Paula Josa-Jones in Calliope, from the 2018 festival
The 2019 Summer Festival at the Wassaic Project happens this Saturday.
At 5 pm I will be performing Garçon to the music of Hugues Le Bars.
Please join us!!!
Cost
Free
When
Saturday, August 3rd, 2019
12:00 PM to Late
Where
Luther Barn Field
17 Furnace Bank Road
Wassaic, NY 12592
DeAnna Pellecchia with Pony
I am thrilled to be presenting a Conscious Touch, Conscious Movement with Horses workshop at the University of California at Santa Barbara as part of the annual Body-Mind Centering Association conference.
Conscious Touch and Conscious Movement is way of improving and deepening our relationship horses through the shared languages of touch and movement. Learning to connect with horses in this way helps us become more comfortable in our own skin, confident, trustworthy to ourselves and the horse, as well as sensitive and skillful in our riding and training, regardless of the discipline. In my experience, this work with horses translates pretty seamlessly to our relationships with our spouses, children, friends, and ourselves.
When I am working with a client and a horse, I never know just how that session will unfold. It is what I love about the work – it is deeply improvisational, and allows the essential invitation of Authentic Movement to undergird the process: “wait to be moved.” That means that the human has the opportunity to go underneath the cognitive habits of language, interpretation, analysis, and planning. To rest in the moment and to listen. To speak when moved in the shared, primal, intimate, and unpredictable languages of the body: movement and touch.
To arrange a session with Paula and a horse partner, contact me.
Drawing by Rebekah Nagy
blood
A mountain stream inside a breathing sac. A palm and some garnets.
from Anatomy/Geography/Ethography by Audrey Gidman
I spent the last week diving into the Body-Mind Centering perspectives on the organs at the Sonder Movement Project, with excellent teachers Amy Matthews, Walburga Glatz and Gloria Desideri. All week I was entranced by the delicious drawings of fellow student Rebekah Nagy.
This drawing is of a capillary bed, the microcirculation place where arterial blood transforms into venous blood. It is the place of return and exchange from its long journey from the heart. The fluid that leaks out of the capillaries is known as interstitial fluid. It’s this leaked interstitial fluid that bathes your body cells in nutrients. The interstitial fluid is retrieved by lymphatic vessels, which return it to your bloodstream. Blood from the capillary bed is drained by the venules, which carry blood back toward the heart.
Body-Mind Centering identifies the place of this transformation and exchange as “capillary isorings” with qualities of suspended rest between going and coming, restful alertness and expanded peacefulness when the tone of this exchange is balanced. 
I love the way that Rebekah has captured to collaborative, friendly, reciprocal quality of this mysterious, transformative place – hands, meeting hands – exchanging, connecting. The body doing its continuous labor, effortlessly.
This is Mystical Mel, a Paint mare whose registered name is Mystical Finale. According to the description on The Mane Intent website, “her markings would suggest she is Medicine Hat Paint. The myth and mystery of the Medicine Hat Paint goes back many years. But it is known as a spirit animal with special powers, and is very rare. Like many Medicine Hat Paints, Mel has a pink muzzle and two blue eyes, making her especially prized.”
Mel was our partner for the last part of the Expanding Body, Mind and Spirit wth Horses workshop that I recently taught at The Mane Intent. Mel has a kind of light, floating attention that I find unusual – some confluence of her color, her mare-ness, and ethereal blue eyes. Her presence feels expansive, yet vigilant and quietly discerning.
We entered the round pen with her two at a time, and let the experience of moving with her unfold in its own way, inviting her to connect in her own time. The last dance was three humans and Mel. One of the humans began to sing softly, as they linked arms, facing away from those of uis witnessing, and toward Mel. She approached slowly and then moved carefully into the circle of their bodies, looking at them and toward us with those astonishing eyes. The song ended and horse and humans moved slowly apart.
This work is always surprising, always moving – an experience that is beyond words – one that lives in the deep possibilities that live in our wordless connection with horses. The invitation to join is offered without limitation or expectation. For us, the greatest gift is simply to breathe and to be in the presence of that embodied mystery.