In Body Ritual
People across time and around the globe use various forms of ritual for healing, prayer, celebration, and marking passages. I offer an embodied form of ritual that draws directly from our common ground as humans on earth. We use our senses, mindful awareness, symbolic imagery, and the elements of our natural environment as tools of connection, manifestation, and meaning-making. Embodied earth-based ritual is fundamentally inclusive and universal. Here, the sensing body is the doorway into deep connection and transformation. Creating ritual together from the present material of our lived experience is a powerful remedy & response to a cultural history of colonization and cutoff from lineage, nature, body, and our ecological community. When we tend our relationship to what’s literally at hand, with a somatic approach, we strengthen synapses of connection and invite integration within ourselves, our communities, and our place in the natural world.
About Me
Sasha Wright is a somatic psychotherapist, an avid dancer, and a curious soul who loves to weave story through her limbs and dance it into being. She listens to the soul’s longing, and creates a sacred space for it to speak. One of the ways she does this is by inviting people into ritual journeys that access potent places of personal truth through the primary language of the body. Other venues include her psychotherapy practice, the dance floor, and the natural world. Visit to learn about my psychotherapy practice: sashawrighttherapy.com |
My Roots
I didn’t grow up religious. My mother tells a story of trying to get little me and my sister to Sunday school, stuffing us into frilly dresses and patent leather shoes. We would put up such an unholy fuss that eventually she and my dad opted to spend our Sundays in the parks, woods, and beaches of our New England homeland instead. “We figured it would be more spiritual to enjoy each other outside than to struggle to get through church.” Little did she know she was taking me to church, a physical home for the holy, under those great oaks and out on the craggy shorelines of the great Atlantic.
I discovered earth-based ritual years later, in gatherings under the full moon and around the May Pole. I finally “got” spirituality, because I could feel it in my body, I could see it in nature, and I created space for it collaboratively with community. I was also diving into contact improv, authentic movement, and other dance practices that favor in-the-moment exploration and discovery over predetermined steps. Hakomi, a modality of somatic psychotherapy based in mindfulness and body awareness, is another key practice of mine that follows the unpredictable and invariably profound path of the sensing body, rather than rote scripts, to the heart of the matter. As a practitioner of dance, somatic psychotherapy, eco therapy, restorative justice, and mindfulness, I am a student of deep listening to the voice of the body, the earth, and the heart. I have spent years re-membering and re-turning to my body as my primary source of knowing, and guiding others to do the same.
I started holding my own rituals because I wanted to tune into the turning of time in community. The wheel of the year orients me to the larger cycles of life that mirror my own natural rhythms. Over time, embodiment has emerged as a core tenet of the rituals I hold. My gift is inviting others into deeper relationship with their bodies and the larger body of creation. Embodied earth-based ritual is magical because it is mundane: of this world. When seeking the mystery, you don’t need to look far, just closely.
I discovered earth-based ritual years later, in gatherings under the full moon and around the May Pole. I finally “got” spirituality, because I could feel it in my body, I could see it in nature, and I created space for it collaboratively with community. I was also diving into contact improv, authentic movement, and other dance practices that favor in-the-moment exploration and discovery over predetermined steps. Hakomi, a modality of somatic psychotherapy based in mindfulness and body awareness, is another key practice of mine that follows the unpredictable and invariably profound path of the sensing body, rather than rote scripts, to the heart of the matter. As a practitioner of dance, somatic psychotherapy, eco therapy, restorative justice, and mindfulness, I am a student of deep listening to the voice of the body, the earth, and the heart. I have spent years re-membering and re-turning to my body as my primary source of knowing, and guiding others to do the same.
I started holding my own rituals because I wanted to tune into the turning of time in community. The wheel of the year orients me to the larger cycles of life that mirror my own natural rhythms. Over time, embodiment has emerged as a core tenet of the rituals I hold. My gift is inviting others into deeper relationship with their bodies and the larger body of creation. Embodied earth-based ritual is magical because it is mundane: of this world. When seeking the mystery, you don’t need to look far, just closely.
