All parts of you are welcome here. This is not a course to fix you. If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of those kinds of courses. Rather, this a journey to deeply come home to yourself, and come home to your body. Where love already resides.
Coming home to oneself also means acknowledging when we abandon ourselves. When we abandon ourselves, we easily get stuck in doing and fixing. As if our whole selves are a project that just needs to be fixed. It can be so overwhelming.
Instead, when we learn to embody ourselves, and embrace all parts of ourselves, we can discover that we don’t need fixing. The realization that we don’t need to do things to earn love. We already are it. You already are it.
In this course, you have the opportunity to reclaim your magical and amazing body.
Which can be seen as a radical gesture in the society we live in. To be grounded and at peace in ones own body, when there are so many forces trying to make us believe otherwise. That we just need to be fixed a little bit more… and a little more… and then at some point in a vague future, we’ll be ready and done. Or?
What if there’s another, more powerful way… to love oneself from the inside out.
Practical Information about the Course:
The course takes place online, making it easy and convenient to attend from wherever you are in the world. All sessions are recorded and uploaded within approximately 24 hours to our shared course platform. There, you will also find all written materials, audio for home practice, and other tips. This way, you have the opportunity to access all course content even if you happen to miss a session.
Each session includes theory and practical exercises. For more detailed information about the content of the sessions, read here.
Self-love exercises as the common Thread include:
- Meditations
- Breathwork
- Intuitive movement
- Visualization
- Yoga nidra
- Touch exercises (non-intimate)
What’s Included?
- 6 online sessions of approximately 2-2.5 hours each (depending on group size)
- All course sessions available to watch afterwards
- A workbook
- Written materials
- Audio recordings
- Small and large group discussions
- Tips for reflection and writing
- Optional addition: a bonus 3 hour workshop in the weekend with intuitive dance, breathwork, and sharing for 2-3 hours (additional fee of 25 USD)
Course Start: As soon as there are enough interests. If you are interested to be on a waitlist for the course sign up here
Dates: Six weekday evenings
Time: 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM
Price: 590 USD (installment payment possible)
Contact me for more information and/or to sign up here.
Offer: If you sign up for Embodied Self-love, you will receive a 10% discount on the Advanced Sexuality course starting in the fall of 2024.
Why is it so important to be in the body, and why is it so difficult?
Because most of us haven’t been encouraged to be very much in our bodies. When we are children, we are naturally in our bodies, but as we grow older, it’s almost as if our attention is “pushed up” into our heads. Thinking and doing have higher status in our culture than feeling and being.
But it hasn’t always been this way.
The word somatic comes from the Greek word “somatikos,” which roughly means the living, embodied, and conscious human being. It’s the experience of someone living in a body and that body being full of life and awareness. Mind and body are not separate but are both part of what we are, which we can call Soma.
The phenomenon of separating body and mind is relatively new in human history. Much of the separation between body and mind and control over the body originated in religions and patriarchal structures that have been active for the past 5000 years. Controlling the body, including sexuality and what was considered sinful.
During the Enlightenment, ideas about the superiority of the mind over the body were reinforced, along with the belief that what comes from the body is dirty, primitive, and not reliable or important.
Given that history, which we still carry traces of, it’s not surprising that so many of us lack a deep grounding and connection with our bodies. That we lack understanding of the importance of inhabiting our bodies and perhaps even feel fear of truly feeling our emotions and what happens in the body.
But to feel whole as humans, we cannot separate body and mind. We are a living organism: body, mind, emotions, and soul. Soul here refers to something that gives life to the body. You can choose to call it soul or energy or whatever you want. But Soma is not just body and mind. It also includes the mystery that keeps us alive, without which body or mind would not exist.
This course (just like all the work I do) is based in Soma.
If we don’t include the body in relation to self-love, it often remains just as an idea. A thought process, a persuasion process where we try to think ourselves into/convince ourselves that (we should) love ourselves. Because we know it would be good. It’s a tiresome process. I know, I’ve tried to love myself from the mental/thought world. And maybe you have too? It takes a lot of energy, and it never lasts. It stays on the surface. But never sinks deep.
If we don’t include the body in our relationship with life, we leave a large part of how we interact with life outside our experience. Through the process of coming back to our bodies, we reclaim the fact that we are whole and complete just as we are. However, when we’re not in touch with the body, it’s easy to feel deficient rather than whole and complete.
It’s also the foundation of a deeper and new form of sexuality. If we live in our heads, we miss a large part of life itself. That which we can only experience through our bodies. For that reason, this course provides a very good foundation for those who want to deepen their pleasure and sexuality, but of course, it has great value in itself. Inhabiting our bodies is the foundation of all forms of pleasure, including food and eating, sexuality, being in nature, etc.
The more we love ourselves and our bodies, the deeper and more profound sexual experiences are possible.
An overview of the course
Session 1: Introduction, grounding, overview, sinking in
In this initial module, we take the time to create safety within the group and introduce the topic. We review and reflect on what self-love is and what embodied self-love entails. How do we create safety within our own bodies and develop a deep relationship with ourselves as a whole? We explore tools for containment and self-regulation to have the courage to inhabit our bodies deeply.
Session 2: Coming home to one’s own truth and love
In this session, we delve into the body and connect with our essence and inner child. By learning to become our own parent to our inner child, we find it easier to deeply care for and love ourselves. This reduces the risk of abandoning ourselves in our present lives and expecting others to provide what we need to give ourselves. We also delve deeper into the nervous system and specifically the significance of the vagus nerve in being present in the body.
Session 3: Meeting our emotional wounds
In this session, we deepen our exploration and learning from session 2 and examine how we’ve learned to abandon ourselves and the consequences of this. We get to know our inner critical voice deeply and how we self-sabotage. How can we learn to understand, embrace, and transform that part? Meeting and embracing our whole selves is a key to self-love.
Session 4: Body love – feeling at home and safe in one’s own skin
In this session, we direct our attention to the body and open up communication with it. We will take a guided journey into the body where we explore physical and emotional contact with the body, practice inhabiting specific parts of the body, and open ourselves to the wisdom therein. How can we create safety to inhabit all parts of our body? We will also explore what it means to awaken our hands and what touch on the body’s own terms means. We also examine forgiveness and gratitude related to the body.
Session 5: Finding home in intuition, wisdom, your original power, and connection with the source
In this session, we deepen our connection with the body and specifically our pelvis, which for many is an uninhabited part of the body, and a part that is so important to feel grounded, at home, and powerful. We will also experiment with boundary setting, which is an important part of self-love. As we learn to say no to things that drain/overwhelm us and make space for what we need, our self-respect increases. Boundary setting is a radical form of self-love.
Session 6: How do we integrate self-love into our lives with ourselves and others?
In our closing session, we tie together everything we’ve learned, reflect on how we can integrate it into our lives and relationships. How can we, with increased self-respect and self-love, meet our surroundings and stand up for ourselves, our needs, and boundaries in a more natural and relaxed way from a deeply grounded place within ourselves?
It’s one thing to tell ourselves in our heads that we love ourselves. It’s a completely different thing to feel it in every cell of the body.