When I say aliveness, what do I mean? Aliveness is the opposite of numbness. It is the full capacity for responsive sensation, encapsulating the entire range of the human capacity to feel, from grief to joy. Aliveness is sensuality, eroticism, connection with the natural world around us, with people and with community. It is a…
Category: Coaching
The Art of Living Body First – An Overview
The Art of Living Body First An Overview Introduction Our birthright is to feel wholly and vibrantly alive. From the moment we came into this world, our bodies guided us to express what we needed to feel complete and well. When we were small and helpless, it was our cries and our body language that…
Wholeness 101: Beyond Gender and Identity
Wholeness 101: Beyond Gender and Identity A 6-Week Online Group Coaching Experience for members of the Trans/Queer/GNC community Co-Hosted by Ilana Grostern and Zoë Galle.Thursdays 6-8pm EST, running from May 11 thru June 15. Register here. Beginning with an overview of The Art of Living Body First and the relevance of the philosophy to the…
Wholeness 101: Reclaiming Your Agency Post-Abuse
Wholeness 101: Reclaiming Your Agency Post-Abuse A 6-Week Online Group Coaching Experience Sundays from March 5 running through April 9, 6 – 8pmEST on Zoom. Who is this group coaching for? Abuse, both of the physical, and the less-evident psychological nature, are rampant. Whether you grew up in an abusive family dynamic, or found yourself in one…
Coherence Matters
A little play on words for you this morning. I’ve been on a #ketogenic diet for the last few weeks and my mind is SHARP AF, so the double entendres are coming in fast and furious. Coherence matters. The word coherence implies the qualities of a unified whole. Matter is defined as something that takes…
The Body Barometer
While I do bill myself as a somatic coach, I also operate with the understanding that we didn’t grow up knowing how to use our entire beings to be well in the world. The fact is that it’s not the mind alone that informs us of how we are. It’s the bodymind that exists in…
The Value of Neutrality
My most revelatory moments seem to come when I’m on a walk. The first time I truly embodied rapture, I was walking down a busy metropolitan street listening to music, and had to look down to see if my feet were still touching the earth. For a moment, I felt perfectly suspended between heaven and earth,…
Hishtavut, Revisited
An oldie, but still me. It’s been an astonishing realization as of late that instead of moving with the chaos into more chaos of my own I am instead connecting more and more deeply with a neutral experience of myself and the world. This is the state that we know as equanimity. Sometime mid last…
Two Unconscious Practices to Bring Into Awareness
Two MAJOR sources of unconscious energy drains are: Emotional labour Mental load In heterosexual spaces, women tend to assume the burden of both WHETHER OR NOT IT’S NECESSARY. And they are so conditioned into us that we don’t even notice we’re doing them – they become part of the landscape. One day, we suddenly become…
Activating the Third Factor through Body-Mind Communion
I am so pleased to share my first article on the body-mind connection, and why fostering it reduces dependency on emotionality. This is a perspective that I’ve been personally integrating over the last year, and stepping into my true vocation has allowed me to create a platform to share information with you, about you, that…
C h a o s
I will never claim to fully understand the phenomona that I talk about and use in my work. The beauty of being is that we don’t have to be able to intellectualize everything from every angle in order for it to be useful. Last week in my training we learned about chaos theory. Specifically, we…
Normalize Being Boring
Something I warn my clients about is that the experience of a regulated nervous, especially once we’ve stabilized into it, can feel extremely boring in contrast to our usual way of being. When one is used to the highs and lows of sympathetic nervous system activation, feeling peaceful, calm, centred, and grounded for ongoing periods…
Ilana Grostern Coaching 