, because I see that as information about what is asking for care within their bodies. If we listen closely, that lack can reveal the stories we carry about what it means to need someone else, to rely on others, about how much we believe we deserve to be loved.

It is deeply nourishing to choose to spend time alone - when that is a genuine choice, not a condition. A choice of someone who has a meaningful relational life, and who knows she can also choose not to be alone when she wants company, or when she needs support, knowing she will be held.

And we can only truly relax into solitude - really settle into it and let it restore us - when we know, in our bodies, that we are not unmoored. That we will be held when we need to be held, by people with whom we have built something real. But building relationships of mutual care takes time, attention, presence. It takes tolerating friction.

Aesthetic solitude offers a way out of the shame of being alone and out of the friction of building meaningful relationships, but it is also a way of abandoning the responsibility of tending to our own relational wounds. It is an exit that leaves us in the same place, with fewer possibilities, not more.

The body knows this. It was born through connection between human beings. It grew because it was cared for. It evolved because it was not alone. It still needs bonds to thrive.

The mind may convince itself that aloneness is better than sharing life with people who are good for us, but the body will never accept that. And when the loneliness aches, or when something wonderful happens and there is no one to celebrate with, or when we need to be held and don’t know who to call, the mind will remember what the body has always known.

- Remember to tend to your friendships today.

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On a different note, if you are into togetherness,

there are two spots available for be-held

If you’d like to join us on June 20th, in Pasadena, email me to register at analiz@embodiedcreatures.com

Details below:

be-held

Warmly,
Ana Liz

Today I come with a reminder and a poem.

Early bird registration for be-held closes tomorrow, and we only have two spots left.

If you’d like to join us, email me at analiz@embodiedcreatures.com

You can find the immersion details here:

be-held

Yesterday I was reminded of this beautiful poem by Nayyirah Waheed, called “Three”, and I hope it will inspire you to care for your body, for yourself, with tenderness today:

꩜

‘no’

might make them angry

but it will make you free.

If no one has ever told you, your freedom is more important than their anger.

*

and I said to my body. softly. ‘I want to be your friend’. and it took a long breath, and

replied ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’

*

If

the ocean

can calm itself,

so can you.

We

are both

salt water

mixed with

air.

꩜

With so much warmth,
Ana Liz

Belonging and intimacy begins with returning to one’s own body. With the willingness to arrive as we are today, and discover that there is ground beneath us to hold us whole.

This is where be-held begins, and this is your invitation.

be-held is a half-day somatic and expressive arts immersion for women, rooted in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process® - an approach that understands the body as the primary source of meaning, creativity, and connection, grounded in somatic movement, expressive arts, and relational support.

Saturday, June 20th, 2-7pm
In-person at Inner Vision Psychotherapy, in Pasadena, CA

In this container, we’ll practice four simultaneous forms of holding:

Through movement, expressive arts, and structured witnessing, we’ll explore what becomes possible when softening into authenticity is not a risk to belonging, but the very path toward it.

You will move, you will make, and you will be seen - not evaluated or interpreted, but truly witnessed by the women in the room with you. And you will witness others in the same way.

This immersion is for you if:

- You long for a deeper sense of connection with your body, inner life, and expression
- You feel your body bracing and aren’t sure how to soften
- You sense there are parts of yourself you hold back, especially in the presence of others
- You want to experience your body as a place of support and wisdom rather than an obstacle or something to manage
- You are curious about integrating somatic and expressive arts practices to your healing and flourishing process
- You want to be in the room with other women who are also moving towards inhabiting and expressing themselves more fully

You will explore:

- The body as the ground of wisdom and belonging
- Movement and expressive arts as pathways back to the deep Self, soul, and mystery of your life
- Art-making as a pathway to inner knowing and connection with others
- Authentic presence and witnessing
- What it means to be held and to behold your own material and others

How you’ll move into this:

- Guided somatic movement explorations
- Expressive arts practices - dance, drawing, writing, sounding, creative collaboration
- Relational witnessing in a closed, intentional group
- Rest, pleasure, and play

Details:

Saturday, June 20th, 2–7pm
at Inner Vision Psychotherapy in Pasadena, CA

Cost:

Early Bird Pricing

$260 pay-in-full
or
$270 in 3 installments of $90
Available through May 30th

On June 1st prices increase to
$300 pay-in-full
or
$310 in 2 installments of $155

Must be fully paid before the event.

Small group
Limited scale spots available for those in need - please inquire within

Registration closes June 17th

To register or ask questions, email analiz@embodiedcreatures.com

For more details, visit:

be-held

For those who are new to I asked my body, a little about myself:

I see the body as bridge between the seen and unseen, the conscious and the unconscious realms. Not something to manage or transcend, but a place full of wisdom to return to, rest within, and find resources in. This is what I teach, and what I bring into every space I hold.

My work with somatic movement and expressive arts emerged from my own healing process, and deepened when I faced breast cancer at 36. In intimately meeting my own fragility and the limits to control, I learned to care for myself with tenderness, and discovered a deeper trust in the body as ground, guide, and healing force, that shapes how I show up in my work.

I am a Certified Practitioner of the Tamalpa Life/Art Process®, and registered as a Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator with ISMETA. I have been working in group settings for over a decade, and in private practice since 2022.

About Ana Liz

I’d love to hold space for and with you.

Warmly,
Ana Liz

When people tell me they’re not creative, I hear that they’re out of touch with their expressive body.

There’s a common belief that creativity is a talent that some of us were gifted with while others are just practical people. That only some of us can dance, only some of us can draw, only some of us can write.

But that is only true in the context of comparison.

Whether you can plié or twirl gracefully is irrelevant, unless you’re comparing yourself to a ballerina.

What most often stops us from expressing ourselves isn’t the absence of talent, much less of capacity. It is shame.

The fear of looking silly, of being seen failing, of exposing our lack of skill and being judged.

It feels vulnerable to be seen bringing intimate and tender parts of ourselves out into the world.

But how could we develop the skill to do it confidently if we don't practice? If we don't even allow ourselves to begin?

And what is so terrible in looking silly, anyway?

I ask this question very seriously. What harm can looking silly really do to you?

Sure, it could affect how others see you momentarily. But if we can’t sustain the discomfort of being seen as imperfect, if the image we need to protect is so fragile that the risk of a clumsy brushstroke or an off-key note feels unbearable, then something in us needs tending to.

And that tending is inner work. The kind of work that needs to be held by self-expression.

We get to know ourselves so that we can be truer to ourselves in the world. So that we can express ourselves as we feel inside, on the outside. Because expression is a human necessity. We want to be seen and known as we are. We want to be celebrated for it. How could we, though, if we can’t let what’s inside show?

That child-like disposition to create without worry for the results helped us process experience, make meaning, learn, and know ourselves and the world around us. And even though, as we grow up, we tend to distance ourselves from this kind of carefree expression, the fact that we learn and grow through it continues to be true for our adult selves as well.

Anna and Daria Halprin, who developed the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, understood that artistic expression is a mirror and a laboratory for our lives. That how we are in our life gets reflected in our art, and our art reveals us back to ourselves.

They understood, and through their legacy I learned this too, that creative expression is how we witness the deepest, most unaltered parts of ourselves. How we stay in touch with our souls.

That bringing a feeling to an image, an image to the body in movement, and movement back to the paper in a poem, brings us clarity about who we are, what challenges us, what resources we have to support us, and what else we might want to build. That as we dialogue with our inner life through creative expression, we can hear the narratives we carry and get in touch with the autonomy we have to make change in our lives.

You don’t need to be skilled to express yourself creatively. And you will develop skill by doing it. By showing up willing to be with what emerges, even when that falls short of your expectation. Working with your expectations is part of the process too.

Maybe most importantly, you don’t need to be skilled to receive the gifts of your expression.

Whether you know how to write a sonnet or you simply let the words flow to the paper without any need for order, what emerges can illuminate you about your life. It can move you, and it can move others. Let that be enough.

The systems that decided that some people make art and some simply consume it, that some are allowed all colors while others must confine themselves to a life in black and white, are systems that get fed from our disconnection from self-expression.

Because self-expression goes hand in hand with critical thinking. With paying attention to what’s happening around us and how that lands on our own bodies. With being in touch with what enlivens us and with what bothers us. This is not very interesting for those who thrive on our collective dissociation.

Even those who don’t consider themselves an artist or a creative likely resonate deeply with the art of other people. Maybe there’s a painting that moves you to tears, or a song that feels like it was written for you.

It feels really good to connect with other people’s expressions of feelings we experience inside our own bodies. Now imagine expressing something that deep in your own way, through your own body, through something you yourself create.

That is what creative self-expression gives you. And it belongs to you.

Will you receive it?

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Join me in person for be-held

A somatic and expressive arts immersion into the ground of the body
for women

June 20th, 2-7pm
in Pasadena, CA

be-held

Details via the link above.
To register, email analiz@embodiedcreatures.com
Early bird registration is open until May 30th.

Warmly,
Ana Liz

If you make art of any kind, you’ve probably experienced moments when, in the middle of making, you realize you are overthinking it and forgot that your body is even there.

Your body is moving – dancing, or writing, or moving a brush across the paper, or playing music, or sculpting – but at the command of the mind.

The mind has taken over the experience of the body, and you are moving from what you think your art should become, not from what it already is inside of you.

When the mind takes over the creative process, we lose the connection to what is already moving within us. And it is that connection that we need to step into if we want to express ourselves rather than simply manufacture art.

Expression is something that emerges from contact with what’s moving within us – feelings, emotions, sensations, imagination. When we make space for that to come through and take shape on the outside, there’s an alignment between what we’re experiencing inside, and what we’re putting out. We’re not manufacturing, but listening and responding. And that type of embodied coherence feels really good and illuminating.

The body isn’t just the instrument of the mind’s expression; it’s the source of it.

But between what is alive inside us and what reaches the outer world, there is often an interception. A part of us that monitors, edits, and redirects our process, that takes what wants to move freely and says: this is not good enough, not original enough, not what people will respond to.

This part may register like discernment, but if we notice how it hardens and limits our process, we will see that it’s a lot more about censoring raw expression. We may tell ourselves that we control our process because of our taste, because we know where we want to go with it, but oftentimes what we are really doing is interrupting the flux, taking what wanted to be born and distorting it into fitting what we think should come out instead.

It’s worth asking: who is this controlling part in me – the inner art critic – performing for?

There’s always an invisible audience we perform for.

The inner art critic learned its standards from other people. From a culture that tells us whose art matters and whose aesthetics get to be the measure of what is valuable. We learn our standards from an external gaze that got so deep inside us that we started calling it our own taste.

If we can’t get ourselves to dialogue with that gaze and to create from beyond it, our expression stops being a matter of what is alive in us wanting to take shape in the world, and it becomes a matter of what version of us will land well on others.

The invisible audience is not faceless. It looks like everyone and every system that taught us that what we make must be a certain way and recognized by certain people. It is, at its core, the face of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism; three forces that decided, long before we picked up a pencil or stepped onto the dance floor, whose expression has value, and therefore, whose inner life is worth listening to at all.

The way to step out of this internalized gaze is by acknowledging how we’ve absorbed it, by noticing how it shows up in our process, and by listening to the body to guide us through a different way of creating, from the inside.

Listening to the body is so key because the censorship happens so early, so deep, that we don’t even know what we’re not letting through. What we’re not in contact with.

But the body knows.

be-held

This is where somatic practice, and especially when integrated with expressive arts practice, can really support us; showing the way back to the body, to listening to the inner movement that is already happening, and setting in motion whatever material has been suppressed and buried for so long that it’s no longer moving, but remains alive within and longing to be seen.

Somatic practice teaches us to stay in contact with the body long enough to hear what wants to be born, and to notice when the inner art critic intercepts it, and to make a choice of expressing beyond it. It’s a path of returning to the source.

When we return to the source, we can create something truly original. Not necessarily because it’s something that has never been done before, but because it is something that has never originated from that place within us.

In this expression, we tap into what is alive within us and reconnect to the flux of what needs to come out, allowing it to come out as it is and as it wants to become, rather than as we think it should be.

This matters for professional artists, and it matters for everyday artists too. Because it’s not only about what we create artistically, but about how we move through the world.

When we know how to create from real contact with what is alive inside us, we refuse to be controlled by the standards we didn’t choose, and we claim the value of our inner life

Our stories are valuable and deserve to be told in whatever way makes sense to us. Our bodies – each particular body with its particular history – are legitimate sources.

Join me for be-held on June 20th

At Inner Vision Psychotherapy, in Pasadena, CA
Saturday, 6/20, from 2 to 7pm
Small, intentional group - for women
Early bird registration is open until May 30th
Email analiz@embodiedcreatures.com to register or ask questions

Details below:

be-held details

Warmly,
Ana Liz

Lovely ones,

When expression has no safe place to land outside the body, it stays inside, morphing into contraction.

The feeling that wanted to move, the sound that wanted to rise, the somatic impulse that was quietly but persistently discouraged until it became a symptom - it all shapes a body working hard to contain an enormous charge of unexpressed experience.

Some of us become rigid in this effort - braced, controlled, and vigilant. Others collapse under the weight of what could never be moved and channeled through and outside the body.

Both are forms of disconnection from our vitality. From the aliveness experienced in a body that is allowed to respond to what it feels.

We see this vert clearly in the voice. So many of us learned to swallow our own sound, making ourselves quieter, smaller, and less disruptive. The voice that wanted to speak, to sing, to scream, to cry, to laugh loudly, to be heard; but learned to stay inside, stopped trusting itself. It forgot the importance of the stories it carries, and lost touch with its own power: to transform us, and to move those who hear us.

More so than being about release, creative expression, is about contact.

When that channel closes, we lose more than self-expression, we lose contact with what nourishes us at the deepest level, with what makes us feel alive, not just functional.

What has your body never had space to express? What would it feel like to allow it?

I’m offering a space for expression that arises from deep listening to the body. Join me for

be-held
a somatic and expressive arts immersion into the ground of the body

for women - small group
June 20th, 2-7pm
Pasadena, CA

Details via the link below.
Email analiz@embodiedcreatures.com to register.

be-held

Warmly,
Ana Liz

Dear ones,

Flexibility is a most precious resource.

Think of a snake moving around the stones in its path - adaptive, intelligent, and free.

That is the kind of flexibility that serves us - not the kind that contorts us into uncomfortable shapes to fit what others want us to be for them.

But for many of us that distinction gets lost.

Through our socialization as women, too often flexibility becomes something else entirely: the constant, often unconscious work of adjusting ourselves to what is expected of us. Not from the inside out - from our own needs, values, desires, and limits - but from the outside in. From the image we think we must maintain, the relationship we fear losing, the discomfort we’ve learned to prevent in others at the cost of our own.

This may look like flexibility, after all, sometimes we do need to compromise. But too often, we take the healthy adaptability that allows for compromise too far and abandon ourselves.

Self-abandonment will, sooner or later, drain our life force.

And when we finally grow tired of losing ourselves in that endless adjusting, many of us swing to the other extreme, becoming rigid. Building walls where we need membranes. Restricting where we need to contain.

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We tend to confuse containment for restriction, but the felt sense of each is very different.

Restriction is imposed from outside in, and cuts us off from ourselves, making us feel contracted, small, stuck.

Containment, on the other hand, comes from within. Self-containment is a way of holding ourselves with care, of having an edge that sustains what is inside without imprisoning.

It is a boundary that is not a wall, but a membrane: permeable, discerning, intelligent - it makes us feel protected and safe to expand.

Flexibility lives inside that containment, and asks that we know where we end and another begins; not to close ourselves off, but to meet others without leaving ourselves behind.

What would it feel like to adapt without restricting?

꩜

We’ll be exploring this, among other themes, in

be-held - a somatic and expressive arts immersion into the ground of the body

on June 20th, Saturday, from 2 to 7pm
in Pasadena, CA
for women

Details via the link below:

be-held immersion

Register by emailing analiz@embodiedcreatures.com

I’d love to have you there!

Warmly,
Ana Liz

We were taught to see ourselves being looked at.

The observer we’ve learned to carry with us early on – watching how we move, how we take up space, how we look from the outside – over time, blends with our own self-perception.

Many of us have internalized it so completely that we can no longer differentiate it from our own inner voice.

Psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts call this self-objectification: the process by which women learn to adopt an external observer’s perspective as the primary view of their own bodies.

The evaluating male gaze watching and ranking us becomes an internal one. And habitual body monitoring follows: the constant, often unconscious checking of how we appear and how we’re being perceived – feeding shame, anxiety, and the behaviors that so often follow, like restricting food, exercising too much or as punishment, dressing uncomfortably because you are supposed to look a certain way, spending loads of time and money in products and procedures that promise to keep you young and desirable, and even skipping activities that could be a source of pleasure, like not going to the beach, or leaving your shirt on when you’re there, because you think your body is not good enough to show.

What we lose in this process, first and foremost, is the connection to our own interior. When our attention is perpetually directed outward – to the surface, to the image – we become less able to listen to what is actually happening inside us, and to show up from that place. From what we feel. What we need. What our body is communicating.

We become very good at adjusting. At reading the room and shaping ourselves accordingly. At containing the expression that wants to rise so it doesn’t disrupt the image, rupture the connection with the other, or reveal too much.

In what ways have you adjusted yourself, your appearance, your voice, your needs, to make sure you were being perceived in a specific way? How often did that adjusting truly support you?

As the small adjustments become frequent, we gradually lose ourselves in the performance. In containments that become automatic, in coercive silencing that becomes so natural we don’t even notice it, in choices that we assume we are making, but that, in truth, we have been taught to make as maintenance of our oppression.

The body, though, keeps its own record. When you return to it, when you listen, it begins to show you what is yours.

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If this resonates, we will be exploring this, and more, in be-held, a half-day somatic and expressive arts immersion for women on June 20th in Pasadena, CA.

There, instead of being looked at, you will see yourself from within, be witnessed by other women, and witness them in return.

If you feel called, I’d love to hold space for you and with you.
You can find more information at the link below, and register by emailing me at analiz@embodiedcreatures.com

Learn more

Warmly,
Ana Liz

Time is coming, once more, to gather in reverence of our wondrous bodies.

After a beautiful event at Inner Vision Psychotherapy last March, I am excited to announce our second group offering in the space:

An invitation to yield into the ground of the body - and the one beneath it, and see what comes alive when you can finally soften and be held.

꩜

As women, we’re conditioned to hold it together

and hide certain parts of ourselves to belong and be safe, to the point where who we are inside begins to feel at odds with how we show up in the world. I hear this from women every day in my private practice, and I know that many of you feel it too.

When I asked what themes you’re feeling called to explore a few weeks ago, 100% of the responders told me they would like to go deeper into intimacy and vulnerability - closely followed by belonging and loneliness, pleasure and eroticism, embodied feminism, and being with others. This tells me that, collectively, we are longing to experience a kind of closeness and depth in our relationships that our rushed, chronically online, performance-driven, and disembodied lifestyle is distancing us from.

There’s a bracing against vulnerability that we have been conditioned to do, because so often we are told (explicitly and in all the invisible ways so ingrained in our culture that we can barely notice) that who we are isn’t good enough. That we aren’t enough beautiful, intelligent, successful, credentialed, interesting, cultured, strong, lovable, spiritual, healed. And so we try to become enough, without even realizing how much effort we’re putting into managing how others see us, and into keeping things - and ourselves - under control.

The thing is, there’s no intimacy without vulnerability

and so, the more we brace against it, the lonelier we grow. Not only because we grow distant from others, but because we lose touch with our own inner strength and aliveness - inseparable from all that feels fragile inside us.

We may not be aware that we do this, but we feel it.

We feel it in the exhaustion that doesn’t resolve with a night’s sleep, in the lack of energy to do the things that used to excite us, in the low libido we either normalize or blame ourselves for, in the way we avoid making plans with friends we love because we already anticipate being too drained to want to go.

This is how many of us are living, but that doesn’t mean it is how we have to live. There’s an alternative:

Many of us never learned we could soften into our vulnerability in the presence of others without risking our belonging.

That we could let inner experience move us, without restricting it.

That our movement and art could express the feelings and stories living in our bodies,

and that we could know ourselves more deeply - and be more deeply known - through that very expression.

This is what we’ll practice together.

Not more self-improvement, or healing as another task, but the simple, radical act of yielding into the ground of the body as it is and letting what is there speak and guide us forward

- without leaving parts of ourselves behind.

꩜

More details below.

Learn More

Saturday, June 20th, from 2 to 7 pm

Cozy space with limited spots, in Pasadena, CA.
To register, email me at analiz@embodiedcreatures.com

Early Bird Pricing

$260 pay-in-full
or
$270 in 3 installments of $90
Available through May 30th

On June 1st prices increase to
$300 pay-in-full
or
$310 in 2 installments of $155

Must be fully paid before the event.
Limited scale spots available for those in need - please inquire within

It would delight me to share this with you.

Warmly,
Ana Liz