WORKSHOPS
Ashley offers interactive, somatic workshops to cultivate access to and autonomy of the body, and respect for ALL bodies, including the earth body. Hating your body blocks embodiment, which blocks connection to the earth, which blocks liberation. This can lead to abuses of the body and suffering.
Falling in love with the earth by falling in love with your body
Body liberation through connection with the earth and as a means to remember the earth body: If we come into right relationship with our bodies, it is a step toward right relationship with the earth. Extractive and harmful action toward our own bodies and the bodies of others feeds the same systems of oppression that underlie extractive practices that are harming the earth body. This workshop helps human-beings begin to dismantle the rigid cishet, thin, white normative body ideal and the idea of body as an object as a means to opening to understanding the earth is not an object or product either. To remember the connection to the earth in our own bodies helps us heal our relationship to our bodies and by healing the relationship to our bodies, we can move toward healing our relationship to the earth.
Workshop Activities and Structure
Structured to align with the 5 elements (water, fire, earth, air, space) this workshop incoroporates dance, ritual, art, self-love, touch, somatic practices, earth connection and vulnerable sharing to create a gathering of human-beings in harmony with other more-than-human beings dedicated to moving past a fatphobic, diet culture based framework and adopting body liberation as a north star. Social justice and equity is central to the conversation and the needs of marginalized communities (including non-human communities) are placed at the forefront. The workshops will emphasize relationship to the earth through place, and incorporating earth elements into the activities.
These can take place as half-day, full day or two day workshops. Participants may engage in:
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Body art with earth elements
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Ecstatic dance
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Meditation
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Communal expression of grief
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Dismantling shame
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Pracitces of taking up space and holding space
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Water blessing
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Earth ritual
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Compassionate, consensual touch (self or with other beings)
