BODY AS INSTRUMENT
A twelve-week embodiment immersion for womb-bodied beings.
September 15 – December 1 |
Tuesdays, 5:30–7:30pm PT | Live on Zoom
We are of the Earth. Our bodies are made of her elements, moved by her rhythms, and alive with the same intelligence that turns her seasons and draws the tides. This is the oldest understanding there is: that the world is alive, that we belong to her, and that the body is where that belonging is felt.
Somewhere along the way, most of us learned to live from the neck up — to think our way through our days and to treat the body as something to manage rather than a place to live in. Body as Instrument is a return. Over three months, we come home to the body as a living, sacred instrument, and we learn to play it again: to tune it, to listen to it, and to let it become once more a place of wisdom, belonging, and prayer.
An Animist Practice
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. We were prayed into existence by a living world, and we remain part of her, never separate.
To practice animism is to remember this, and to let it change how we live in our bodies. When we understand the Earth as alive, the body becomes alive to us too — a piece of the living world, moving through the same cycles of darkness and light, rest and fire, descent and bloom. We stop managing sensation and begin to listen to it, because sensation is how the living body speaks.
This is the architecture of the work: a way of reading the body that's older and more precise than most of what we've inherited.
Who this is For:
This container is for womb-bodied beings who've done some work of understanding themselves and still feel something unresolved — a knowing that lives lower than the mind can reach, in the belly, the chest, the places words don't quite get to. You've maybe sat in enough therapy sessions or read enough books to talk fluently about your patterns, and still feel them running the show. This is for the layer past that: the one that doesn't respond to insight, only to being felt, moved, and finally released.
You don't need any dance or movement background. You need a willingness to stop explaining yourself for a while, and start listening instead.
This is not for you if:
You're looking for a workout, choreography, or a fitness class
You want a quick fix or a single technique to take and go
You'd rather analyze an experience than feel it
You're not open to ritual, or to emotional material surfacing as the body unwinds
The Philosophy
We ground this remembering in living wisdom traditions, brought down out of concept
and into the body, where they were always meant to be felt.
Ayurveda gives us the map.
This ancient wisdom tradition that is over 5000 years old, originating in India, teaches us to read the body through the elements — earth, water, fire, air, and ether. This frameowrk helps us to understand our own constitution the way we would understand a landscape: what unsettles us, what steadies us, what we need in order to feel at home.
Alongside Ayurveda, we draw on ancestral cosmologies from South American Indigenous traditions, that view our bodies as extensions of the Earth: our sacred and wise, beloved teacher who exists within and all around us.
Just as the Earth moves through her seasons and the moon through her phases,
our bodies move through their own cycles, whether or not we were ever taught to notice.
Learning to read those cycles — in the body, our emotional realm, in the womb, in the turning year —
is the architecture of this work.
The Practice
Week to week, the remembering happens through the body.
We practice somatic and intuitive movement to soften what is braced and awaken what has gone quiet.
We work with ritual to mark thresholds and make the invisible felt.
We study our own constitution through the lens of Ayurveda, and we learn simple, cyclical ways of living that bring our energy back into rhythm with the Earth.
And we move, journal, and reflect together, so that what surfaces in one body is held by the whole circle.
None of this is performance. There is no shape to get right, no choreography to master. There is only the body as it already is, and the willingness to receive what arises in it as information — as the voice of something older and wiser than the thinking mind.
Shape of the Journey
We move through three thresholds together, each one building on the last: coming home to the body, meeting the wombspace as a place of transformation, and finally opening into expression and channel.
I. TUNING THE TERRAIN: Body as Home
We begin by arriving. 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 have gone quiet without noticing.
This is where we remember our belonging to the Earth. Working through the lens of Ayurveda, we come to know our own constitution — what disturbs our sense of homeostasis, what steadies us, what this particular body is asking for in order to feel like home. Through somatic practice, journaling, and shared reflection, we begin to feel ourselves as part of the living world rather than separate from her: prayed into existence, made of her elements, held by her ground.
II. COURTING THE WOMBSPCAPE:
Body as Alchemist
From there we descend into the creative center — the womb, where the body keeps what the mind has set aside: memory, grief, desire, and the long unbroken line of the mothers and grandmothers before us. We commune with the element of water to cleanse, remember, nurture, and release what is no longer ours to carry.
This is a journey into deeper shadow & soul retrieval work, guided by the phases of the moon and the wisdom of the womb. What we have been carrying does not need to be carried forever. Here it begins to move, and what has felt like weight begins to become fuel. We work with ritual and cyclical movement to tend this inner knowing, letting the wombspace do what it has always known how to do: create, compost, and renew.
III — AWAKENING THE PRAYER:
Body as Channel
Having been rooted and having moved through the water, we rise with fire and Spirit. The final weeks turn the body upward, toward breath and voice and the subtler currents that run beneath ordinary movement, and something shifts in how movement itself feels — it stops being something we perform and becomes something that moves through us instead.
This is the work of opening: learning to let expression move through the body without forcing it — grief that finally finds sound, joy that finally finds movement, a prayer that doesn't need words to be real. What you're left with isn't a technique. It's a body that knows how to receive, and stays open enough to let something move through it, again and again, long after these nine weeks end.
Closing the Constellation
We will complete what we started together, each of us having done our own clearing, our own tuning, our own remembering. This closing will be a ritual, and an opportunity for each participant to share their own embodied storytelling offering.
What we close with is no longer just a personal practice, but a collective constellation. It's proof that the map only becomes visible once enough of us agree to hold our light, together, against the dark, as an act of resistance for these times.
MEET THE
INSTRUCTOR
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's what this immersion is. Not a lecture on ancient wisdom, but a physical practice of it. Asha facilitates from the conviction that the body is where these teachings were always meant to land — and that coming home to it isn't a metaphor. It's something you do with your feet on the ground and your breath in your belly, week after week, until it's no longer a concept you understand but a place you live.
FAQs
Do I need any dance or movement experience to join?
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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?
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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.
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What do I need to participate each week?
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A device with video access, a bit of open floor space, and a willingness to move, even in small ways.
What is the investment?
$950 for the entire 3 month program, which includes 12 live online sessions, guided prompts weekly, a community chat, and one daylong in person retreat in Sebastopol California. Payment plans are available on an as needed basis.
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Is the daylong retreat required?
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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?
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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.