December 30 · 10am - January 1, 2025 · 6:30pm PST
IOOF
520 Dana Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
Facilitated by Matthew Nelson
Celebrate New Year's with Intention and Community:
Join BraveSpace®, where we co-create a circle of belonging safe enough to
explore embodied authenticity and vulnerability. In BraveSpace we consciously
cultivate and de-shame our sensual intelligence as a community through the
relational practices of contact improvisation. We’ll uplevel our physical and
metaphysical attunement skills to tap into the joyful healing power of communal
inter-being. Beginners will be offered the tools they need to suceed, and more
advanced dancers will be met in their expertise.
For New Year’s, we invite you to tune in deeply, not tune
out. It’s a time to embrace transformation, release old patterns that no longer
serve you, and intentionally welcome the new. Through movement, touch,
connection, and sacred medicine, we will elevate ourselves and each
other—entering the New Year with clarity, purpose, openness, and play.
There are ten fundamental principles of BraveSpace®
which derive from the art of contact improvisation, multiple somatic lineages,
and a few mysticism traditions. These principles will serve as the
essential framework for our experience together:
1) Somatic Research: Notice the
sensations, emotions, images, and movements that arise in your body. The truth
of your body cannot be manipulated away by your mind.
2) De-shaming: You are nature, both wild and
civilized. Bear witness to the divine light and darkness that comes through
yourself and others by holding your stories and judgements lightly.
3) Trans-formation: You are comprised of
patterns. Be willing to change your form, face your trauma, and invite
discomfort so you can grow in alignment with your joy, purpose, and truth in
community.
4) Improvisation: True power is the ability
to stay present with what is. Invite awe and wonder as you inhabit the
mysterious gap between the little bit that you know and the infinite unknown.
5) Response-ability: Reposition yourself in
relation to others and the world to find where you belong in each moment.
Communicate your truth, yet do not attempt to control others’ actions in order
to avoid your own shifts.
6) Heart-Centeredness: Approach your heart as
a gateway to spirit and communal consciousness so that you may function and
serve beyond the limitations of your mind and individual identity.
7) Tensegrity: Tensional integrity is
fundamental to the wholeness of living systems. Practice holding the tension of
opposites physically and metaphysically to build greater range and capacity in
your being.
8) Risk: You are going to die: Everything has
a beginning, middle, and end. Embrace fear without being led by it.
9) Eros: Follow your joy, pleasure, vitality,
and longing to develop loving fullness within yourself. Connect your sexual
essence first to spirit within so that you have capacity to love and attune
with others generously.
10) Interbeing: You are simultaneously an
individual and a part of this collectively animate world. Speak, listen, move,
feel, and be willing to change your mind.
