In honor of Valentine’s Day we are extending our 2021 New Year’s Studio Special!
**Get in touch to reserve your time!**
Give yourself or a loved one the gift of studio space…
6 hours of private studio time for $200 That’s 40% off our regular rate!
For $200 you get: ~ 6 whole hours of SomaSpace all to yourself ~ You can use this time all at once or spread out over time. ~ This is a 40% discount off our regular weekend rental rate! ~ *BonusOffer: if you use this time for recording an on-line class, we will offer our full marketing package as part of the deal to help you get the word out!
You can use the time for: ~ Your private movement practice ~ Recording and/or streaming your online offerings ~ Taking a zoom class or workshop with space to move ~ Hanging out in a safe space away from home
To take advantage of this special, you must complete your booking with a signed contract and 100% payment before March 1, 2021. Your studio time can be booked for anytime from February to May, 2021.
Terms: * 6-hours minimum is required (let us know if you’d like to work out an arrangement for more time) * Time can be used for one single studio session, or spread out over multiple sessions * 15-minute grace period before and after all bookings, free of charge * Must agree to use hand sanitizer upon entering, wipe down surfaces used, and complete cleaning protocol before leaving the studio to help us all maintain a safe, clean, healthy space to move in. * For all rentals, there is a refundable $250 security deposit (we can hold a check for this) * Our regular cancellation policy applies (inquire for details)
In response to Covid-19, we have implemented a new detailed cleaning and safety protocol and are providing renters with masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies and instructions for sanitizing at the end of their time at the studio. We are doing our best to ensure a safe and healthy wellness center for everyone!
Take advantage of this deep discounted deal now!
To officially book, we require a signed contract and 100% of the total rental fee upfront by March 1, 2021.
The studio is wheelchair accessible and one block from the MAX Hollywood Transit Center with free parking on the street.
To take advantage of this deal and reserve your studio time email us at: contact@somaspace.us
SomaSpace: Movement Arts & Healing Center has practitioner rooms available for rent!
Are you looking for a clean and safe home for your healing arts practice? Do you need a dedicated space to see your clients virtually? Is your work heart-centered and would it flourish in a gorgeous, energetically-rich sanctuary with like-minded community?
If so, please check out the details below and call or email to schedule a tour!
In response to Covid-19, we have implemented a new detailed cleaning and safety protocol and are providing each treatment room with masks, hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies. We are doing our best to ensure a safe and healthy wellness center for everyone!
The ideal practitioner will: ~ Specialize in massage therapy, acupuncture, naturopathy, plant medicine, herbalism, shamanic healing, bodywork of all kinds, aromatherapy, coaching and other healing modalities ~ Benefit from a lively community hub & movement arts wellness center environment ~ Appreciate and take loving care of our gorgeous healing sanctuary ~ Be comfortable with quiet activities during the day and louder activities at night in the movement studio ~ Be okay with limited weekend hours, as some weekends have private workshops
Practitioner Room #2
~ Room is 9’6″ x 7’6″ ~ Mostly furnished, shared office ~ Available for rent Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays: $150/month for one day per week (i.e. every Mon only) $225/month for two days per week (i.e. every Mon & Tues) $325/month for three days per week (i.e. every Mon, Tues & Fri) ~ Available March 5, 2021, although we are happy to be flexible with move-in date ~ 6-month contract is required, as well as professional liability insurance and security deposit ~ Some weekends may be available
Practitioner Room #3
~ Room is 12’2″ x 17′ ~ Unfurnished (or partially, if preferred) ~ Available for rent Mondays through Fridays: $350/month for one day per week (i.e. every Wed) $650/month for two days per week (i.e. every Tues & Thurs) $950/month for three days per week (i.e. every Tues, Wed & Thurs) $1250/month for four days per week (i.e. every Tues, Wed, Thurs & Fri) $1500/month for full time use (excluding weekends) ~ Available immediately, although we are happy to be flexible with move-in date ~ 6-month contract is required, as well as professional liability insurance and security deposit ~ Some weekends may be available
Rent includes: ~ Beautiful space with complete accessibility for different levels of ability (ADA) ~ Large front entry area with plants, seating, beautiful lighting and water fountain ~ Extensive publicity and exposure to a diverse community interested in healing arts and movement ~ Utilities including heat/air conditioning, wireless Internet, trash/recycling, and electricity ~ Kitchenette with filtered water, fridge, microwave, toaster oven, teapot, coffeemaker and dishes ~ A private lounge for teachers and practitioners only ~ Access to large movement studio
“The Seed Of Consciousness” by Lubosh Cech Archival Exhibition Canvas Printed on Gilded Wood Panel. 32″ x 24″ x 2 Purchase
“I am honored to be showing the sacred images from Nepal and the Pacific Northwest at SomaSpace for the fourth time. The programs that SomaSpace offers and the fine people who participate in them seem to be an ideal match of philosophy and audience that fit my artistic vision. I hope the presence of these images will complement and enhance everyone’s experience here.” ~ Luce (artbyluce.com)
Lubosh Cech (LuCe) is a Portland-based visual artist working as a photographer, holistic graphic designer, filmmaker, and painter.
Born in Prague, Czech Republic, he is classically educated in studio art and art history. After leaving Prague as a political refugee, LuCe spent nearly a decade installing and designing art exhibitions at Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He then relocated to Portland with a meditation community (an ashram) where he lived and worked for many years before moving on to pursue freelancing work and further his Tantric and shamanic studies.
A long-time meditator, LuCe experiences his work as an expression of his devotion to Beauty. Accessing the richness of deep, mystical realms through various spiritual experiences, his focus is on the transformational and healing aspects of art.
We live in a world with an epidemic of homelessness. In the US at least half a million people live without a home. The numbers of vulnerable people displaced worldwide are staggering. We feel the planet as our collective home in crisis. How can any of us truly feel at home in this world?
As the child of immigrant parents from India, I’ve often
struggled with feeling at home in the world. There is a profound sense of grief in the immigrant
experience, even when you leave home voluntarily. The food will never taste as
good as it did at home. The air will lack that familiar combination of musky
sweetness and putrid stench of home. Though I was born in Chicago, I felt my
parents’ separation from home as my own loss. On our many trips to India as a
child, I felt a fleeting sense of belonging that I would never feel in the
United States. Even that faded as I struggled to fit in here in the US,
abandoning my mother tongue and learning how to decipher the hieroglyphics of
this culture. And so the sense of being at home in the world is something that
I never really felt during childhood.
A dear friend of mine who grew up in the Caribbean once told me that for her the sea was home. The days and years she spent idling in the waves, laying on the pink sand, these were a homecoming for her. And she asked me if I had a place like that. I felt grief as I confessed that I didn’t. But that I hoped I would find one. Yet as I thought about it, I realized that home is not a place for me. Home is a feeling.
My first experiences with somatic work were learning
practices of contact, of touch. Placing my hands on the shoulders of another
person, feeling the whole of myself in relation to their body, I understood
what it meant to be in right relationship with the world. This was home. Neither
too close, nor too far away. Not too much contact, not too little. Just enough heart, just enough
ground. No thoughts, only
feelings. A resonant web that
connected us, our bodies no longer separate, surrounded by potent space.
I had searched my whole life for this feeling outside of
myself, in romantic relationships, in philosophy, and in my art. It wasn’t
until later that I learned that for me, home is the felt sense of being in
resonance with others and with the planet. This is not an abstraction or something to aspire to. It is
something that we can learn to feel and sense in the present moment. And when we feel it, when we enter that
resonant space, something new can happen.
This something new
is how I think about creativity. An elemental contact with ourselves and with
others. Rather than willing something to happen, struggling to produce, we are
co-creators.
This fundamental attunement that connects us to home is a
perceptual orientation that at some point in history, we didn’t have to learn.
But I believe we do need to relearn it now, and create spaces to practice it
together.
If you too long for home, join me in this resonant space.
You can schedule a private session with me (in person on or on Skype) or a free introductory phone consultation online, or get in touch with me at info@anitachari.com for more information. Somatic work in a group context is another powerful way that you can leverage the presence and contact of others to create attunement. In my workshop series on Embodying Creativity you’ll learn to practice the skills of releasing imprinting from your history through attunement with yourself and with others in the group. You can also receive weekly resources by joining my email list at my website.
Join me for upcoming evening Embodying Creativity at SomaSpace (4050 NE Broadway StreetPortland, Oregon 97232):
I’m truly excited to be joining the SomaSpace community and to have the chance to share my work with you. Over the next two months, I’ll be publishing a series of blog posts to introduce you to the principles of my Embodying Creativity program, which I’ll be teaching in my upcoming classes at SomaSpace. Throughout my posts, I’ll share with you my journey of learning about these tools, which I believe are essential for connecting to a paradigm of creativity, health, and sustainability. Every two weeks I’ll introduce a new concept from my work, along with tools and exercises every few days that you can use in your daily practice. I invite you to share your thoughts and questions with me along the way at info@anitachari.com or find me on Instagram, @anita.chari.embody, and stay tuned for new exercises, videos, and tools for your creative practice and wellbeing. I’m also offering a 25% discount on private sessions for new clients during the month of January, so please don’t miss this opportunity to start your year off from a place of empowerment, purpose, and embodied stillness!
Each and every one of us is a being that emerged out of nothing, from stillness. If we take a moment to really consider this, we can see that each of us, at the core of our being, is inherently a creative process, a dynamic movement of becoming. Without struggle, without trying, we are already creative just because we are here. No matter what we choose to do in our lives, we are in a continual process of self-renewal and self-creation. Just as in our first moments of life, as embryos, one of the first gestures of our being after fertilization is a long period of stillness before our cells divide into more and more complexity. Within this stillness, in which we do absolutely nothing, potency builds—we are nothing but our creative potential.
Long after these early moments of life, it can be incredibly difficult to connect with the felt sense of our inherent creativity. So much of the time we struggle to feel passionately in contact with the desires we have for empowerment and expression. Trauma from childhood, accelerated living, technology, ambivalent relationships, and unprocessed emotions all contribute to a sense of unease and disconnection from how our creativity wants to express itself. For a long time, I struggled with the connection between my personal trauma and my creative expression. Like many creative people, the source of my stories, my music, and my expression seemed to flow from a place of wounding that I needed to express. For me, as a child of Indian immigrants living in the US, it was a childhood of alienation in a culture where I felt foreign and excluded that was the source of my pain. And yet this painful imprinting also threatened to silence my voice. This is a paradox that I think many of us struggle with: Our life struggles are the source of our creativity, yet if we don’t know how to resolve those experiences in a healthy way, our expression can’t come to fruition.
As part of my personal journey, understanding the connection between creativity and trauma has become my passion and my path. I’ve worked for more than a decade to learn about how to transform personal and collective trauma through creativity. The result of my work is a process called Embodying Creativity that brings together embodied practices, trauma resolution, and creative work. This program fuses my experience as a somatic practitioner, published author, musician, and academic to teach you how to resolve the trauma that you hold in your body that impacts your experience of wellbeing and creativity, causes anxiety, and cuts you off from the energy that fuels your creative path. In the coming months, I’ll be offering drop-in classes, private sessions (on Skype and in-person at SomaSpace), and intensive weekend workshops in this work. I invite you to join me to find a deeper level of vitality, expression, and health in your work and in your body.
In this series of posts and, at a deeper level, in my upcoming classes on Embodying Creativity, you will learn: ~ How traumatic events in our lives manifest as “imprinting,” as energy held in the physical body that limits creativity and wellbeing. ~ Techniques for resolving traumatic imprints from your history that will amplify your emotional and physical health, calm your nervous system, and rejuvenate your creative process. ~ Resources to bring the inherent health of your nervous system online in times of stress and creative blockage, allowing you to use more of your energy toward your creative goals. ~ Tools for understanding your own unique “creative sequencing,” that will allow you to magnify your creative potential in every phase of your process. ~Concepts for understanding the fundamental connection between creativity, relationships, and health.
I’ve been fortunate on my
journey to have learned these tools that attune us to the creative process and
that facilitate emotional and relational healing. Creativity is healing,
because it allows us to resolve patterns from our history and to create
something new. We meet ourselves and our world in a deeper way through bringing
new possibilities into being. And healing is creative. Because it can only
happen when we liberate ourselves from the limited perspective of our wounding
to have a new experience of the world.
Creativity is a physical and
ethereal process of the unseen coming into form. Like birth, it is often
painful. In the creative process we are compressed and expanded, rocked with
contractions. We wait in stillness, afraid that we will never get to the other
side. And then when we complete something, despite the struggle, we are seduced
to begin again.
Join me for upcoming evening classes at SomaSpace (4050 NE Broadway StreetPortland, Oregon 97232):
Friday, January 17, 2020, 7-10 pm,$35 pre-registration (receive a 25% discount for taking the 4-class series)
And if you know someone who could benefit from this work, please do share this post with them, or better yet, come on over to anitachari.com to subscribe to my list for weekly resources and reflections for your wellness practice! You can contact me at info@anitachari.com for more information, to register for classes (drop-ins welcome) and to schedule private in-person or Skype sessions.
Offering The Embodiment Process & Biodynamic Healing Sessions
Anita Chari is a somatic educator and Craniosacral practitioner devoted to facilitate clients in reconnecting the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the mind. She offers a holistic and biodynamic approach that draws on cutting-edge work on somatic experience, neuroscience, creativity, and attachment work to promote healing and empowerment. She is a certified Embodiment Process Practitioner™, with more than ten years of experience in this holistic practice, which integrates Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, somatic counseling work, trauma resolution, and pre- and peri-natal birth trauma work. She is also a facilitator of Continuum movement, a subtle therapeutic sound and movement practice that can profoundly transform physical, emotional, and energetic imprints from one’s history, restoring the body and psyche through contact with one’s individual blueprint.
With over fifteen years of work in academia, extensive musical and artistic training, and her experience as a published author, she specializes in teaching embodiment work to individuals in both creative and more left-brained fields. She serves intellectuals, writers, artists, teachers, creatives, academics, and lay people in deepening their contact with embodied experience in the realm of work, relationships, and creative process.
Anita offers free phone consultations, and sessions are available in person or on Skype.
Settling into fall is a time of coming inward. After the glory of the summer, the adventures in the sunshine and the playfulness of the season, it is now time to begin to turn within oneself. To think about what new habits you want to establish and what will nourish you as we come into the wet and cold season.
My summer was all about adjustment. Entering into graduate school for physician assistant studies and figuring our how to realign my life to support me through this rigorous process.
I quickly returned to living in my head and living my body behind. It’s such a familiar rut in my brain, too easy to cut off from the neck down. And yet, when I live that way, I quickly use up my inner resources and find I am tired, cranky, and lose my optimism.
Remembering to return inward and to feel my full self has been essential for the endurance I need in this rigorous training program. It is so helpful to me to feel into the pull of gravity and allow my body to sink in. Gravity is always there to remind me of my physical body and fullness. From this rooted place of embodiment, I can accomplish my goals with greater ease, enjoyment, and confidence.
I have to remember to live in my body. To feel my fullness. To connect with my breath, bones, and muscles. To live in one’s head can be so tempting and yet what a loss to cut off the rest of one’s senses.
After ten years in private practice with the Feldenkrais Method, I forgot how easy it is to lose oneself. I had the luxury of dropping into my body every day as a necessity and joy of my work. Now I need to be reminded of these tools. They don’t always come naturally.
I have found it useful to make doing movement lessons a part of my weekly routine. Finding small moments in each day to do a little movement practice and longer periods of time on the weekends. This is essential to my health and vibrancy.
What do you do to self-renew? How do you find ways to live within your whole body? What strategies do you have for self-care in the darker part of the year?
I invite you to join me in weekly Feldenkrais classes to help deepen your embodiment practices and to find greater ease, joy, and freedom. For me and for many of my students, these practices are essence of deep nourishment.
Join me in my on-line weekly class (delivered right to your inbox) or join my friend Alice on Friday mornings at SomaSpace. All the details are below.
Wishing you a gentle re-integration as the days shorten, Jacqueline
Two Options for Classes
Weekly In-Person Class Friday morning class continues at SomaSpace with Alice Boyd. Weekly class from 10am-11am on Fridays. Drop-in for $15 or join the Fall series for $96 (8-weeks) For details: https://somaspace.us/classes/#healing-chronic-pain-2
Weekly On-Line Class Classes released to your inbox on Monday mornings. Do the lessons whenever you like! Details below and at: https://feldenkraisportland.com/offerings/
While at the grocery store the other day ready to check out, I looked from line to line doing my best to figure out which line would be the quickest. I waited anxiously for my turn as I continued to scan the other lines to determine if I had made the “right” choice. Still considering if I should make a last minute change, I began to unload my groceries on the conveyor belt just as the cashier asked for a price check over the store intercom. Frustration and anxiety were my first reactions before realizing there was nothing I could do to change my current situation, but there was something I could do to change my relationship to it.
I took a breath, experienced my shoulders fall away from my ears, and relaxed. I felt a shift in my body and immediately felt more calm. My mind was registering the experience in my body in that moment. The inner atmosphere that was created was familiar from the many Breema classes I have taken over the years. After another breath, I noticed the delay no longer bothered me. There was gratitude for such simple tools to let go of the unnecessary stress I experienced due to a situation in my life. I realized that there was no rush. I did not have to live my life reacting to everything habitually and unconsciously. There was something simple in that moment that I could do.
Breema and the Nine Principles of Harmony give me the support to change how I relate to my daily experiences. My thoughts and judgments about everything create most of the challenges I experience in my daily life. Breema supports me to learn how to bring my mind to the activity of my body. I know that my body breathes over and over again, yet I almost never actually experience my breath during the day. I can bring my mind to register my breath in any moment and when I do that, I experience a shift within myself. I am no longer lost in thought, but instead I am connected to my body. My mind and body are working in harmony with each other. I have a moment of body-mind connection. When I give my mind a simple job to do, I begin to let go of my identification I have with the thoughts in my head.
The beauty of this practice is that I can do this in any moment at any time. Whenever I exhale, I notice my shoulders fall down my back. I feel relaxed, more alert, and connected to my body. I benefit so much by making this effort to be Present and experience this body-mind connection.
I can choose to work with any of the Nine Principles in any moment to support me to be present—Body Comfortable, Full Participation, Single Moment Single Activity, No Hurry No Pause, No Force, Mutual Support, Firmness and Gentleness, No Extra, and No Judgment. I hand the cashier some money to pay for my groceries with single moment single activity alive and for that one moment I Am Present.
Steve Brodsky is a Breema Instructor with a regular teaching practice in Oregon. He will be joined by Jon Schreiber, Director of the Breema Center, and Breema Instructors from Oregon for the Annual Portland Breema Workshop at SomaSpace Urban Retreat in NE Portland, Oregon on October 5-6th. To experience Breema, there will be a complimentary evening at SomaSpace Friday October 4th 7-9pm. For more information or to register, visit breema.info/pdx or email breemaworkshops@gmail.com.
I was in the midst of a divorce from a 16 year marriage, one that included welcoming three children into this world. It was a Sunday morning and I had “zipped myself up”, shoving all my grief into my body and zipping it up tightly so it wouldn’t spill over as I moved through my life, an experience I had every time I went into public. I was sitting in the pews of my congregation when a woman lit a candle during our joys and sorrows ritual, stood at the microphone, and stated that the candle was to honor her divorce from 2 decades prior. Happily married to a new partner, she recognized that her divorce from 20 years earlier had been a private and shameful event and never properly recognized publicly. She recanted the ritual that went into her marriage, and the isolation and guilt that went into her divorce. I was moved to tears. Unzipped.
My own marriage ceremony had included guests, flowers, cake, music, candles, readings and an exotic honeymoon. My divorce was private, painful, quiet. It was heart-break. Messy, awkward and shameful. I realized that this life transition out of married life lacked ritual and connection. I began to yearn for an opportunity to honor this transition. I heard of “divorce parties” and other celebrations and I respected this; yet, my divorce wasn’t a celebration. It was a painful to the core, wailing on the floor, zip myself up and be brave, I have to do it to save my soul, dear god help me, kind of event. A party didn’t seem right. I needed a journey to honor this transition.
From that was born the Alchemizing Divorce workshop. Together with my co-creator, Kristin Lee Admundson-Speer, who had moved through her own divorce process years earlier and is currently happily re-married to her life partner, we designed a process that would include ritual and ceremony, like what may go into a wedding. We included opportunity to celebrate, and opportunity to wail on the floor if that’s what is needed. No zipping oneself up required.
This journey is really something one must experience to understand. Describing the Alchemizing Divorce workshop is like describing a foreign country or a stunning natural wonder. We can describe it, but there’s a magic that you only experience by living it. I know you’re curious though, so I’ll try to explain….
We honor three phases of the relationship:
~ The coming together, or “the construction”,
~ The dismantling, or “the destruction”
~ The “integration”, or greater alignment with our divine purpose.
We build altars and place flowers. We eat cake. We have ceremonial tea. We wear comfortable clothing, and possibly adorn ourselves in a ceremonial way if that feels right. We move our bodies to music. We write cards. We pray and meditate. We tell our stories, move through them, and break free of them. We reflect one another. We transmute.
Kristin and I have designed a day long event that honors loss AND the transformation into greater alignment with the divine, a move toward greater joy and serenity.
We hope that you will join us, or share this invitation with someone who you believe may benefit. Together we will move through the construction, destruction and integration of the relationship we once had. From this we experience freedom from the heartbreak and move forward with renewed hope and clarity.
I am grateful and excited to be returning to SomaSpace in two weeks for an Embodied Life seminar.
My intention is to connect “inner work” through Feldenkrais movement, awareness practices and guided meditations with the “outer work” of applying our learning to actual situations in our lives.
Finding the courage to meet our challenges – personal, social and planetary from “grounded centeredness” is essential for our collective health and for our positive influence on the world.
I hope you will join us for the week-end, May 18/19 10:00-5:00 , and the free Friday night talk May 17 7:00-8:30.
