Wild Divine Dance

There are two distinct but interwoven threads to Wild Divine Dance.

Indoors, conscious dance is held by carefully DJ-ed music as a partner and guide — inviting dance, movement, sensation, and relationship.

Outdoors, we turn towards the body, the senses and the living landscape itself. Earth, weather, water, wind, sound and other beings enter the dance. Both practices weave movement with stillness, poetry and silence.

When I first discovered conscious dance in the 1990s, something in me awoke. There was joy and playfulness, but also something deeper — a beautiful intimacy and connection with others, with my own body and with life itself. In moments of dancing together, the familiar boundaries of me and you could soften. There was less sense of being a separate self moving through the world, and more a feeling of being held within one unfolding movement of life.

It felt like remembering something I had always known.

After the pain, hurt and shutting down of my childhood and early twenties, dance became part of a gradual journey of healing — a way back into my body, into relationship, trust and aliveness. Alongside meditation, it opened glimpses of a deeper belonging: moments when the boundaries between inner and outer, self and other, mover and movement became less solid.

Rather than taking me away from my human experience, these practices brought me more deeply into it. Beneath the places that had contracted and protected themselves, I began to rediscover a capacity to feel, connect, love, play and allow myself to be moved by life.

And I recognise something of that same awakening in wild nature.

Put me beside the sea and something in me wakes up.

I feel it in my skin, my breath, the impulse to move. Salt wind, immense sky, shifting light, the rhythmic lapping or exhilarating crash of waves — the sheer elemental presence brings me alive in a way I find difficult to put into words.

I love leaning my whole weight into enormous rocks, scrambling over boulders, sinking my feet into wet sand and jumping into clear rock pools revealed by the falling tide. I love the ever-changing colours of sea and sky.

Sometimes it feels as though the landscape is not simply around me, but moving through me. The distinction between body and world becomes less certain. I am breathing it, touching it, being touched by it. There is not simply me here and nature out there, but a living field of relationship — movement meeting movement.

During my MA in Art and Ecology at Falmouth in 2006, I began exploring this relationship more consciously through movement on the beaches of Devon, Dorset and Cornwall and across Dartmoor.

I became fascinated by what happens when we stop treating landscape as a backdrop and begin to listen to it — allowing rock, wind, water, weather and the contours of the land to shape how we move.

Slowly, landscape became more than somewhere I went to practise.

It became part of the practice.

My work has also been shaped by many years of conscious dance and movement training since 1997, including Ya’Acov and Susannah Darling Khan, Gabrielle Roth, Kate Shela, Anna Halprin’s performance group, Open Floor, Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Authentic Movement.

Beneath all these influences runs a simple thread: a movement from separation towards relationship; from shutting down towards aliveness; from experiencing ourselves as separate, towards remembering our belonging.

Perhaps it is less about becoming connected than remembering the connection that was never truly absent.

Nature is not somewhere outside us, we are nature.

Dance Movement Psychotherapy

I trained as a Dance Movement Psychotherapist (Roehampton) and worked extensively within mental health and community services between 1998 and 2009.

I offered individual and group Dance Movement Psychotherapy to people experiencing a wide range of challenges, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction and complex mental health difficulties. I also worked in forensic services and with refugees, carers, unemployed people, and adults and young people with physical and learning disabilities.

This therapeutic background and ongoing involvement with the Black and Asian Therapy Network (BAATN) continues to inform the way I hold dance spaces: with sensitivity to the different bodies, histories and experiences that people bring with them.

Meditation and Dharma

Meditation has been part of my life since 1989. I have spent extended periods practising in monasteries and retreat centres in India, Europe and the USA, primarily within the Theravada Buddhist Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, tradition.

Since 2001, I have undertaken regular periods of silent retreat, including retreats of up to six months, amounting to over two and a half years of silent retreat practice. I have a particular interest in the practices of loving-kindness and deep meditative absorption, including metta jhana.

My dharma and mindfulness training has included the Dharma Facilitators Programme with Christopher Titmuss (2003), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training with Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn and Dr Bob Stahl (2012), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy training at Bangor University. I have been recommended to teach Theravada Buddhist meditation by Ajahn Amaro of Amaravati Buddhist Monastery.

Teaching and Professional Practice

I have taught meditation and mindfulness since 2001 in community organisations, non-profits and NHS mental health services, as well as offering mindfulness training to NHS staff.

My teaching has also included work with University College London, London Mindful, Meru Health, Brighton Insight Meditation, Heartcamp in San Francisco and the Insight Meditation Center in California.

Alongside facilitating conscious dance, I continue to offer Dance Movement Psychotherapy and professional supervision in private practice and am registered with the Association for Dance Movement Psychotherapy UK (ADMP UK).

I have also trained with Joanna Macy in The Work That Reconnects, an approach that explores our relationship with the living Earth and how we can meet the challenges of our time with awareness, connection and creativity.

Bringing These Strands Together

Wild Divine Dance is where many of these strands meet.

Movement and stillness
Body and awareness
Inner experience and relationship
Freedom, discipline and presence
Human nature and the more-than-human world.

I create and facilitate spaces in which we can listen more deeply into the body, explore our own movement, connect with one another and the greater whole discover what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to move with awareness, giving space for intuition and sacred intelligence.