Embodied Consciousness Developing

Where does the movement come from? This decades-old question first began squirreling around in my dancer mind as a yearning for a deeper source of movement. In her new book, Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth, Linda Hartley takes her readers to the brink of movement’s mysterious and unseen source. She tracks the embryonic growth

Lineage & Transmission

Partly because I am a daughter and a mother, and partly because of consequential encounters with extraordinary teachers, I’m interested in transmission as a key to human development. In other words, the long arc of what gets passed on is time expressing itself through lineage. The seeds of one teacher’s

Today is the day

“Relationship in any form teaches us about our capacity to accept, endure, and survive suffering, our own and every being’s: thus the creation of our developing compassion.”  –  Janet Adler Today is the day. It’s been fifteen years since my father left me with a puzzling mystery after he died. Writing

Synchronicity and International Authentic Movement Day 2024

I’ve been thinking about synchronicity and the way it upends our experience of space and time. While I am always moved by the synchronistic arisings that happen within a moving and witnessing circle and the mystery of these spontaneous choreographies, I no longer find myself surprised. However, when it happens

Janet Adler Memorial

Paula Sager speaking at Janet Adler Memorial October 8, 2023, Northampton, MA I’d like to begin with a poem by W.S. Merwin: Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise When it is not yet day I am walking on centuries of dead chestnut leaves In a place without grief Though the oriole

International Authentic Movement Day

INTERNATIONAL AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT DAY Honoring Mary Starks Whitehouse October 4th 2021, 12:00 – 1:30 pm EST, online. Seven years ago, I was sitting next to Elizabeth Reid at Aileen Crow’s 85th birthday party in New York City. Aileen had been an inspiring teacher, beloved by all of us gathered at

On a Path, in a Circle

A circle keeps appearing. Sometimes it’s a very ancient circle, a group of people, a community moving and dancing in one circle. Sometimes it’s an image I saw in the newspaper this summer of a woman in a park sitting cross-legged in a circle she had drawn around herself, a

Remembering Nancy

Spring, 1981—I’ve landed in Northampton, Massachusetts, just as Nancy and Lisa Nelson are looking for clerical help with Contact Quarterly. A dream job for a young writer/dancer. Up the stairs to the second floor of 31 Elizabeth Street goes my memory, into the “office,” a small room off the kitchen of Nancy’s house, the hub of operations in those early years.

Befriending the Unknown

Paula Sager shares a contemplative practice of embodied awareness in solidarity with all who are quarantined or choosing to stay safe in place. If you don’t have access to a candle or matches, you can substitute the moon, or light coming through a window, or an empty chair, or a little stone, or …

2019 Somatics Festival Archive

Somatics Festival – celebrating Janet Adler, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, and Nancy Stark Smith. Photos, dance, film, drawings, as well as video of festival workshops and panel conversations—all fruits of the extraordinary embodied inquiry and practices developed by these women with their students and collaborators.

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