Body as
Instrument
What moves through you is only as clear as you are.
You are the instrument.
This is the tending of it.
A twelve-week immersion
for highly sensitive people —
a return to the body as the channel through
which Spirit leads, speaks, and moves.
September 15–December 1
Tuesdays, 5:30–7:30pm PT on Zoom
One daylong retreat in Sebastopol
Tuition: $950 | Payment Plans Available.
You have always felt deeply
You feel what a room is holding before anyone speaks it. You listen beneath the words. You take the world in more fully than most — its beauty and its grief, its subtlety, its unspoken currents — and you have carried that depth of feeling your whole life, whether or not anyone ever taught you what it was for.
This was never too much. It is your instrument.
Not a technique, not a modality, not something you studied — but the finely tuned sensitivity you were born with, the way life moves through you and reaches everyone near you. An instrument this sensitive asks for one thing above all: to be kept in tune.
Most of us have spent our lives treating the body like luggage — hauling it around, ignoring it until it complains. But an instrument is different. It picks up everything.
The cost of the untended instrument
Most of us who feel this deeply were taught to tend everyone but ourselves — until we absorb what was never ours, the grief that walked into the room, the weather of everyone around us, until we can no longer tell where we end and the world begins, and the clear signal we were born to receive gets lost somewhere in the noise of everything we've taken on.
None of that is a flaw in you. It is simply what happens to an instrument that is played and played and never tuned.
For twelve weeks, we tune yours.
Not to make you feel less — but to keep you clear, so your sensitivity can do what it was always meant to do: not flood you, but move through you, as presence, as art, as medicine, as Spirit. So that what you carry is clean, what leads is spirit, and you become, at last, clear enough to let something move through you.
What We Work With
Movement as Medicine
Intuitive, somatic movement that softens what has braced and awakens what has gone quiet — no choreography, no shape to get right. You learn to feel your own body as information.
Womb & Ancestral Remembering
The deeper descent — into the wombspace, the body's creative center, where vision and possibility are born and where the long line of the mothers before us still lives. We learn to draw from it as a portal of creation, and to let what has long been carried compost into fuel — so the womb becomes source rather than storage.
Ritual & Energetic Hygiene
The folk medicine of the earth, brought into daily practice — the limpia that clears what has grown heavy, the baño that washes and renews. For those who hold space, this becomes non-negotiable craft: a way to set down what you take on, so you stop carrying energy home with you.
Ayurveda & Cyclical Living
A way of reading the body through the elements — coming to know your own constitution the way you would know a landscape, and living in rhythm with the earth, so you stay resourced enough to keep giving without emptying.
Who This is For
This is for the highly sensitive — the deep feelers, the ones attuned to the subtle current wherever they go, who feel what a room is holding before a word is spoken. You may have spent years being told this was too much, learning to dampen it, to keep it from spilling over. But your sensitivity was never something to manage or mute. It is a gift — perhaps the truest one you carry — and like any gift, it asks to be unlocked, awakened, deepened, and tended.
This is for those whose gift is to feel — the artists and the healers, the therapists and the facilitators, the caregivers and the mothers, the teachers and the bodyworkers, the lineage carriers, and everyone who holds, everywhere they go. The ones who have tended everyone else's depths, and are ready, at last, to be met in their own.
This is a slow, felt practice, not a technique to collect or a certification to add. It won't fix you from the outside — it hands you practices you'll learn to tend yourself. It moves at the pace of the body, which means we let grief and rest and the quiet parts take the time they ask for, rather than rushing toward the breakthrough. It asks you to feel more than to analyze, and to stay open to ritual and to whatever your body brings up as it unwinds.
If that is what you have been longing for, you are in the right place.
Shape of the Journey
This work rests on an animist understanding of the world — the knowing, held by earth-based ancestral traditions across time, that the Earth is a living being rather than a backdrop to our lives, and that everything within her is in relationship.
The plants, the elements, the moon, the turning seasons — these are our kin. When we understand the Earth as alive, the body becomes alive to us too, and we stop managing sensation and begin to listen to it, because sensation is how the living body speaks.
This is feminine consciousness in its most physical form — not an idea, but a way of being read by the world instead of only reading it.
I. TUNING THE TERRAIN:
Body as Home — Grounding and Clearing
We begin by slowing down. Before any deeper work is possible, the body has to become a place that feels safe to live in again — which, for most of us, means slowing down enough to feel what is actually here: where we hold, where we brace, where we override, where we have gone quiet without noticing.
Our first weeks are given to cleansing.
Drawing on the folk medicine of South America, you learn the ancient practices of energetic hygiene — limpias, baños, and the small daily rituals that keep you clear.
This is where the tending becomes practice you can carry into your work: you learn to set down what isn't yours, so you stop absorbing your clients and carrying them home. And working through the lens of Ayurveda, you come to know your own constitution — what disturbs it, what steadies it, what this particular body needs in order to stay resourced.
By the end of this threshold: a daily practice for clearing what you take on, and a felt sense of your own ground.
II. COURTING THE WOMBSCAPE:
Body as Alchemist — Descent and Creative Source
From here we descend into the creative center — the womb, the body's oldest source of creation, where vision and possibility and life itself have always been born. It is also where the body keeps what the mind has set aside: memory, desire, and the long unbroken line of the mothers and grandmothers before us. We commune with the element of water — to remember, to nurture, and to let what has long been held begin to move again.
This is the alchemist's work, guided by the phases of the moon and the wisdom of the womb — letting the wombspace do what it has always known how to do: create, compost, and renew.
What has felt like weight begins to become fuel; what was finished becomes fertile ground. To descend here is to remember the womb as a portal of infinite creation — and to learn to draw from it, for your work, your art, your leading, and your life.
By the end of this threshold: a living relationship with the womb as source —
the place your ideas, your vision, and your creative force come from.
III — AWAKENING THE PRAYER:
Body as Channel — Expression and Offering
Having been rooted, and having moved through the water, we rise now with fire and spirit. Having learned to feel ourselves clearly and to tend what we carry, we turn at last toward the world — toward what wants to be made and offered through us.
These final weeks are for carrying the gift outward: letting all that sensitivity, once so easily flooded, become the very source of our creativity, our craft, and the way we serve.
This is the work of opening — learning to let expression move through the body without forcing it, to trust what rises rather than manage it. Here, sensitivity stops being something to protect and becomes something to transmit through: the same attunement that lets you feel a room becomes the capacity to move a room, to create from what you sense, to offer from what moves through you rather than what you strategize in your mind.
Together we explore the art of holding space, we craft our own rituals, and we learn what it is to let our sensitivity become a channel — a way of being deeply, usefully of service to the world, without emptying ourselves to do it.
By the end of this threshold: a body that knows how to receive and stay open — so that what you offer becomes transmission rather than performance, and your sensitivity, fully awakened, becomes the instrument you were always meant to play.
Closing the Constellation
We complete what we began together, each of us having done our own clearing, our own tuning, our own remembering. This closing is a ritual, and an offering: an opportunity for each participant to share their own embodied expression of their unique gifts. What we close with is no longer only a personal practice but a collective one — a constellation of those who have agreed to hold their light, together, and to carry it back into the many rooms they hold.
What you leave with
Not a certificate. A cleaner instrument — and everything that follows from it. What you carry out of these twelve weeks, and keep:
A daily practice for clearing what you take on — so you can walk out of a hard session and not bring it home
The capacity to hold space from presence — to drop beneath method and strategy and let the room be met by what's actually in you
Your own constitution, known — well enough to keep yourself resourced across a whole life of giving, and to feel depletion coming before it arrives
Expression that moves through you cleanly — so your teaching, your speaking, your creating carry transmission rather than performance
Your own material, tended — enough that it stops leaking sideways into the work and the people you hold
And beneath all of it, a clear vessel — clear enough that spirit can actually move through it, into every room you enter
* Body as Instrument is a twelve-week embodiment practice — somatic movement, folk-medicine ritual, and Ayurveda — for highly sensitive people learning to tend the instrument they are. It is deeply healing and therapeutic work, though it is not a substitute for crisis support, therapy, or medical care.
Meet your Guide
Asha Kohli
Asha Kohli is a movement artist, ceremonialist, and folk medicine practitioner. Born into a lineage of artists and spiritual seekers, of Punjabi and Colombian descent, she grew up singing, praying, and dancing in ceremony, where the elements were always honored as sacred.
She has devoted her life to being a steward of ancient technologies, reclaiming her right to inherited ancestral wisdom that colonization and displacement once tried to sever. Her movement practice, rooted in the body since childhood, has evolved into something far beyond choreography: a way of accessing the emotional memory, stored information, and wisdom the body has always carried.
Asha has spent years as a student of wisdom traditions from the Andes, the Amazon, and Ayurveda — and just as many years as a dancer, moving through hula, hip hop, house, contact improv, salsa, and whatever else asked to move through her. Somewhere in holding both, she found her real work: not just learning what these traditions know, but translating it — taking what could stay abstract, esoteric, locked in concept, and bringing it down into the body, where it can actually be felt.
That is what this immersion is. Not a lecture on ancient wisdom, but a physical practice of it — offered, especially, to those whose own work is to bring others home to themselves, and who deserve to be tended as devotedly as they tend everyone else.
FAQs
Do I need any dance or movement experience to join?
1
No. This isn't about technique or choreography. If you have a body and a willingness to show up, you're ready. Some of the most powerful moments in this work come from people who've never called themselves dancers.
Is this a religious or spiritual program? What if I don't share your specific spiritual background?
2
This work draws on folk medicine traditions and ceremonial practices from Asha’s ancestral linages rooted in South American culture and Ayurveda, but it isn't tied to any single religion, and you don't need to share a specific belief system to participate. These practices are shared as a doorway for others to deepen their own relationship to spirituality. You're invited to bring your own relationship to spirit, however you understand that word, or simply stay curious and see what arises.
What happens if I miss a live session?
Sessions are recorded and available to you for the duration of the container, so you won't lose access to the material if life happens. That said, this is a container built on group energy and continuity, so I'd encourage prioritizing live attendance whenever you can, especially for the threshold-marking sessions.
3
Do I need to be a practitioner to join?
No. If you are called to serve, in whatever form that is taking, and you want to become a clearer channel for it, you belong here.
4
This program centers the womb. Who is the womb work for?
5
The wombspace we work with is as much energetic as it is physical — the body's creative center, the seat of memory and vision. You're welcome here whether your relationship to the womb is literal, energetic, or something you're still discovering. If you have questions about whether this work is a fit for your body, reach out before enrolling and we'll talk it through.
Is the daylong retreat required?
6
The daylong is the hinge the whole container turns on, and I'd consider it essential to the full experience. If travel or timing makes it genuinely impossible, reach out before enrolling so we can talk through whether this round is the right fit.
How is this different from a typical dance or somatics class?
7
Most movement classes ask you to perform a shape correctly. This asks the opposite: to notice what's already happening in your body, and to trust that as information rather than something to fix or perfect.