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Post-Equinox Greetings, Tomorrow we enter the Chinese solar term “Cold Dew.” I don’t know if you’ve recently been outside before sunrise, but it’s getting chilly out there! My practice buddy and I got extra bundled up for our bi-weekly dawn Qi Gong yesterday. That cold bite adds an extra level of appreciation for the sun’s dual promise of heat and light. The contrast helps us feel. Today I’ve been feeling acutely aware of the ways we humans distance ourselves from each other and the rest of life. Stories of violence against bodies we see as different from our own hurts my heart, and I realize this pain is part of the reason I do the work I do. When you enter deeply into the sensory experience of your own body, it opens up your sensory awareness of the world. The ability to feel this connection makes it much more difficult to separate ourselves into an “us” and a “them.” And still, who wants to feel all that?! My response to the question is: I do. There was a moment in my own healing process when I made a very conscious and visceral decision. By that point it had become clear to me that feeling was a prerequisite for healing, and in order to heal myself, there was no other choice. I had to be willing to feel. And feeling included everything. The ecstatic, the devastating, the all of it. And I decided this is what I want. I want to be fully alive. I want to heal. I want to feel. All of it. And I do. And more is always possible. So this is the invitation, friends. On Saturday, October 18, 2025 you are invited to attend Movement Fundamentals II: Before Walking. This course is a continuation of the first Movement Fundamentals, where we relearn how to walk, but instead of progressing forward, we’re going farther back. We’ll be taking our movement practice deeper into the core to activate forgotten muscle groups along the spine and reawaken what my teacher calls “fish spine.” Our spine is not a rigid column. It evolved to be a swimming fish, a responsive, intricately articulated fluid core of movement. The spine, encasing its delicate bundles of sensory tissue, the spinal cord, activates and organizes the entire body. The greater the mobility in our spines, the more sensory attunement we have to life. Both inside, and outside. Learning to move our bodies like the animals we are changes both our experience of ourselves and our perspective on the world around us. I can’t fully explain this to you. It has to be experienced. So again I invite you to join me. We’ll spend the afternoon engaged in explorations that will gently challenge your concepts of how the body is designed to move, and guide you into new possibilities. The majority of exercises will take place on the floor. We’ll de-emphasize the use of our limbs in exchange for relearning how to activate core muscles, the source of whole-body coordination and coherence. If you have ever had the sense that your body doesn’t know where all its pieces are, this workshop is for you. While I designed this course for folks who have taken the first Movement Fundamentals, I’ve decided to open it up to anyone who has worked with me in private sessions or other classes as well. If you have never worked with me in person but feel especially interested, please book a consult so I can assess whether the workshop would be a good fit for you at this time. I hope to see you there. And in the meantime, feel the sun on your face. Let the cold bite your fingers. Rejoice in being alive. Warm wishes, Georgia P.S. I’m aware the first hour of this workshop overlaps with the No Kings protest from noon-3pm in downtown Corvallis. I moved our start time to 2pm so people have the option to join in nonviolent demonstration beforehand if they so choose.
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