The body is always communicating.
It tightens, braces, compensates and protects.
Over time, these responses can become restrictive, painful and create a sense of disconnection.
The body is not working against you.
It is asking you to slow down, to listen and to respond appropriately to what is happening.
“My prolifically strong body broke down. I could no longer do the things I used to. That’s how it got my attention.
I learned how to move from a place of listening to and feeling what what was truly needed.
This is how I healed my body.
It’s how you can create healing for yours”
– Ian
From an early age, we learned to look outside ourselves. We were taught to follow rules, meet expectations, perform and push.
Discipline, criticism and competition shaped the way many of us live & relate to our bodies.
We easily can become slaves to all that we have been taught to pursue…overriding exhaustion, tension and pain. We push through, believing it will strengthen us.
Over time blind pushing will stop working as we become disconnected from our own living intelligence. Our body will protest with restriction, pain, injury and illness.
To Disconnect
Another Relationship is Possible
We can learn another kind of experience of being in our body. One where we awaken our feeling sense and naturally move towards what feels good and supportive. We can learn to listen, breathe, move and create a new experience—one of relief, trust and eventually a sense of refuge.
The body can become a place to return to when the external world feels overwhelming. Within, we can find greater coherence, steadiness, and a more spacious relationship with ourselves.
A simple question can guide us in our movement and in our lives…
NATURALIZE
is a process of transforming the experience of being in the body through movement. It is a process of rehabilitating injury, restoring mobility, becoming more pain-free and establishing the body as an enjoyable place to exist. It starts with a thorough investigation of where you are now. The focus becomes about opening the sensory channels to create an experience—a knowing of what is going on in the body, and not only from a clinical description. An adopted intuitive strategy is developed from the inside out, progressing into a supported and ultimately more trusted and joyful state. This is a deeply held process that allows a natural way of being in the body to emerge from old conditioning. An integral part of this healing journey is established through TAO’OM.
TAO’OM
TAO’OM is the name Ian has given to a deep and connected experience of being in our body that we can access through a certain dimension of movement and breath. It is the way of reclaiming our body and our connection to it. Your access to yourself is truly the only thing that implicitly knows all of what you need to heal, to grow, to be strong and to live life fully. This access can be obtained through your own unique Tao of Movement.
YOUR HEALING DANCE
Once you learn how to connect to yourself through sensorial-based movement, your senses tell you what they want. You connect to your desire for what is real within you. You drop the pretence because it cannot exist in the light of what is real. What is real is nourishing and feels good. Everything else is a search for this. Once you feel where you are and what you need and then move accordingly, this offers you healing from the years of existing in something else. The full expression of this is your Healing Dance.
A 35-year martial artist, collaborator of Ecstatic Dance, developer of TAO’OM—the Tao of Movement—and creator of The Lions Hunt, a men’s rites-of-passage program, Ian has spent decades exploring how our bodies can heal, rejuvenate and revitalize.
At 43, after years of rigorous training, his once extraordinarily strong body began to break down. Seeking help externally did not help. His healing journey eventually led him inward: into yoga, conscious strength, breath, free movement and the deeper practice of listening to what his body was communicating. His body guided him into what it needed to heal in a new relationship with self that became a powerful inner resource.
What Ian brings is a map built from the inside out. He knows firsthand that healing, trust, strength and aliveness are experiences that must be inhabited. He guides people into a different relationship with their bodies—one in which the truth emerges from within, becoming a beacon for direction and a resource for embodied joyfulness.
Ian creates spaces where people can slow down and feel what is actually present. From this place of embodied presence, you can stop overriding yourself and begin responding to the intelligence within you.
