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I can’t say when it happens exactly, that’s the mysterious thing. One moment I’m here, encompassed by flesh and bone. And the next, there’s a pixilation of space / my density turning to effervescent vapour / every sub-atomic particle articulated in a vibration that is strangely visible. I can sense my skin – so permeable, the boundaries between what is ‘me’ and ‘not me’ begin to blur. Here, I am every-thing. And I am no-thing. I am the scintillating buzz of wild cicadas, the thick jungle-wet green, shafts of morning light and drifting sage. I am all of that, it is all of me. Swallowed by sound and space, suspended within Earth’s exhale – a stream in nirvanas flow. Then slowly, magnetized by the gravitational pull of consciousness contracting, the scattered pixels coalesce. Returning to a form and density that is familiar. A seemingly now solid body standing in the yoga shala. Gazing out. Aperture open. Receiving this world un-filtered, its shimmering reality bathed in light. Euphoria expanding all the way to the horizon.
WHAT IS EMBODIED FLOW?
There are methods that awaken you, instructors that inspire you, and experiences that re-define what you imagined possible. When they’re combined, they create a happening so rare, so mystical and so unique it has students googling “What. Just. Happened” and whispering “BIG magic” around breakfast tables.
Such is the experience of Tara Judelle and Scott Lyon’s profound Embodied Flow teacher training – a now known training that’s rapidly grown in size over the last three years due to its reputation as an ultra-cathartic, somewhat-shamanic, impossible-to-even-categorize experience.
Describing the indescribable.
Embodied Flow is an intricate weave of potent influences, combining experiences across a broad body-mind spectrum. It blends various hatha, tantric and somatic movement systems with embodiment practices (inspired by Bonny Bainbridge Cohen) and other various flavors from the somatic spice rack, with neuro psychophysiology, dance, creative and healing arts amongst them. These modalities are seamlessly blended and distilled into three powerful twelve day modules – Body, Mind, and Expression. Unlike traditional styles of yoga, Embodied Flow refuses to dictate or superimpose rigid instruction on a body. Tara suggests, it gives people a “different way of interfacing with yoga and what they think it is.” A way of experiencing it as “a living art form.”
A DAY IN THE LIFE.
Each detailed module expands your movement vocabulary, while leading through an intense rediscovery that dissolves all you thought you knew about anatomy and being. In “practice labs”, you’re making familiar shapes (asanas) and then liquifying them by initiating sequences from different body systems, and moving in non-linear ways, often causing you to migrate off your mat entirely. You are spinning like a dervish whirl with eyes closed, transcending the usual limits of your mind and body.
Behind these experiences of “samadhi in action” are your wise meta MC’s Tara and Scott. Holding backgrounds in theatre arts, directing and dance, their ‘stage presence’ is otherworldly and magical, carrying an energy that seemingly ripples through the room, instantly transporting students into a greater connection and deeper intimacy with life, as well as their inner worlds.
DJ’s of etymology, they brilliantly respond to “the mind of the room” and fine-tune frequency to facilitate raw, pure flow. This flow quality permeates all things with ease, steeping into your cells while enhancing your own sensitivity to subtleties, new dimensions and knowledge.
At some point along these experiential, often-ecstatic, and always-enlightening explorations, one of their voices gently reenters your awareness, offering some existentially profound and entirely life-infusing sound bite. Both have the ability, in one line, to nail it in a way that hits you right in the sternum. And you start to realize – all the things that are too ‘small’ for you are falling away – in front of your very eyes, unraveling old stories and revealing the circuitry of your highest Self.
It is precisely in those ah-ha moments- those moments of absolute revelatory ecstasy where you begin fully tasting life, you open your eyes a little wider and awaken. As Scott describes, “there’s the taste of what wasn’t and what is and therefore we know the difference.”
In order to best capture these epiphanies in the body-mind before they fade away, practical sessions are closely followed by group discussions. Why? The use of language and storytelling are ways of throwing an anchor into something that’s so ephemeral, essentially grounding it into reality. You can bookmark the experience and easefully return to it later. In other words, it enriches the entire practice. You feel it in a deeper way and thus bring it into your body more effectively.
CONSCIOUSNESS IS ITS OWN BAG OF TRICKS
In spite of the whispered speculations around the breakfast table and attempts, by students to uncover the magicians’ secrets, I’m once again reminded that consciousness is its own bag of tricks. It’s not voodoo, or magic or even radical- although it’s fun to talk about it in that way. It’s simply an un-learning and remembering. William Beats Yeats once said, “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” Embodied Flow helps you reclaim a primal sensory skill set long forgotten by this modern age. It sets up a paradigm for true transformation offering a rich container for deeper introspective sensitivities to nature, people, and ourselves, and becoming attuned as Scott says “to subtle variety of flavours of consciousness.”
”The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” Einstein
WHAT A WONDERFUL (INNER) WORLD
The funny thing about experiences is that – they have to be experienced. Words, at their best, can only point to full meaning. Embodied Flow is especially hard to quantify because the metrics are metaphysical. Yes, you get the piece of paper and continuing education units (CEU). Yes, you deepen your practice and leave with a swag of new skills and techniques, transferrable to teaching, but perhaps most importantly, you get your Self.
As Tara puts it, you “excavate the pure potentiality of what you are” You don’t feel alone, you don’t feel separate, and you feel articulated and home and whole, echoes Scott. “People start showing up,” He points to Zeno Frudakis’s Freedom sculpture to illustrate his point. The sculpture portrays a figure breaking free from the wall, and emerging. “It’s that,” he would say. “It just feels like all of a sudden the constructs that have not allowed them to experience that free movement, that freedom in the world, just gets left behind.”
On the final day, sitting around the proverbial campfire on our bolster-logs, I listen to the students, “baby ninjas” as Tara calls them, speak of feeling ‘brand new’, of getting “unstuck”, “reclaiming power”, “coming home”. I see people showing up several shades braver, I hear the subtle shifts in voices that are natural and newly free, I sense them resting in the pulsating, nourishing place of their true nature. A circle of souls in beautiful savasana.
Tara is the last to speak, eloquently summarizing the 40-day container of embodied flow as “a microcosm of a world that could be.” Her words are delivered against a backdrop of bright-eyed bushy tailed kindreds, totally unguarded in their optimism, both ready and willing to set the world on fire… leaving a lingering image and knowing sentiment: what a wonderful world it would be.
WHERE + WHEN //
Current schedule for world wide Embodied Flow Teacher Trainings with Scott and Tara can be viewed at tarajudelle.com.
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