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: Self-Awareness
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 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…
An Introduction to Body-First Living
Once upon a time, before a man named Descartes won a popularity contest, we understood that we weren’t separate from all that is. We valued the mind in service to the body, not the other way around. The unfortunate impact of the Cartesian Split is that we now have a society populated by humans who…
Guided Self-Noticing
An Exercise in Tuning in to this Moment through the Body This is a technique I use to guide my clients into attuned connection with their bodies, bringing attention to the connection with the physical nature of the world around them. We end by focusing our attention between the eyes and tasking the mind to…
Where Do You Place Your Attention?
The last few weeks have brought with them some events that seemingly arose out of left field. I felt side swiped, blindsided, caught unawares. In hindsight, none of the events should have shocked me as they did. But they did, and that is a fact, and thanks to the extensive reading I’ve been doing about…
Ilana Grostern Coaching 