About Being Nature
DANCE · MOVEMENT · AWARENESS · WILD NATURE
A series of 6 day-long workshops in Thurlestone on Tuesdays.
Book individual days or build on practice through the series.
SEPTEMBER 15, 22, 29
OCTOBER 6, 13, 20
10.30AM – 3.30PM
SLIDING SCALE £50–90
2 hours daily studio practice at Thurlestone Parish Hall followed by coastal nature immersion.
For anyone curious about, or already practising dance, meditation or the creative arts and with a love for wild nature!
Beginners welcome!
Being Nature is an embodied practice of movement, awareness and relationship — an invitation to listen more deeply to ourselves, each other and the living world. It takes place both indoors and in nature.
There are no steps to learn and no particular way you need to dance. We begin with the body as it is — sensing breath, weight, earth, space and the movements already stirring within us.
With music, rhythm, drumming, sounding, silence and sensitive facilitation, we explore what happens when we give movement our attention and allow the dance to unfold.
Movement ‘scores’ — simple frameworks for exploration — offer a starting point for curiosity rather than something to get right. They invite you to notice what is present in the moment and to follow your own movement, with permission, openness and non-judgemental awareness. The scores engage the whole of our experience — sensation and physical movement, heart and mind, our inner landscape and our unfolding relationship with others and the world around us.
Sometimes the movement is expansive and wild. Sometimes tender, playful, hesitant or almost imperceptible. Sometimes dance.emerges. Sometimes there is stillness.
We practise listening for what is here, allowing it to unfold with sensitivity within our environment. Rather than seeking a particular experience, we become curious about what is actually happening now, giving space for intuition and sacred intelligence.
Movement, Awareness and Relationship
Being Nature draws on conscious dance, Buddhist meditation, Dance Movement Psychotherapy, movement awareness and ecopsychology.
Movement invitations and simple scores offer a starting point for exploration rather than something to get right.
We might become curious about the weight of the body falling into the earth, the rhythm of breath, the spaces between us, or the impulse that arrives before a movement takes form.
We explore movement through sensation, breath, grounding, space, weight, time and flow — moving alone, alongside another, and as part of the wider group.
At times we follow our own movement closely. At others we allow ourselves to be affected by another body, a sound, a gesture, a rhythm or the changing atmosphere of the room.
We practise moving between inner and outer attention:
sensing ourselves while remaining available to the world.
Mindfulness and loving-kindness are woven through the practice, inviting us to meet what arises with curiosity rather than judgement.
There is space to follow, unfold, experiment, play — and simply be.
Moving and Being Moved
Being Nature is interested not only in how we move, but in how movement happens between us and the world.
When we become quieter in our attention, we may notice how continuously we are affecting and being affected.
Another dancer changes direction and something shifts in us.
A rhythm enters the body.
A silence alters the room.
A movement catches our eye and our own movement changes.
We move and are moved.
Through witnessing and shared practice, we explore the fluid relationship between self, other and group; inner sensation and outward expression; autonomy and belonging.
Dancing with the Living World
Some Being Nature workshops take place entirely indoors. Others move between studio and wild landscapes.
Outside, the practice changes.
We don't simply take the dance we might do on an indoor floor and place it on a beach, moor or woodland.
We listen.
Feet encounter sand, stone, mud or grass.
Wind moves across skin.
Light changes.
Birdsong opens the distance.
The ground rises, falls, softens or resists beneath our weight.
'Scores' and subsequent exploration arise from the terrain, weather conditions and temperature both internally and externally. Sound, texture, horizon and the other lives around us become part of the practice.
We allow the particular place to affect how we move.
Sometimes we follow an impulse. Sometimes we wait long enough for something outside ourselves to invite the next movement.
In this way, landscape becomes more than the setting for our dance.
It enters the dance.
Practising Belonging
At the heart of Being Nature is an exploration of belonging — not simply as something we think about, but something we can come to know through the body.
We practise through sensation and relationship.
Feeling the ground receive our weight.
Sensing another person moving nearby and noticing the subtle response in our own body.
Allowing attention to widen from the sensations beneath our skin to the sounds, movements and living presence around us.
We discover that the body is never entirely separate.
We are breathing in the world around us.
We are held by gravity.
We orient towards and away from one another.
Our rhythms meet other rhythms.
Outside, these relationships become vividly tangible: breath and wind, foot and earth, skin and weather, body and horizon.
Through movement, interconnectedness can become less an idea we understand and more an experience we recognise.
A knowing through skin.
Through breath.
Through bone.
Through relationship.
We are not trying to manufacture an experience of oneness. Instead, we practise becoming attentive enough to notice the relationships that are already here.
The boundary between inner and outer may soften.
Body becomes landscape.
Landscape enters body.
And perhaps we glimpse, however briefly, that we are not observers standing outside the living world, but participants within it — moving, responding and belonging to something much larger than ourselves.
The roots of the practice
Being Nature has evolved through many years of dance, meditation, psychotherapy and embodied engagement with landscape.
The practice is informed by:
- universal movement principles including breath, grounding, spatial awareness, weight, flow and release
- Laban Movement Analysis, including time, weight, space and flow
- Buddhist mindfulness and loving-kindness practices
- Authentic Movement and witnessing
- awareness of early movement development
- Dance Movement Psychotherapy
- ecopsychology and embodied relationship with place
- our changing relationships with self, other, group and the more-than-human world.
These are not techniques that participants need to master. They are threads that inform the way the space is held and the movement invitations that may arise.
Why Being Nature?
Being Nature offers a space to become more intimate with your own movement and more available to the world around you.
Through the practice, you may discover greater freedom and range in your movement, deepen awareness of your body and emotions, reconnect with creativity and play, and experience new ways of relating to yourself and others.
It can be joyful, surprising, quiet, messy, tender and alive.
Above all, Being Nature is an invitation to become curious:
What is moving in me?
What am I moving towards?
What am I in relationship with?
What happens when I listen?
What happens when I allow myself to be moved?
No previous dance or meditation experience is needed.
Come with the body you have, the experience you are having and a willingness to listen.
The dance begins right here.
Gratitude to my many teachers including Anna Halprin, Helen Poynor and Sandra Reeve.