Shiné: mind/body/spirit

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Shiné: mind/body/spirit

Yoga & somatic practices for centering, with Katy Hawkins at Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting Live classes: katyhawkins.com
Recorded classes: movingpoetics.com

12/08/2025

WHAT WINTER WANTS.
January-March, 6:30-8pm
Enough movement to warm you and land you in your body. From there it’s just deep rest, good music, and touch. Join us.
Registration info here: https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

12/06/2025

SOMATICS & PSYCHEDELICS: A PRACTICE GROUP

Embodied practices to prepare for and integrate psychedelic journeys - December 7th, 6:30-9PM

This Sunday’s workshop will focus on the mystical aspects of psychedelic journeying. By mystical experience, I mean crossing over into ways of knowing beyond the reach of the rational mind. Across traditions, mystics describe the body as a doorway. Warmth spreading through the chest, a softening in the belly, trembling at the edges of surrender, a widening field of stillness. Something ancient awakens not above us, but within us. Sunday’s session will be a guided, experiential immersion into that doorway. Through intuitive and devotional movement, cellular breathwork, and relational presence, we’ll explore the body as an oracle.

Across this journey, you’ll be invited to slow down and listen deeply. We begin by grounding the nervous system and orienting to the three centers—mind, heart, and gut—so that wisdom can arise from an integrated whole-self presence. Through somatic inquiry and IFS–inspired posture work, you’ll learn how the body speaks in unmistakable truths—yes, no, maybe—and how parts of you long to be witnessed, softened, and met.

As the field broadens, we’ll enter into practices drawn from Body-Mind Centering, Laban movement, elemental embodiment, and devotional bowing. These portals reintroduce you to the sacred through breath, gravity, rhythm, and spacious awareness.

In the collective space, we’ll move into soul listening, gentle companioning (with optional trauma-informed laying on of hands), and the quiet mystery of being sensed and seen. We close in ritual—rooted, opened, and more deeply attuned to the subtle pulse of the holy.

If you’re longing for an embodied experience of the mystical that is felt, not forced, this workshop is a homecoming. Join us. Let the body reveal what the mind has never been able to name.

No one will be turned away for lack of funds - please reach back if you need support on this front.

Registration info here: https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

12/03/2025

THE SOMATICS OF MYSTICISM
An embodied journey into deep presence

DECEMBER 7TH, 6:3O-9PM

Mystical experience is so often imagined as something that happens “in the head”—a flash of insight, a transcendent idea, a moment of spiritual clarity. But across traditions, mystics describe something different: a body that becomes a doorway. Warmth spreading through the chest, a softening in the belly, trembling at the edges of surrender, a widening field of stillness. Something ancient awakens not above us, but within us.
The Somatics of Mysticism is a guided, experiential immersion into that doorway. Through intuitive movement, devotional stillness, cellular breathwork, and relational presence, we explore the body not as an obstacle to the sacred, but as its most faithful oracle.

Across this journey, you’ll be invited to slow down and listen deeply. We begin by grounding the nervous system and orienting to the three centers—mind, heart, and gut—so that wisdom can arise from an integrated whole-self presence. Through somatic inquiry and IFS–inspired posture work, you’ll learn how the body speaks in unmistakable truths—yes, no, maybe—and how parts of you long to be witnessed, softened, and met.

As the field broadens, we enter practices drawn from Body-Mind Centering, Laban movement, elemental embodiment, and devotional bowing. These portals reintroduce you to the sacred through breath, gravity, rhythm, and spacious awareness.

In the collective space, we'll move into soul listening, gentle companioning, optional trauma-informed touch, sound-sharing, and the quiet mystery of being sensed and seen.

We close in ritual—rooted, opened, and more deeply attuned to the subtle pulse of the holy.

If you’re longing for a spiritual experience that is felt, not forced—an embodied mysticism that honors intuition, presence, and the wisdom of the living body—this workshop is a homecoming. Join us. Let the body reveal what the mind has never been able to name.

11/23/2025

Shiné’s fall-into-winter offerings:
-The Somatics of Mysticism
-Fireside Restorative Yoga & Massage Therapy
-Somatics for Psychedelic Journeying

Check it out on katyhawkins.com

“i thank You God for this amazing”

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-EE Cummings

Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/03bacb22103c/fall-17992945

11/21/2025

November 23rd, 6-8pm; December 14th, 6-8pm

Surrender to the need for radical rest, in this extended restorative practice in our cozy fireplace room. As you settle body & mind you’ll receive hands-on healing touch. This gentle practice of soothing poses (mostly seated and supine, and supported by blankets and blocks) is open to all levels of practice. Expect to emerge grounded and nurtured.

Limited to just a handful of folks, to give you aaaall the hands-on TLC.
Register here: https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html

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):
https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=__test_email__&u=e2c17b1425a8cb6ac4566a750&id=0be9d73a2f

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

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20 East Mermaid Lane
Philadelphia, PA
19118

Website

http://katyhawkins.com/

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