April 5, 2025
The Skylight Centre, London
10:00 am – 6:00 pm
£195 (payments will be billed in US dollars)
*3 installment payment plans are available. Email Sarah to set up.
This movement-based day of exploration will be real, rare and of tangible substance. Sarah’s work brings a nuance and gravitas that invites us to ground, galvanize and embody our power and primal intelligence as literal forces of nature- of the earth, alive with the tenor of weather and storms… human animals fleshed through with instinct, vision, creative response, and essential and cohering fierceness.
What does it mean to land and locate in time and space, to consolidate life-force against the modes of dilution, dispersion, distraction, and domestication that we are baited with every day? What does it feel like to wake up out of strategic amnesia and the lull of dissociation? What would it mean to put an ear to the ground at this moment in our world?… Literally (through the sensing capacity in our bones to hear instruction, impulse and information rising up from below) and archetypally (through our capacity to reach between worlds, into interstitial spaces, below the surface, beyond what can be seen now, and access multiple layers of intelligence and mythological instruction and vision)? What would it mean to move our way into a great remembering that will nourish and inspire right down to the bones of our Souls?
This workshop is a somatic exploration for moving toward a fierce becoming. Through flows of archetypal qigong, primal expression, landing in our bones, and tracking the communal weave of emergent symbol and mythological clues that rise up in our forest of moving bodies, we call forth the fierce motions of inner life that are required to guard and protect our soul-fire, truth, and integrity, and to move us into the world with more coherence.
We come together to cut through. To inhabit ourselves more truly. Moving out of the false feminine feigning of “not knowing” into the deep visceral knowing of a fierce kind of love.
Fierceness in the feminine soul is too often kept under wraps, hidden from view, and relegated to unexpressed territories. In most myths, fairy tales and real-life scenarios depicting a feminine protagonist, it is the embodiment and expression of this fierceness that is needed to free her from her own capture, domestication, and disappearance toward a life and path of sovereignty and true power.
Too often the qualities of ferocious integrity live in the shadows and become distorted and ineffective versions of themselves as they twist into knots of anger, rage, and resentment…or become so hidden that they seem unfindable altogether, rendering us falsely passive, self-doubting, tentative, demure, disembodied and dissociated.
The aspects and qualities of the ferocious feminine are part of our instinctual animal body containing profound integrity when not repressed, hidden, or avoided.
A fundamental truth of the wild feminine soul is that we know what must live and what must die. It is not only within our reach but within our biological intelligence to be the keepers of cycles and the actors of this agency.
When we are not landed in our bones, nor close to the somatic gestures of this fierce instinct, it is difficult to use our voice, to say a full no or a full yes, to stand up for ourselves and each other.
This workshop is open to all genders and every BODY wishing to explore the qualities of fierceness within the context of the modern socialization and widely propagated misunderstandings of “masculine” and “feminine” natures.
WHAT TO BRING: A yoga mat, blanket, cushion for sitting, water, snacks, + wear layers for laying still and warming movement, Lunch if you don’t want to leave our studio location.
YOUR GUIDE:
Sarah Byrden
Sarah Byrden has been a somatic practitioner, educator and wilderness guide for over 25 years. Her life and work have been an unfolding love affair with land/ place, story/ myth, body/movement, nature/wilderness, voice/word. She considers herself a guide, and most places, if we truly arrive, as wildernesses.
Sarah leads backpacking trips for women, and offers exploratory spaces of archetypal qigong, primal movement, mythology, Chinese 5 Elements, and creative writing. A two time TEDx presenter, Sarah has dedicated her life to apprenticeships in movement, nature/wilderness exploration and guiding, writing and listening.
Teaching from her own life-long journey, she is the founder of The Elemental Self, a bastion of soul-centered work, offering pathways for remembering, return and reclamation… of ourselves as nature, the web in which we belong, and our innate capacity to move and be moved by brilliant and loving source beyond conditioning.
Every workshop/trip she offers is an emergent experience. She does not work from a script or curriculum, rather from deep listening and tracking of the “room”. She is most interested in the depth of the emergent creativity, vitality and wisdom that arises when we turn toward this kind of listening and participation.
Irish/Celtic in blood, she has called the Tewa lands of Northern New Mexico home for the better part of her adult life.