Soma Nidra: Bones and Connective Tissue

Like the nondual relationship between a river and its riverbed, your bones and connective tissue shape your movement and are shaped and reshaped by your movement. This event explores the biotensegritous relationship of your bones and connective tissue, investigating how they arise as a fluid continuum, eventually crystallizing and specializing into different densities and functions in your adult body. Through their specialization they co-manage compressive and tensile forces, allowing you leverage in gravity and suspension in space.

The evening is part of Soma Nidra: Body Tripping through the Communities of You, a series of multi-scale body trips in a monthly workshop format. These trips explore your embodied anatomy through gentle movement, Yin and Restorative Yoga, and Soma Nidra. Soma Nidra is Bex Naj’s somatic approach to Yoga Nidra, a practice that bridges our conscious and unconscious minds through storytelling and deep rest. Bex keeps it somatic by grounding the stories she tells in the felt-sense awareness of your body and breath as dynamic processes. Over the course of the series, we’ll explore our inner space through the body maps of western anatomy, physiology, and embryology, integrating these into an energetic practice that allows us to melt away tension, rest deeply, and illuminate the mysterious places within to see what they have to say. These classes are appropriate for all levels of yoga and will often feature drawing and/or journaling prompts to integrate the dreamlike wisdom of your bodied revelations.

Come dressed in comfortable and warm layers you can move gently in. While yoga props and materials for writing and drawing will be provided, students are encouraged to bring their own mat, an extra blanket, and any other beloved supplies they wish.

Bex Naj has been a dancer and mover her entire life. She is an E-RYT 500+ and Somatic Movement Educator. She has practiced yoga for more than two decades, taught private and group yoga classes for fifteen years, and has spent the past decade immersed in Body-Mind Centering®, a somatic modality for exploring consciousness through your body, your movement, and your mind as a continuum of experience. She is working to become a somatic movement therapist in this modality.

Her facilitation style reflects her deep enthusiasm for exploring and expressing consciousness through touch, movement, and imaginal practice. She draws inspiration from all of her teachers, in particular, Amy Matthews, Nikki Costello, Sarah Barnaby, and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

Bex believes that feeling strong, expressive, present, and comfortable in your body is your birthright. Movement is the foundation of everything we are, including the mysterious processes we call “our bodies,” “consciousness,” and “thought.” She grounds suggestions of spirituality in felt-sense and whole body inquiry rather than relying on abstract, dualistic dogma. Her ongoing project is articulating nondual philosophy through the laboratory of embodied research. Embodiment is the fundament from which all spiritual practice and self-transformation emerge, aspirations that are not separate from exploring ourselves through movement and stillness. The unique minds and interwoven communities of each of our diverse tissues await the light of our exploratory attention.

You can learn more about Bex at bexnaj.yoga

Host or Publisher The Berkeley Alembic Foundation