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About
senses beyond
senses beyond is a wholehearted invitation to move into the expansiveness of presence and reconnect with the wonder of your life.
Body is always in the present moment, our senses are always sensing into the here-now. By heightening our sensual awareness through movement, we expand the mind which is so often identified with too much thinking. It's not about relegating the mind, rather it is seeing when we are so often stuck in a very small part of the mind, thinking.
By coming into our senses, making full contact with our experience right now, we enter into the expansiveness and release of our presence.
Without right/wrong labels, judgement and stories give way to curiosity about the nature of our living experience and a therapeutic wonder of our inner an outer world grows, we sense the immense connection that is intrinsic to everyone of us.
As with each living being and the Universe, we start with movement
The ancient practice of Yoga has given rise to the principles of innate wholeness, consciousness, and the mind/body relationship.
Embodiment practices, such as Body Mind Centering, offer an experiential understanding of how every aspect of our living organism influences who we are in the moment, and our movement reflects our mind.
Gestalt Therapy helps us to enter into a loving dialogue with our experience, and how we shape and are shaped by our environment.
senses beyond is a working accumulation of these practices, expressed through Embodied Expression, Embodied Yoga, and Therapeutic Wonder.
The Threads
Different fields weaving together
Holistic is a word that is thrown around a lot and has in many ways lost its meaning. A dictionary definition states:
'characterised by the belief that the parts of something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole'
This truly characterises Charlene's approach and for me has been the only real solution. I would recommend Charlene to anybody without hesitation.
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G.T. Manchester
The Weaver of the Threads
I'm bringing together everything I've moved through in the last 16 years.
Everything I teach started with my own yearning to live from body, spirit, mind authentically.
I wanted to feel, not simply be told, that peace within exists, so I turned to Yoga & Meditation, and am now a Senior Yoga Teacher with Yoga Alliance Professionals. I felt my body asking for acknowledgment of its magnificence, so I turned to Embodiment practices. I needed to express myself with a wider movement vocabulary, so I turned to Dance. I had to understand what influences my actions and beliefs, so I turned to Gestalt Therapy.
All those years ago when I did that first Yoga class and without realising it, the seed of a senses beyond thread was being sown in the midst of sleeplessness, anxiety, and chronic bewilderment. I'll forever be indebted to Yoga & Meditation for giving me the simple tools to go within and beyond worrying through the interplay of breath-movement, and sensing the inherent peace within. I teach from this profound appreciation and the dialogue I continue to have with this ancient practice.
Through Yoga, I entered the door of body and realised I hadn't in a long time stepped inside and moved from her, even during the practice of Yoga. My journey in Embodiment began as I felt the stark difference between telling my body what to do and listening, being and moving from this vast intelligence.
My evolving experience in Embodiment, how the mind is not confined to the head but is laced in every part of the living organism we call 'body', adds another thread to senses beyond.
I had so much to express, but my vocabulary was limited. I had an urge to create a new word, but as I'd stopped dance classes in my late teens, the letters were no longer forthcoming. Learning new dance patterns paved the way to begin to communicate with myself in a way that words cannot as movement is so often under our consciousness, whereas words tend to arise out of what is already known. senses beyond gained another thread.
I was behaving in ways I didn't want to, feeling stuck in particular thought/emotional patterns. There are things I cannot see and have to see to move forward. With its equal emphasis on mind/body, and roots in Buddhism, the humanistic Gestalt Therapy has not only helped me to truly understand myself better, but brought me deeper into what it means to be alive in relationship to myself and others. The Gestalt thread was created.
And within all of these threads are people. The thousands of students I've taught since 2012, from elite athletes to the people who walk/zoom in to the class share themselves with me. Our co-created experience is shaping the web of connection practices that is senses beyond.
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