Shiné: mind/body/spirit, 20 East Mermaid Lane, Philadelphia, PA (2025)

11/18/2025

As a Quaker teaching embodiment in my own place of worship, the role of spirituality in social justice somatics is sometimes too close to me to be able to see or name. Here’s how articulates it: “sometimes we are learning new skills or frameworks on top of a deeply defended self. So we may be able to pick up some skills or frameworks but it’s going to fall short in areas where we’re still really defended, because the threat to our sense of safety is going to supersede any new skill that we might have. …what’s really important for change is that we have a relationship with - a felt experience of - the part of us that is beyond defense. And this to me is a spiritual question. The part of you that is connected to all life, that can’t be shamed, that can’t be put into these hierarchies of who matters + who doesn’t matter, that even in some sense transcends our own body safety. There’s a part that I’ve felt access to, that I try to cultivate access to, that is a little bit beyond all that. And that part gives me the courage to change because I’m less identified with all the defenses that I have. …sometimes with embodiment practice + trying to learn new skills, we skip over the cultivation of that spiritual relationship and try to just force skills onto a defended + scared body. And think that has to shift. Or at least I see it shifting in my own practice. Talking more openly about spirit + embodiment also compels us to talk about how spirituality can be used by people to opt out of their human experience. Hot take: I think a lot of religions encourage + rely on spiritual bypass. The spiritual component of embodiment is not to absolve us of the implications of our involvement in or accountability to the things that are happening on this planet. I think of the spiritual dimension as a resource to me living in this human life. It’s not a place that I escape to. I am responsible to understand the things that I’ve internalized, the behaviors that I practice, the ways that certain systems or ways of being persist in my own behavior. I rely on that spiritual dimension to give me the courage to face the things I need to face in this very human experience.”

11/15/2025

We've been embodying the big wind of Spirit, as it makes itself known, moving through the last of the golden leaves. I always think of my dad, just a few days before he passed, reciting from memory the entirety of the Shakespeare sonnet on the autumn of life, even as he was struggling to recognize us. "That time of year thou mayest in me behold/ where leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold..."
I remember his remarking on the reversal of the predictable order of phrase there - leaves, or none, or few - at the dining room table where he was teaching 13-year-old me how to read poetry. And I'm placing his halting, rush-and-go-and-stop-again dying process in conversation with all I know of the autumn of life: my own foray into the beginnings of perimenopause. The signals and signs of transformation come and go, waft around unexpectedly, windily, in no particular order, without a logic we can know or predict. Like Spirit.

So we explored an awesome poem by Kai Carlson-Wee through wind movements. The yellow leaves outside the practice room were LIT UP - ON FIRE. May we refashion our brain for rattle-bag beauty - even in the scattered trash and the bleach billboards. May we draw light from Light, scooping up the truth from its sleep. I'll trade you the rest of my life to believe it.

Check out all our fall-into-winter offerings in the newsletter (Somatics of Mysticism Workshop, Fireside Restorative & Hands-on TLC, Winter Wednesday Evening Series):
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11/09/2025

So excited for this workshop today!
Next up:
The Somatics of Mysticism
December 7th, 6:30-9pm

11/08/2025

What's been going on in class?

If you've been missing out on practicing with us, we've been trying to concretize practices for listening with the whole body. Check out this listening meditation in my rewrite of a poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, for a morning I spent with my favorite mourning dove, Simone (not to be mistaken for Simon, her partner).

Our way in to listening meditations have been via an exploration of how the energy centers in the body correspond to the nerve plexuses. We've been experimenting with the intimate associations between the cervical, brachial, lumbar, and sacral plexuses formed by the intertwining of spinal nerve roots that emerge from the spinal cord near specific vertebrae, and how stimulating those vertebrae might give us access to chakra centers that may have felt abstract or too esoteric for direct experience.

So we examined some basic embryology for how attending to the three sagittal sheaths of the body might give us a new somatic experience in a familiar yoga pose. Focusing discreet attention on the digestive and respiratory functions that correlate to the front body, the nervous system centered in the back body, and the middle sheath with its skeletal structures and blood systems of vessels and heart, gives an entirely new perspective on something as familiar as triangle pose. We examined how the primitive cord emerges at the center of these somatic layers, to listen for new sounds in the empty space of this central axis of the body, whether you call it Sushumna Nadi or the nautical cord. Then we listened for vibratory patterns in bells, chimes, and bowls for how these resonances moved through or in the central channel. The poem we turned to for this listening meditation was Trommer's "Right Here" (the original version).

Hope to see you in classes soon! Our new monthly payment system breaks down to $10 for a kick-ass yoga class that promise something different each time for your body, mind, and spirit. Info on Shiné here: https://www.katyhawkins.com

11/05/2025

Money matters:
I’ve been listening to ways of knowing that lie below my (brainwashed) head, in navigating the difficult question of money. It's awkward when personal and cultural value systems rub up against one another - as they do anytime we follow a calling that isn't particularly valued in this culture. It's awkward when what has great worth to us personally doesn't correspond to what the conventions of our society deem to be important. Asking folks to shift to a system of supporting Shiné's continuance, not as a fee-per-class transaction, but as a monthly commitment to guarantee that the doors remain open for us all - was uncomfortable. Re-asserting the value of humble ways of gathering with other humans and re-integrating body, mind, and spirit resists culturally-received values. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had in the last 2 months that are like... "but I spend three weeks in Italy every January, so what about that month?" or "All summer I'm at my second house on Mondays, so can I pay less in the summer?" Hmmmm... It's understandable how the irony would be lost, given that capitalism isn't the shark, as the saying goes, it's the water we swim in. It's hard to re-evaluate the values inculcated each and every moment of each and every day! We cease to be able to really perceive what is being valued, in the number of dollars our culture assigns to a bottle of wine, a sports event, new high heels, a "cut-and-color," or being served a meal in a restaurant. This is by design, of course, because the values assigned to things in our culture are very much based on what serves the survival of its systems. A regular communal practice of re-membering old perceptual pathways actually threatens those systems. It brings people healing and clarity and access to deeper forms of knowing that lead to acting with integrity. Is it any wonder that it's undervalued? And it's hard to choose something different, against the grain.
There's a passage in Hospicing Modernity that rhymes with this approach to feeling below the head-brain for how to act on our values…
Read the rest in the last newsletter:

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11/04/2025

Sunday, 3-5pm: Shiné’s Ancestral Healing workshop will offer somatic practices for working with the wounds and gifts of our individual ancestral lineages. We will ritually call in our people, explore how their imprints survive in our movement patterning, then engage an experiment for opening to intuitive nudges from the mysterium. Register here: https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

10/30/2025

I have borrowed frameworks designed by the BPF for workshops and retreats… their contributions to making visible the inseparability of spirituality & equity initiatives are so important and rich! …and have been formative in the way I think about Quakerism. May their work together in this 3-day retreat wind its beautiful way into the world. 🌎

10/30/2025

Less talk more music

https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

10/26/2025

The last few weeks we've been exploring below-the-head discernment practices. Quakers talk a lot about discernment, and recently the term is getting more airplay in wider circles. By "discernment" I'm referring to the work of making choices in keeping with our values and commitments. In class, we've been exploring embodied ways to feel into this. First, a couple weeks ago, we engaged an approach from the late Suzanne River's "Global Somatics" program (as described by Susan Raffo). I'm adapting and paraphrasing here, based on some old notes I revisited:

Western Medicine didn't always believe that the brain in our skull is the enter of all ways of knowing. Up until Galen showed up in the 500s, the medical systems that eventually became Western medicine saw treating the body as a practice of balancing the humors. What was originally an elemental approach to care - in which the humors were as much about the land and the context around the human body as what was happening in an individual self - slowly became more diagnostic and focused on body separateness. Western medicine and Western culture evolved together, and as knowing things became more important than experiencing things, as individual knowledge was centered over collective knowing, so did the Western understanding of anatomy respond.

In this anatomized view of the body, the brain has a specific role. The brain brings information in through all kinds of body listenings, and especially the nervous system, and then determines a course of action. But for many generations, Western ways of knowing - like so many other cultural ways of knowing - centered on the heart-brain more than the head-brain. It matters, embryologically, that the two were physically connected at the start of our emergence, before separating and spiraling away from each other. The heart-brain, where information from many aspects of the body comes together and decisions are made, isn't just the heart organ, but includes the thymus (the "higher heart" spot we often tap in our practice together), the pericardium, and really, probably the lungs as well. If the head-brain is about making sense of things, a kind of executive function in relation to our survival and our sense of the future and our capacity for pleasure, then the heart-brain does the same, but with the ways in which we connect. And nourish. And are nourished. And then there's the gut-brain, this universe of microbiota and cells of human and non-human species, sorting out how to live together in harmony - or not. The gut-brain is the oldest brain in our bodies - it started learning how to be alive generations before the heart-brain and the head-brain became complex systems.

We can get out from the reign of the head and deepen our ability to feel our gut instinct, our heart's longing, if we regularly practice dropping into them intentionally. When we practice listening through all three brains together, rather than primarily through one or two, we can connect with the world in way that accounts for the sometimes contradictory information that comes in through our head, heart, and gut. We can feel them in the same way that we'd feel any community (including internal parts of our psyche) who, when asked what they would like, shares a range of opinions and needs that are based on each of their experiences and locations. We are listening to our own internal community and although there are times when they all pretty much agree, they are rare. Even if we are discerning a pathway that responds to a simple question like "should I get more rest?" (which for most of us is like DUH YES F**K TO THE YES), we'll probably get some contradictions. We might get a kind of primal slow yes from our gut, and a feeling of sadness from our heart, and a thought from our head-brain that tells us how much work we have left to do. Listening with all three brains is a practice for not assuming that single answers exist for anything. It's about living with contradictions and practicing feeling, internally, the many ways we respond, sensing our own layers, which in turn helps us hold space for other people's complexities and contradictions, as well. ☀️

More in this week’s newsletter:
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10/26/2025

If you've never read Hospicing Modernity, there's this amazing part I love to turn to when I'm confused. It's a collaborative text called "Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness" written by the GTDF collective (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures). De Oliveira recommends returning to these four pages of the book "anytime you feel bewildered, disoriented, or discombobulated by what you experience..." - so I did. She offers that we choose just five sentences and create exercises to bring their wisdom into our daily life. So here it goes:

1. Be open to what you can't and may never understand. Creatively make space for the unknown and the unknowable, in ourselves and others. Don't cast upon everything a blanket of interpretation.
2. Don't hold "being" hostage to "knowing." Engage with creativity beyond the intellect by recovering exiled capacities, expanding sensibilities, and dis-immunizing intimacies. Allow your state of wonder to stay open, without always trapping it into meaning.
3. Turn the heart into a verb. Activate the sense of hearing in all parts of your body. Listen to unuttered wisdom, nurturing intrinsic rather than productive value. Dissolve the limits and weight of your body, allowing others to move through, with, and for you. Collectivize your heart so that it breaks open and not apart.
4. Allow yourself to be guided by a metabolic intelligence. Seek sense-fulness rather than meaningfulness. Integrate with a wider metabolism, feeling your entanglement with everything, including the ugly, the broken, and the messed up. Learn to breathe water. Be water.
5. Interrupt addictions to consumption, not only of "stuff" but also of knowledge, experiences, and relationships. Dance beyond the loop of identification and disidentification. Co-sense with radical tenderness and assist with the birth of something new. Allow it to come through you, forever changeable and fluid.

Confession: this is actually breaking the rules because it's 18 sentences not 5 and I also combined some and cut and pasted but I'm going with it. So what, you may ask, are my exercises? What are the nitty-gritty exercises to bring this wisdom into my daily life, to incorporate all these verbs? It might help to list them:

Be open, make space, allow, flow, don't blanket over, recover senses and intimacies, dissolve skin limits, collectivize, activate your heart, nurture inherent human worthiness, follow metabolic intelligence, feel entanglements, dance, transcend preferences, interrupt addictions, breathe, birth something new, BE.

When I read that list, I know that my exercises for manifesting these ways of being emerge while practicing with you. We discover new exercises for all of these, all the time. So again I'm saying thank you. Thank you for bringing so much of yourselves to this experimental space, for co-holding our disorientation, for holding our individual and collective complexities, and for practicing new ways of being and finding our way - together.

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10/19/2025

WAITING LIST:
The Wednesday night series in November and December will be part gentle flow, restorative with Reiki-style touch. The series is full, but please reach out to be placed on a waiting list, and you'll be contacted in the order of your sign-up week by week, as spots open up.
11/5, 11/12, 12/3, 12/10, 6:30 - 8PM
This and other workshops here: https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

Shiné: mind/body/spirit

11/18/2025

11/15/2025

11/09/2025

11/08/2025

11/05/2025

11/04/2025

10/30/2025

10/30/2025

10/26/2025

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10/19/2025

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