Thank you to every one who came to this evening session as part of the fantastic MovingBeyond 2025. It felt like something real. Here are some reflections from the evening:
Every person had a different story of collapse: personal, ancestral, planetary. Some were spoken, some were brought through silence, as breath, as the way a person holds themselves in the room.
When we moved our bodies and let these stories shape us physically, we weren’t just talking about collapse, we were inhabiting it in movement, allowing it to shape us. Each person had their own shape and form, their own way of being in it.
Sharing this together was different for us all. The depth came quickly and with it came more awareness and presence to what is.
I witnessed grief moving through the group in ways that felt collective.
One participant spoke of surviving a major natural disaster and described how, in the absence of systems, humans remembered themselves. Working by daylight, sharing what they had, caring for one another.
The invitation to explore collapse not as a one-time thing, but as a threshold: something we’re in and moving with; opened up different movement. Another person said that something shifted in her body. She could pivot. Not everywhere, but in some places and directions. Another described feeling drawn to the ground, to the soil, and staying there before moving again.
Someone else felt the threshold in her hips — a rhythm like labour, birth.
Another said she felt more ease after the session, like something had been seen and acknowledged.
These stories came through the body, not through interpretation. These stories live in our bodies as movement or shape or sensation – a deeper weave we can touch when we bring our awareness to them.
We didn’t come away resolved but we came away a little more spacious, perhaps more able to stay present and in some cases, more able to move.
Collapse lives in us. Not as a crisis to manage, but as something shaped by the systems around us — food, light, medicine, transport, communications. We acknowledged that these systems are deconstructing around us. But what began to emerge in the going to the ground, the birthing and the lived experience post collapse: kindness, relationship, sharing; is that we are also shaped by forces much older than those systems. Something we’ve known before and we have known for a long time.
What I witnessed was that when we meet it in the body, with others, something composts, without force but by staying close to what is living inside and around ourselves, and in holding our differences together.
If this speaks to something in you or you feel a gentle pull to explore collapse and composting through movement, somatic practice and shared inquiry, let me know. I’ll share future spaces like this in the coming months.
Photo Credit: my own from a walk in the plantation near me
