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Dear TES Community, So much is happening in the world, and here in our community, it seems to be speeding up. In taking time to weigh through the immensity of information and find the path of appropriate responsiveness, staying connected to my body and the earth have been incredibly resourcing. One thing that has felt very clear in balancing all this unknown is to center and respond to the voices of those who are most impacted. I have been inspired and humbled by conversations about mutual aid, supporting immuno-compromised and other impacted populations/folks, working against the racism and xenophobia that have accompanied COVID-19, holding the balance that not all folks can afford to stock up on food or not go to work and how we can all show up for each other amidst the direct ask of physical distancing. Even just reading that, feels like a lot in my body. If it does for you as well, perhaps take a moment to breathe or move or shake or give yourself a hug. With all of this present in our social field, and in solidarity with asks from elders, immunocompromised folks, and others, we are choosing to cancel all in person classes/gatherings until further notice. And yet, knowing what we know about trauma and resilience, we believe that many of the skills and practices our facilitators offer are needed even more right now. We are in the process of reviving our “Community Practices of Resilience” online and transitioning, as much as possible, to offer on-line courses. We deeply understand the importance of connection and belonging, as well as skills for nervous system regulation for settling ourselves and transforming social panic into creative systems of support. We are with you in this, so let’s support each other in moving through the uncertainty. We invite you to please, reach out to folks virtually, especially folks that live alone. As able, we encourage you to get to know your community and see what support is needed and to donate time, supplies and money. Take deep breaths and remember to literally touch the ground (I saw the first bit of Nettle up in the garden today!). Here are some amazing and varied resources:
Lastly, Sarai, Amanda and Abbi are available to offer sessions via Zoom. Learn more about us at: https://www.theeverythingspace.com/services.html We look forward to growing resilient communities together. Amanda and Abbi  The first bit of nettle is coming up =)
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Welcome to The Everything Space:
A somatic education and embodiment studio weaving personal growth and dynamic social change. We strive to cultivate resilience, rewilding, presence and connection for all bodies. We offer services to individuals, professionals and organizations through *private sessions of movement repatterning & bodywork, *classes & workshops, *studio rentals, *retreat facilitation, *coaching for collaborators, and *organizational consultations. which create opportunities to listen deeply to the wisdom of the body, express grief and celebration, and rewild ourselves for the purpose of inhabiting and supporting more resilient communities. The Everything Space is a collaboratively run embodiment studio providing skillful and accessible somatic education, curated by Abbi Jaffe and Amanda Franz. Opened in 2014, the space was built around the dream of co-creating a community space that centers the body’s intelligence as a liberatory, political act. Since then, the community of support has grown to include Josie Green (Rental Coordinator, Service Provider), Mea Starr (Garden Project Co-Organizer), Sarai Hinkley (Service Provider), and Hazel Turrone (Flyering Extraordinaire, Facilitator), along with numerous facilitators who host their potent offerings here. We are dedicated embodiment activists, passionate about somatic education, social and environmental justice, community centered growth, large and small scale transformation and more. Our mission is bolded below, with descriptions following: Our Mission: We are committed to unleashing the body’s intelligence to co-create a more resilient world. The Everything Space, located on the unceded territory of the Abenaki Nation, in downtown Montpelier, is where folks from all walks of life come to learn and listen to the deep intelligence of their own bodies. We are specifically dedicated to the education of diverse somatic practices as an integral part of social and environmental justice work. The offerings at The Everything Space are intentionally expansive to address our bodies as part of everything that we do and how we connect with the world around us. 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 acknowledge the global implications of climate crisis, collective trauma and embedded systems of oppression and we aim to unite personal growth and dynamic social change in all offerings at The Everything Space. All of the classes and facilitators that teach here have different focuses and share a commitment to the studio's vision. The facilitators all 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. We offer classes & workshops, organizational somatic consultation and implementation, private sessions, performances and creative space to create opportunities for people to listen deeply to the wisdom of the body, express grief and celebration, and rewild ourselves. We are in this, with you, as humans, together. You are welcome here! We warmly welcome a wide diversity of people. We are an anti-racist organization that welcomes all bodies, all religions, all races, all genders, all sexualities, and all relationships styles. We are queer positive and trans positive. We work to understand and dismantle privilege and systemic oppression. We strive to make our services accessible. We welcome feedback and growing together. The Everything Space has been growing and thriving for 4 years now!
To celebrate, we’d love to goosh about the amazing community of facilitators and associated offerings that have happened here since day one. We couldn’t have done this without you! Over the past four years, these amazing offerings have graced our community. The list is loosely themed and very incomplete. Wow! Being Alive: Standing on the Page, Mindful Eating, the Somatics of Digestion, Waking the Witch, Resilience Breathwork, Softening our Roots, 20 Jam Jam retreats, the Burning Times Never Ended and more. Outdoor Practices: the Garden Project, Natural Fitness, Co-Regulation Study Group, and more. Movement/Improv/Play: Emergent Intelligence,Co-Motion, Axis Syllabus study groups and workshops, Somatic Movement Series, Playback Theatre labs and troupe, weekly contact improv jams, Rise Up Dance Therapy, CI Fundamentals Series, Robin Hood’s Arrow, Queer Contact Improv class and jam, Feldenkrais method classes,Contemplative Dance Practice and more. Embodied Communication: Authentic Relating, Circling, Supporting One Another Trauma/Resilience Practices/Education: 4 Growing Resilience courses, My Grandmother’s Hands book group, The Work that Reconnects, and more. Free/By Donation Public Education/Dialogue: Hosting numerous community meetings, the Dawnland Decolonization Solidarity Group, The Abenaki Worldview with Melody Walker Brook, community accountability circles, Decolonization: Investigating Colonial Impact Event, Bodies of Change: Embodiment and Social Change discussion group, Community Practices of Resilience, Creative Space, and more. One On One Support: Cranio-sacral clinic, Re-Embodiment Training, hosting the private practices of Sarai Hinkley, Josie Green, Abbi Jaffe, and Amanda Franz Special thanks and gratitude to Andreas, Jamie, Hazel, Josie, Jon W, Sarai, Mea, Lucy, Lenna, Mandy, Ben, MC, Murphy, Stephen and all our amazing facilitators. We are honored to be in community with you and to grow and change ourselves, each other, and the world, together. “ All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you.” ~ partial quote from Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler Dear Everything Space,
(On the event of your 2nd Birthday) How can it be that you are only 2? My heart has always known your embrace; like a plant in the sunroom you grew, green & bright! Becoming through my body like muscle becoming bone, like birds flocking HOME - you have held me - when I am a body heaving with pain and unknown, when I am GOOGLY with silliness or ecstatic, brimming with LOVE & GRATITUDE. And on the days when I feel FLAT, scarcely moving in my tiny dance on the floor, your walls have risen for me like those of a CATHEDRAL, beckoning my spirit UP UP UP to experience divine acceptance. Dear Everything Space, how does your 2 years map into my human body? In your 2 years I have become a brave listener, a curious, compassionate, consensual explorer of my own and others bodies. I have been challenged to reflect. I have remembered how to taste my food, how to be in a space of unknown, trusting...trusting...trusting my own response, my creative impulse in each moment. I have RECLAIMED MY ENOUGHNESS through intelligence I didn’t know I could know, in a COMMUNITY READY to offer unconditional belonging to one another. Dear Everything Space, in these 2 years, you have come to embody your name. Everything I am has space to be. I HONOR you now, as you have honored me. Thank you. ~Lucy Schmid 2017 By DAN BOLLES Published in Seven Days on Jan 17, 2018: www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/the-everything-space-champions-embodiment-revolution The revolution may or may not be televised — or YouTubed or Facebook Lived or whatever. But if Amanda Franz and Abbi Jaffe have their way, said revolution will most definitely be slow. And probably kind of awkward and touchy-feely. It will also be deeply self-aware and in touch with its own proprioceptive senses. There may be archery.
Franz and Jaffe are the cofounders of the Everything Space, which bills itself as the first studio in Vermont "specifically dedicated to the education of diverse somatic practices as an integral part of social and environmental justice work." Or, to use phrases Jaffe coined, the multiuse Montpelier studio is the epicenter of "embodiment activism" and home to the "embodiment revolution." To understand those terms, it's first helpful to have a definition of "somatic education," or "somatics." Very simply, it's a field of movement study and therapy based on inner perceptions of the body — in other words, on actively paying attention to all the stuff our bodies are always trying to tell us if we'd just take a moment to listen. Or, as the late philosopher and somatics pioneer Thomas Hanna put it, somatics is the study of "the human being as experienced by himself from the inside." At the Everything Space on a recent Tuesday evening, students are experiencing themselves from the inside — or learning to, at least. This is the second session of the seven-week somatic movement class Discover Your Body Intelligence, led by Montpelier's Amy LePage. On a gleaming hardwood floor, eight students — mostly middle-aged women — stand over heavy knit blankets and plush pillows. The open room is warm, clean and well lit, with oversize windows on two sides looking onto Main Street and frigid downtown Montpelier. At the front of the room, LePage stands beside a model skeleton. She uses it to highlight the parts of the body on which this week's class will concentrate — shoulders and pelvis. Following a brief icebreaker session, LePage instructs her students to stand in place and roll their heads from side to side. She asks them to pay special attention to muscles in the neck and shoulders that engage and release throughout the movement. "Notice if one side feels different," she says. "Notice if you're holding your breath differently." LePage teaches therapeutic yoga and somatics throughout the Montpelier area, independently of the Everything Space, under the banner of Emerge Yoga. Somatics has many variants, but LePage follows Hanna's teachings in her focus on recognizing the habitual and often subconscious ways our bodies store tension — slanted posture, hunched shoulders — so we can release that tension through conscious movement. "Our habits and patterns eventually become normal, so our baseline changes," LePage explains later. "So this is an opportunity to recalibrate, find our baseline and notice the nuances." The way to do that, she continues, "is to slow way, way down." During the hourlong class, LePage guides her students through a series of gentle but deliberate movements, most of which happen (very slowly) at floor level. In each case, she reminds her students to take note of the subtle changes in their bodies and how their bodies interact with their surroundings. "We're usually all over the place, thinking and doing, which means that we're never actually sensing and noticing internally," says LePage. "We are relating human beings; we relate with our environment and other people. So, by having the opportunity to dive inward and pay attention to ourselves, it also impacts how we then experience outwardly." An increase in internal awareness, she explains, can promote positive external actions. That, in essence, is the foundation of the so-called "embodiment revolution," as well as a founding principle of the Everything Space. When Franz and Jaffe opened the collaboratively run studio two years ago, it was the culmination of five years of teaching together — often at Dharma Door (now Reciprocity Vermont Embodiment Center) in Underhill, an embodiment retreat center owned by Jaffe. Though Dharma Door was a formative experience for the duo, Franz says it was just one piece of "the larger embodiment puzzle." "We wanted to open a space that focused on the integration of somatic education and how that is connected to social and environmental justice," says Franz. Such a space would need to be more accessible than a remote retreat — both physically and financially. "That's why we called it the Everything Space," says Jaffe, who has a background in yoga and Thai massage and has been teaching embodiment classes throughout New England for more than a decade. "We could have called it the Somatic Studio or something. But we wanted anyone to walk in and feel like it could apply to them." The Everything Space charges for its classes on a sliding scale. They range from LePage's class to weekly contact improvisation jams to the family-oriented CoMotion Dance class to a new session called Robin Hood's Arrow: Piercing the Illusion of Capitalist Culture. That last one is an archery class taught by wilderness guide and hunter safety instructor Murphy Robinson. Franz and Jaffe are both certified somatic body practitioners working toward somatic educator/therapist certification from the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. They curate the Everything Space's offerings to align with the concepts of embodiment activism. For example, besides learning to shoot a bow and arrow, Robinson's students will ponder "six concepts of anti-capitalist theory," according to the course description. Not all classes are so overtly political. Most, in fact, aim arrows at capitalism and patriarchy in subtler ways. "We're saying that the body is important, and let's listen to the signals it's giving us," explains Jaffe. "And in our culture, that's a radical act." "So the activism is in creating a culture where it's safe to feel our bodies," she continues. "Because when we are connected to ourselves, our bodies and nature, we're going to respond differently when we show up to be an activist or gas station attendant or whatever it is we do." "How we relate to the world is related to how we hear ourselves," says Franz, who has studied and practiced somatics in the U.S. and Canada for more than 12 years. The embodiment revolution, she continues, is "about how to get people in their bodies and feeling more connected and alive through that process." As LePage's students file out of the Everything Space at the conclusion of her class, it's hard to say whether they're ready to smash the patriarchy, battle the alt-right or save the planet. But most look relaxed and contented. "The slowing-down thing is really unusual for me," says Berlin's Kathi Graves, who explains that the class is helping her deal with chronic nerve pain. "I'm noticing things in my body because it's kind of meditative — and I'm not a meditative person." Clara Bruns is dealing with a "frozen shoulder." The Calais resident credits the "small, gentle movements" practiced in somatics with helping her regain some mobility. "I have this problem because of habitual tension holding," says Bruns. Somatic movement "helps me relax." You may or may not see Graves or Bruns on the front lines at the next Statehouse protest. But, according to Jaffe's theory of embodiment activism, the mere act of slowing down and listening to their bodies could have a broader effect on the community. As LePage puts it: "The more we learn about ourselves, the more it impacts the world and culture around us." The original print version of this article was headlined "Inner Activism"  “Somatics is the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception” (Hanna, 1986), in other words, soma is the multitude of sensations that arise through being a body. It’s all the information you feel in yourself as a body in the world. Somatics offers a different perspective than a traditional objective view of “body as machine”. The word somatic highlights the body-mind connection, because at any given moment we are consciously perceiving (mind) our bodies. As a research field, it brings together both current scientific knowledge (anatomy, biology, physiology, neuroscience, bio-mechanics, etc) as well as present experiential knowledge to deepen our understanding of our bodies as dynamically organized and intricately balanced systems.
By focusing on our awareness of our bodies through felt sensation, we can begin to understand our internal reactions and then intentionally choose different responses when appropriate. Whether or not we consciously notice our interior worlds, we are alive with bodily communication: we are constantly responding to stimuli, creating sensations, responding with movement, and creating more sensations and thus the patterns that make up who we are. By bringing awareness to our sensations, we begin to speak the language of the soma and allow for conscious change. We can notice when we might normally react with frustration and choose to respond differently- to take a deep breath and say something else. In some ways, it seems so simple. Notice what you feel and allow that to influence your choices. In this self-regulating system loop, we can move towards health. But as we begin to understand the nature and prevalence of trauma, combined with the pace and demands of life, it becomes clear that maintaining this body connection as a practice of resilience is increasingly hard. In traumatic responses, parts of our brain go off-line, making sensory input either too extreme or unavailable because of numbing. It’s easy to lose touch with our ability to listen, and sometimes what’s there is so painful, our psyches form a protective barrier against feeling it, thus numbing out those sensations. As more folks engage with the complexities of our contemporary lives, and the greater world at large, more and more people are turning to our bodily intelligence as a keystone for making definitive and profound change. Folks from all walks of life are applying the framework of somatic intelligence into psychology, therapy, movement and rehabilitation practices, trauma treatment, educational reform, health and wellness practices, interpersonal conflict, community building, and social justice reform. By incorporating novel movement patterns and ways of listening, somatic practices can help reset the system by allowing for new inputs and outputs. Developing somatic intelligence builds resilience in our physical, emotional and relational capacities, allowing for the possibility of change. About The Everything Space: The Everything Space is a collaboratively run embodiment studio providing skillful and accessible somatic education, curated by Abbi Jaffe and Amanda Franz. The Everything Space offers classes, organizational somatic consultation and implementation, private sessions, performances and creative space to create opportunities to listen deeply to the wisdom of the body, express grief and celebration, and rewild ourselves. Find out more at theeverythingspace.com or find them on Facebook at The Everything Space. The Everything Space unleashes the body’s intelligence, with you!
Somatic education studio officially opens its doors. [somatic = the lived/felt experience as a body ie. connection of bodymind]. Montpelier, Vermont: The Everything Space, a new embodiment studio curated by Abbi Jaffe and Amanda Franz, is located in the center of downtown Montpelier, 64 Main St, where folks from all walks of life come to learn and listen to the deep intelligence of their own bodies. It is the first studio in Vermont specifically dedicated to the education of diverse somatic practices as an integral part of social and environmental justice work. The offerings at The Everything Space are intentionally expansive to address our bodies as part of everything that we do and how we connect with the world around us. With a compelling range of movement classes like Natural Fitness and contact improvisation, to relational practices like Embodying our Ecosystems and Authentic Relating, to big picture Embodiment Activism practices like Growing Resilience: Being Trauma Informed and Bodies of Change: Embodiment & Social Change discussion group, there is a weaving of the inner and outer world that highlights our many connections. All of the classes and facilitators that teach here have different focuses and share a commitment to the studio's vision. And, to bridge the content with the process, the facilitators all attend an in-house training on Being Trauma Informed, taught by Jaffe and Franz, which educates and provides skills about the body's response to trauma, including the trauma of systemic oppression. Their understanding of how embodiment practices that include a big picture analysis create a potent ground for working with and releasing trauma has proven to be powerful for their community and clients. Jaffe and Franz have been teaching together for 5 years, and after opening The Everything Space, and offering two years of classes and private sessions there, they are ready and ripe to welcome more people into the community. “Vermonters have been excited to have such potent opportunities in Montpelier. Our offerings create a supportive community and are in line with the current research in the fields of biomechanics, neuroscience, and health that point to the profound implications of developing one’s somatic intelligence in promoting mental health and the longevity of the body.” states Jaffe, “We would like to continue to welcome a diversity of people of all ages, including the builders, farmers, educators, activists and the professional movement artists that have already been attending.” The diversity of people coming through the door is no accident. Most classes are structured on a sliding scale or are by donation. “Accessibility has long been a part of the conversation on how to integrate social justice work and embodiment,” says Franz, “We are Embodiment Activists, doing the work of resilience building. Every day, we navigate a complex modern world which affects our bodies, the foundation of our resilience. Listening deeply to our body and cultivating connection to ourselves, our communities and the greater Earth community supports us to engage with the world in a positive way. That’s part of why we decided to name it The Everything Space. We are reclaiming our body’s intelligence in everything we do.” About The Everything Space: The Everything Space is a collaboratively run embodiment studio providing skillful and accessible somatic education, curated by Abbi Jaffe and Amanda Franz. The Everything Space offers classes, organizational somatic consultation and implementation, private sessions, performances and creative space to create opportunities to listen deeply to the wisdom of the body, express grief and celebration, and rewild ourselves. Find out more at theeverythingspace.com or find them on Facebook at The Everything Space. |
AuthorAmanda Franz and Archives
March 2020
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