About

Welcome to The Everything Space

The Everything Space, located on the unceded territory of the Abenaki Nation in downtown Montpelier, is a collaboratively run movement studio providing skillful and accessible somatic education, curated by Abbi Jaffe and Amanda Franz since 2014.  We are specifically dedicated to the education of diverse somatic practices as an integral part of social and environmental justice work.

The Everything Space centers the body’s intelligence as a liberatory, political act.  We are dedicated embodiment activists, passionate about somatic education and therapy, social and environmental justice, community centered growth, large and small scale transformation, and more.

All of the facilitators that teach here have different focuses and share a commitment to the studio's vision. The facilitators attend twice yearly in-house educational trainings on relevant topics such as being trauma/resilience informed, unpacking privilege & systemic oppression, and creating cultures & communities of support.

The Everything Space has maintained itself through the generous donations of two private investors, a frugal budget, reciprocally supportive relationships, creative economy, and is very much a volunteer effort.

We strive to cultivate resilience, rewilding, presence and connection for all bodies.

Learn more about our mission here.

Abbi Jaffe, RSME/T, BSW she/they

Abbi Jaffe is an embodiment activist and teacher, bodyworker, social worker and community builder. Abbi inspires others to follow their own body's curiosity and impulses, embrace grief and celebration, unleash their radiant resilience, and to be exquisite.

Abbi passionately teaches classes and workshops in growing resilience, being trauma informed yoga, contact improvisation dance, acro yoga, authentic movement, contemplative dance practice, and embodied community building and has been leading people on expeditions in the wilderness and within themselves since 2000.

Abbi has been teaching embodiment for over 12 years and is asked to teach throughout New England (Middlebury College Center for Health and Wellness, Dance New England Summer Camp, VT AcroYoga Festival, Druid Camp, The Annual Burlington VT International Contact Jam, EarthSpirit’s Rites of Spring, Wanderlust Vermont Yoga Festival).

Abbi is a certified Somatic Body Practitioner, a certified Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist through ISMETA, and has a Bachelor's of Social Work from the University of Vermont. Learn more at growingreciprocity.com. Check out Abbi's offerings here and on our Classes/Events page.

Amanda Franz RSME/T, BA she/they

Amanda Franz is a magic maker of creative transformation. She organizes for, lives and breathes the interconnection of body and Earth. Through bodywork, education, facilitation, embodiment activism and community building, she invites people into the profound intelligence of their bodies and empowers them to bring that intelligence everywhere they go. She is deeply investigating what it means to be a human, right now, in this world, and how to cultivate dynamic resilience within the midst of the chaos.

Along with her ardent listening to the body, she has been cultivating healthy relationship to the Earth by growing and wild-crafting food and medicinal herbs. She runs a small apothecary called Wild Thing Herbal Apothecary, from plants with which she has cultivated reciprocal relationship.

Amanda has been studying, teaching, and performing various somatic movement modalities throughout the United States and in Canada and Russia for the past 15 years. She is a certified Somatic Body Practitioner and is a certified Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist through ISMETA, as well as a certified Level II Collab trainer and facilitator. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Oberlin College and forever holds Missouri, the place of her birth, dear to her heart. Check out Amanda's offerings here and on our Classes/Events page.

Exceptional Teachers & Facilitators

Lucy Schmid, M.Ed

Lucy is a teacher, mover, improviser, and performer of everyday life. She recently completed her Masters in Education at Goddard College with a focus on embodied learning. This summer she participated in a Playback Theater “Core Training” in NYC. She can’t wait to co-explore the communal magic of Playback Theater within the Central Vermont community!

Sarai Louise Hinkley
MA, LMHC, R-DMT

Sarai is a dance/movement therapist, licensed mental health counselor and body worker ready to support you in finding balance and recovery when your world is turned upside-down. Her practice is deeply rooted in social justice, somatic psychology, expressive therapy, mindfulness, trauma and attachment neuroscience and theory. She is passionate about guiding people to follow their hearts and survive this crazy, beautiful world. She employs a variety of counseling methods that have been demonstrated by research to be effective at reducing stress, anxiety, depression, trauma/PTSD symptoms and increasing self-esteem, spontaneity and joy.

Learn more about Sarai at skipperstone.com

Murphy Robinson

Murphy Robinson s a Wilderness Guide, Level 2 Archery Instructor, and a Vermont Hunter's Safety Instructor. She loves teaching people concrete skills that help them experience their inner wildness and their connection to the land.

Learn more at www.mountainsongexpeditions.com

Mandy Snyder

Mandy Snyder is a dancer, healing artist and lover of laughter. She weaves improvisational movement, mindfulness and soul-filled practices for alchemy that heals our hurts, expands joy and connects us to a peaceful place within.

Lenna Wertenbaker

Lenna Wertenbaker is inspired by the body as a landscape, our beings as complex and interconnected, and our experiences as living forces that shape who we are. She believes our stories are worth finding and telling. Lenna has been studying what it means to live in a body for over a decade, by way of western herbal medicine, human anatomy and physiology, yoga philosophy and practice, five phase theory, and trauma and resilience studies. The great love of Lenna’s life is the wild natural world; she seeks a human-ness that belongs to the earth.

Mary Chris (MC) DeBelina Doyle, MFA

MC's focus since 2008 has been primarily teaching children creative dance and raising her growing family. MC studied Biology and Dance at Dartmouth College (B.A. 2005) and combined her two passions at Sarah Lawrence College receiving an MFA in Dance (2008). Her thesis work focused on the links between science and art.

MC founded the Hopkins Center’s Children’s Creative Dance Program at Dartmouth in 2005 and taught every class until 2012 when her family relocated to Philadelphia. As a faculty member at Dartmouth she was fortunate to perform with, and choreograph for, the Dartmouth Dance Theater Ensemble and she was a frequent guest teacher in the advanced modern dance classes.

MC finds dance in everything and currently her biggest inspirations are her four children. They are excited to have finally settled in Montpelier, Vermont and MC has been teaching children creative dance classes here and there since they moved in 2015.

Tessa Micaela

Tessa Micaela writes poems, practices clinical herbal medicine and generative care, teaches embodiment and writing, and plays in the woods. Tessa is the author of there are boxes and there is wanting (Trembling Pillow Press, 2016), Crude Matter (ypolita press, 2016) and Where Bells Begin (Rescue Press, November 2019).

Hazel Turrone

Hazel Turrone weaves together a lifelong passion for dance and earth spirituality with nearly 30 years exploration of alternative healing. She offers integrative bodywork, energy work and nutritional/herbal support in her private practice in Montpelier. Attuning to the land through woodland play and gardening have been greatly influential in her life. She believes that the destructive path humans are on is directly related to a severed connection with the earth...with our bodies...with our sexual power. In reconnecting to our bodies, deeply in alignment with the very source of our blood and bones and flesh we can dismantle the systems of oppression, freeing ourselves to our greatest purpose and potential.

The Everything Space: 64 Main Street, 3rd Floor, Montpelier VT 05602, Unceded Territory of the Abenaki Nation