Calling the directions
A ritual of becoming everything
Turn your body to the east.
Go on. Get your phone out, if you need, to orient yourself towards the sunrise. This doesn’t have to be done at sunrise. The echo of new beginnings might remain nonetheless.
Turn your body to the east. Take a breath. Sigh it out. Feel the air cross the threshold of you, spreading into your soft sponge lungs, diffusing. The basket of your ribs making room then softening back in. Every cell of you is breathing, the oxygen and carbon dioxide dancing across membranes.
We turn to the east and to the mental body. Take a breath. Watch the shifting cloudscape of your thoughts. As slippery and ephemeral as vapour in your hands. Here an old story, here a fresh arising of inspiration. Thoughts as sharp as a sword. Powerful in one context, deadly in another.
This is an experience of the body.
Welcome air! Hail east!
Turn your body to the south.
One quarter turn and a realignment. Feel your heart beat in your chest. The electrical spark at the very centre of you, rhythmic and pulsing. This internal furnace.
Turn your body to the south. Turn your attention towards the electric aliveness that runs through you, warm like the sun. Can you sense its radiance? Some experience it as a torus. A doughnut, if you prefer, with you in the hole. The energetic radius that extends beyond your edges, your heart at the centre.
We turn to the south and to the energetic body. Feel your heart beat in your chest. Find where your desire burns. Where the energy moves you. Find the erotic flame that points you towards “yes! this!” As simple and potent as a sunflower turning towards the sun.
This is an experience of the body.
Welcome fire! Hail south!
Turn your body to the west.
Another quarter turn. Notice the waters in you. The liquidity of this supposedly solid physical form.
Turn your body to the west. Feel the fluid slip of spit down your throat. Blood and lymph flowing in their channels. Damp marrow in your bones. The lubrication between and within every cell. How juicy you are!
We turn to the west and to the emotional body. The rolling tides of feeling. The deep ocean held in each of us. Waves rising and receding, rippling through you.
This is an experience of the body.
Welcome water! Hail west!
Turn your body to the north.
Another quarter turn, rounding on a full rotation now. Feel your feet on the ground. The solid connection of sole against floor.
Turn your body to the north. Surrender your weight as gravity lovingly tugs your atoms towards the Earth. Imagine all the things those atoms were before they came to constitute you. Everything they will become after they pass through. You are the Earth. An ecosystem within an ecosystem, in a continual cycle of atomic exchange.
We turn to the north and to the physical body. Acknowledging that to be a living being (in this realm, at least) requires a physical form. You are physical! You have mass! you exist in physical space! What a strange and wondrous thing.
This is an experience of the body.
Welcome earth! Hail north!
Turn your body to the east once more. The full circle completed but with a few embodied realms yet to explore.
Turn your awareness to the below. To the underworld. To everything that came before. Feel the stretch of deep time open beneath you. All the ancestors, both blood and kin. You carry their love letters within you. All the beings who lived and died before you, shaping the pathways to create this very moment. Your very body.
We turn to the below and to the relational body. The reciprocal interconnection between you and everything else. A body built for relationship – with other humans, other beings, the living world, the ancestors. A body attuned and receptive to connection.
This is an experience of the body.
Welcome relationship! Hail below!
Lastly, turn your awareness to the above.
Zoom out. From deep time to deep space. Rise through the clouds, traverse the thin barrier of the atmosphere. Remember yourself into the cosmos. The infinite expanse of space. 100 billion galaxies and then some, the fertile void in between. A potent vastness from which any possibility might emerge.
We turn to the above and to the spiritual body. To the unlanguageable. To the mystery. To the divine.
This is an experience of the body.
Welcome spirit! Hail above!
Coming up:
✹ The Foundation - Beta round
Online or in person at Studio Dreamland.
A 3-month somatic mentorship. Establish a somatic practice that acts like a steady foundation so that you can reconnect to your most potent, creative self.
Cultivate the embodied self-trust, creative clarity, and deep-rooted power needed to to conjure new worlds, for yourself and the collective.
February 28th is the last chance to do this work with me at beta round pricing.
✹ Safer Spaces
Online, February 25th
2 - 5pm UK time
Co-hosted with Sara Duigou
How can we make our work trauma conscious?
How can we help people feel safe with us?
How can we find embodied safety for ourselves in our work?
This workshop is for anyone who works with people’s bodies - tattoo artists, coaches, movement teachers, massage therapists, hair dressers, healers.
You’ll come away from this workshop with a deeper ability to hold space for your clients and yourself. To offer agency and meet whatever arises with confidence and ease.
Sustenance:
I love Karin’s writing so much. You should go follow her for the wordsmithery alone, but also because her most recent piece perfectly encapsulates the good-bad pleasure of watching “Wuthering Heights”
You know what’s been giving me a lot of joy lately? Going places to make things with other humans. Pottery, risograph, writing. It does something good to a person to chat and learn and create with your hands, I highly recommend.
90’s yearners unite! The Jeff Buckley documentary It’s Never Over is out and I can’t wait to soak in every moment.
This is Eyes Open, Dreaming – one woman’s adventures in creativity, liberatory somatics, animism, and embodying worlds of connection.
more about me
more about studio dreamland
I really needed this. What a beautiful post—I will be returning to it when I need a moment of embodied connection with myself and all that is. Thank you 💕
Loved this x