OUR BODIES AND EARTH: ON WHY NATURE IS OUR PRIMARY RELATIONSHIP, WITH JAMIE McHUGH
A conversation about our bodies as aspects of Earth and nature as a human’s primary relationship. On the need- and the luxury!- of attuning our bodies’ ecosystems to the wakeful intelligence of our natural world and romancing our inner and outer nature as a way of self-knowing.
Host Stefana Serafina speaks to Jamie McHugh, an embodiment educator who has been on faculty at the Tamalpa Institute and JFK University for over 25 years. A somatic therapist and coach, Jamie is also the creator of Somatic Expression, a method for practicing the art of conscious relationship between one’s own body and the living landscape.
THIS EPISODE’S WISDOM QUOTES
“Once we plug into the larger body of the Earth, we have more possibilities and choices for the fullness of our being to emerge. So in our daily lives, do we have simple little places of green, trees, and water? Where can we go in our immediate environment to settle into ourselves and resonate with the elements?
What is essential for those non-linear and magical relationships between human and nature to happen is that we change our internal sense of time as well as our literal sense of time to allow those to happen. The tradition of Sabbath, of unplugging, is very useful here: If we take one day out of seven to unplug and journey into the environment, find a place and hang out there and give ourselves a chunk of time, we can take on the informing of that area. Magic, like earth time, takes time.”
“Movement as a healing art is a kind of a hero’s journey to shed our conditioning and our experience of being a body in modern culture.”
“We have to rediscover? How do we play as adults? How to enrich our movement repertoire? How do we allow our psyches and somas to loosen the tethers of who we think we are and allow ourselves to participate in our lives and landscape in a much different way?”
To find out more about Jamie’s work, visit
For more on Stefana’s women’s embodiment work, visit
www.intuitivedance.org