This is a place for exploring possibilities, ideas, skills and techniques. A space in which we ask (and possibly) answer questions about a variety of meditative practices, the magnificent form of Contact Improvisation and how these two forms can speak to each other through our bodies, hearts and minds.
This is a robustly facilitated but flexibly structured space where high-caliber learning and teaching happen. But this is not a typical class format. A🧪 lab(oratory) is a place for experimentation, exploration and asking “what if?” questions.
No experience in meditation or in Contact Improvisation is necessary, beginners are warmly welcomed, but high levels of engagement, critical thinking and autonomous, self-directed and self-motivated approaches to learning meditation and Contact Improvisation are required. There will be silence, space and ambiguity. Please come with that expectation in mind.
No one turned away for lack of funds! Come talk to us at the door!
About this Practice
Both Meditation and Contact Improvisation are impossible to contain within fixed definitional containers. The following are little flavors from these facilitators at this time.
Contact improvisation is a form of movement practice that emphasizes improvisation, somatics, physical touch and communication in which spontaneous interactions between participants, the earth and space may alchemize a continuous blossoming of possibilities.
Meditation is a continuous attuning to the living field of experience - body, heart, mind - in real time.
Contemplative Contact Improvisation is an ongoing exploration of ways in which meditation and Contact Improvisation can live beautifully and usefully in, through and as our lives.
About the Facilitators
Amma Thanasanti
Amma Thanasanti has been practicing meditation for over 45 years. Ajahn Chah, Dipa Ma and the Dalai Lama were her first teachers. She was a Buddhist nun for 26 years, including 20 years living in Ajahn Chah monasteries. She has been teaching meditation since 1989 and leading intensive retreats since 1996.
She is the Spiritual Director of Awakening Truth, a 501(c)(3) founded in 2009 that uses traditional Buddhist teachings and adaptive means to support bringing trauma-informed tools to clean up, grow up, show up and wake up to our essential nature. She founded the Integrated Meditation Program to address baseline patterns that meditation practice alone may not shift.
She has been dancing contact improvisation since 1976—a practice embodying presence, attunement, trust, joy, and spontaneous collaboration. She also loves communing with trees, rocks, water, oceans, cooking, making herbal potions, and laughing.
What moves through her teaching is what she has lived: profound insight experiences, early Buddhist teachings, nature-based wisdom from wilderness, and embodied knowing through dance. While each has a different face, they point her back to the same inquiry—what is happening now, how the field between us shapes experience, and the living truth of this moment.
https://awakeningtruth.org/
Nick Smith
Nick Smith is a facilitator, organizer, meditator, dancer and body worker focused on improvisation, somatics, communication, touch and relational technologies. Nick offers body work sessions in the Bay Area and teaches regularly at The Alembic, The Finnish Hall, The Athletic Playground, Breathing Room Alameda and elsewhere.
https://www.grapes.dance/
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