Iris Solène

Iris trained as a contemporary dancer before turning toward somatic practice in her late twenties. She teaches small in-person workshops on embodiment and writes here on how the body holds the work the mind tries to do alone. She found the AYA Method through a friend and stayed for the audio moments — for once, a practice that asks you to listen first. Dance gave her a career's worth of knowledge about what a body can be asked to do; somatic work taught her the opposite skill — noticing what a body is already doing, unasked. Her essays live in that noticing: the jaw that sets before a difficult conversation, the breath that shortens around an old wish, the shoulders that answer a question the mouth is still avoiding. In her workshops she keeps groups small and moves slowly, because the nervous system, in her experience, has no interest in being impressed. She writes the same way. Her pieces walk a reader through practices that fit inside an ordinary day: standing differently while the kettle heats, listening to a Dream-Self Moment with a hand on the sternum, letting a sentence land somewhere below the collarbone. Her recurring theme is patience with the body's timeline — intention travels at the speed of tissue, she says, not the speed of thought, and the practice is learning to be glad about that.

Writes about: embodiment, somatic practice, manifestation.

Elsewhere: instagram.com