We are shaped by the world and shape the world.
Blending ancient wisdom, contemporary somatic practices, and neuroscience, this workshop invites you to reconnect with your embodied wisdom and explore the conversation between yin and yang within your being and relational world.
Today, we live in a world of imbalance; we feel it personally and experience it around us. In terms of yin and yang, we see yang energy favoured, rewarded, and dominating. We swim in a strive-drive culture that calls us, regardless of our gender identity, to express our yang and suppress our yin. We adopt these behaviours, often out of awareness.
In our embodied experience, excessive yang manifests as too much muscular tension and a busy internal dialogue, with an emphasis on forward and upward dimensions, as well as reliance on willpower to keep us going. Yang drives us toward focused vision, linear thinking, heightened speed, and in excess can lead us to exhaustion and diminished relationships.
Yin feminine principles support our balancing rest and recovery and are associated with relaxed muscles, softening, slowing, fluidity, yielding, receptivity, listening, intuition, and systemic relational awareness. The influence of yin tends to be integrating and stabilising over a longer time frame.
In the workshop we will explore how to bring yin and yang into a more revitalising creative balance, providing our grounding, resilience, and resourcefulness to meet the world as it is today and lay the foundations for the future we wish to realise. We will engage in a journey of inquiry beyond our ‘try hard’ over-efforting performative self toward achievement with grace, centred presence, and redefining power.
Iain McGilchrist describes this as bringing the right and left hemispheres into their proper relationship. Timothy Galwey, in his Inner Game work, which was highly influential in the early days of coaching, addresses this dynamic complementary duality through Self 1 and Self 2.
The workshop can be viewed as a companion to my Leadership Embodiment workshops, exploring the elements of embodiment and somatics that lay underneath and around those workshops, or it can be a attended as a standalone event.
We will be weaving together Tai Chi and Qigong wisdom, the Inner Game Principles, Leadership Embodiment principles, Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique insights, Polyvagal Theory understanding and Nora Bateson’s Warm Data exploring foundational principles for practical positive change.
As my tai chi teacher Chungliang Huang says,
“tai ji is not about the form, it is about how we reach for the rice packet from the top shelf of the supermarket”
Our explorations will include:
– Yin and yang as creative partners rather than opposing forces
– The aesthetics of movement – soft power, flow and effective action
– Moving from your centre of gravity
– Interoception and enhanced sensing
– Embodying of space, polarities and continuums
– The impulses that move you
– The relationship between personal embodiment and broader social transformation
Limited Places
There are a maximum of 8 places available on this workshop, creating a small group mutual learning experience.
Fee
Special Early Bird Price £450+VAT – booking and payment by 9 June 2025
Standard Fee £525+VAT
A bursary may be available for anyone on a low family income and for whom the fee is prohibitive
Venue
Headington, Oxford.
Booking
Please email me paul@thebeyondpartnership.co.uk with you name and invoicing address.
