Stalking Wild Psoas: Awakening To Our Creative Self
“When life is recognized and felt-sensed in flesh and blood, the longing for a new way of communicating becomes paramount.”
“What if instead of identifying myself with objects, I felt my heart as a large oscillator emanating far beyond my physical skin: a complex, nonlinear “conductor of depth information” from the external world to be felt and heard? What if I sensed my gut as a center of intelligent life where “I ” cohabitates with a profundity of microorganisms? What if I fully comprehended that I am elemental, a biosphere of living substance and that I am shaped, quite literally, by more microorganisms than human cells?
Such realizations surely would redefine health protocols and might spark an awakening on a global scale.”
Excerpt from Liz Koch’s new manuscript, Stalking Wild Psoas: Changing the Language of Body from Object to Process (North Atlantic Books, 2019).
When choosing which workshop to attend, I do understand that people wish to be practical, to gain tools for their trade, and be able to apply these tools with their clients and students. Or perhaps a person simply wants to rid themselves of a psoas problem and feel more comfortable. My experience over the past 45 years of exploring the core tissue called psoas is that the quickest way to resolve discord, recover integrity, support integration, become functional, and flourish creatively in one’s life is to turn towards our bio-intelligence through primal expression.
People often email to ask what will I do in a Stalking Wild Psoas Workshop? How does the Stalking Wild Psoas Workshop differ from the functionally-based 12-Hour or 18-Hour Psoas Workshop? I typically start by saying that Stalking Wild Psoas is a process-oriented workshop. I attempt then to explain the importance of such a process by employing the following metaphor: our psoas is like a pot-bound houseplant that has been forced into a way of being. This answer may feel shallow and somewhat mundane; perhaps my words seem to lack substance, reason, and purpose.
What I really mean to say is that I don’t do anything and neither do you. Rather we begin with an invitation to awaken into a different consciousness from the one society has provided us. We evoke a different experience of existing under the cultural and historical terrain that has been going on since the beginning of time. Our presence and awareness change our sense of being, shifting our focus. This process helps us emerge from the isolation of separation and subsequently dissolves our insistence on being a thing called a body, allowing our participation in the larger biological processes of life. When we allow ourselves the opportunity to simply explore, evoke, and call forth bio-intelligence, we discover for ourselves a deep inner knowing that elicits profound conductivity, vital meaning, and delicious playfulness.
This process entails creating a safe container (my job and yours) in order for our blood to ignite desire and our hearts to synchronize into coherent membranes reaching toward awareness. A fertile ground of landing is sown where primordial movements prevail, slowing us down and quieting our mental chatter so we can hear the cilia talking to each other and the mitochondria excitedly deconstructing the colonization embedded within living tissue, dissolving and healing our inherited wounds and awakening imaginal cells that innovate new creative ways of being. We begin to flourish and become more than our defended, fearful thoughts can ever fathom.
Because we are self-organizing and self-healing organisms struggling with our cultural story, more reps will not necessarily create better function or take a person’s deeply faceted, soulful fears away. From my experience, there is no shortcut in gaining integrity. One way, however, to expedite the process is to collide with the elements of the earth through somatic play. The Stalking Wild Psoas Workshop emphasizes self-efficacy so that a person can become self-aware, feel more alive, and sense safety through being nourished.
Photo Credit: Scan electron microscope image of cilia John Wallingford – Wallingford Lab https://www.wallingfordlab.org/
