backwards wisdom the course

a body-up learning space for women, where we practice honouring mess & wrongness, decentralising logic-forward linear ways of sense-making and expressing, and re-centring the non-linear feral wisdom of the body

An Immersion into Non-Linear Wisdom, the Aliveness of Mess & the Magic of Wrongness

What does this look like in practice?

- landing in and orienting to our bodies, exploring how we can find more safety and comfort together

- cultivating our sense of 'edges': our felt sense of boundary/protection/separateness from the world around us (so that we can hold our unique flavour of mess & wisdom)

- learning how to listen to the unfolding of our non-linear, embodied wisdom stream by paying attention to our senses, impulses & present moment experience

- practicing centring this wisdom stream & inhabiting the weirdness, tenderness, crunchiness it may evoke, noticing when we get swayed by the dominant paradigm's preference for linear sense-making, and orienting back to our own thread of aliveness

- making space for 'mess' by meeting it directly through the body, contacting the aliveness it contains

- exploring 'wrongness': how we internalise a sense of wrongness given to use by the dominant paradigm, and how when we take out these daggers of wrongness and turn them the right way round, places which were considered 'wrong' are discovered to be gushing with aliveness, love, creativity & sensuality

Outside-In/Inside-Out

Part of our immersion will include exploration and discovery around how, especially as women, we are encouraged to perceive ourselves from the outside-in. This outside-in gaze that we adopt towards ourselves extends not only to our external appearance or behaviour, but also to the relationship we hold with our felt, somatic ecology. Labelling, judging, allowing/disavowing, explaining our experience. Making it wrong. Criticising the 'mess' it might contain.

This kind of self-scrutiny can be amplified for women who possess a particular flavour of feral, weird, non-linear embodied wisdom. We internalise the external, patriarchal gaze that makes our natural way of following and inhabiting our body's instinct wrong. During our time together, we will meet this gaze, and the ways in which it can often be blocking us from the strange, wonderful & unique genius that often lives inside these spaces of "Wrongness".

Meeting the Mess

In our practice, we will gently unravel some of what the mind labels as "Wrong", and, with the felt sense, begin feeling and inhabiting the somatic reality of what lives underneath.

In my experience, through diving into direct contact with the sensations of wrongness, we are often blessed with meeting the rich and potent well of aliveness that is Mess. This isn't a mental accepting or rationalising of our Mess, but an intimate and inherently sensual coming-close-to what is Alive in the present moment. This core thread will weave itself through our Backwards Wisdom learning space.

Feral Wisdom & Neurodiversity

As well as learning to inhabit our Wrongness and meet our Mess, we will learn practical, body-based tools for contacting the unique, weird and feral wisdom stream that speaks only through you & your body. We will also practice being Seen in this - something that can support us in accessing our Backwards Wisdom not only when we're in our own personal, private practice, but also when we are out in the world.

In a world where explaining & logical sense-making are hyper-dominant, we will be exercising our muscle for embodying our more instinctual, Body-Up, non-linear ways of being & expressing. This element can be particularly powerful for women who are deeply sensitive or neurodiverse - our physiological wiring is such that it can be extremely easy for us to feel and be porous to the relational and environmental fields that we exist in, and while this offers immense gifts it can also often be a struggle to maintain contact with ourselves while we move through the world. We will be training our capacity to stay with and follow our own differentiated, unique wisdom stream while being in relationship with the rest of life. 

Practical Details