Ripples and Rumbles: Sensing Liberation in the Body

The Series

Subversion. The dictionary definition is “to turn from below.” At Big Waves, we yearn to turn things …the things that are getting in the way of collective liberation. We work with organizations pursuing that vision, and we focus on the turning. We think about subversion, and we think of “below” as places that are hidden, unspoken, taken for granted, and invisible. Inside ourselves, and in our relationships.

Last year we talked about this in a series of public, recorded conversations we called Ripples and Rumbles. We talked about queerness, power, conflict, and reconciliation. We’ve been thinking about those conversations, and how so many of us sense there is a different leap we can make, a hidden path we can find, beyond all of the big hearted and heavy lifting so many are already joined in. One of the explorations we are most energized by is an exploration of knowing, not knowing, and its realms. What kinds of knowing are prioritized and reproduced, and what kinds are ignored or silenced? How are our efforts to transform affected by this? 

We are exploring this with others again, in a series of public and recorded conversations that we are calling Ripples and Rumbles: Subverting Knowing. It is a five part series, setting the stage first with the story of knowledge as we understand it today, and then considering less dominant forms of knowledge: outsiderness, edge work, disorientation, imagination, and sensual and embodied knowing. We will close with a step back from knowing, to being.

The Third Conversation: 

"Sensing Liberation in the Body"

What is the special knowledge we gain through our senses and our embodied experience about being alive, what’s important, and how to be in connection with ourselves and other beings? How would the world and our lives be different if we were all more able to experience what our senses and our bodies can tell us? We can build capacity for interconnection, for suffering, for the fullness of existence through embodied work. We can come to a deeper understanding of how our disconnected ways have brought us down some bleak paths, and we can repair what has been harmed and reclaim what has been lost.

Sage Hayes (she/he/they) is a healing arts practitioner exploring lineage, embodied presence and emergent relational care for individual and collective transformation. Sage is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner of 17 years, a bodyworker with a massage and biodynamic craniosacral therapy background and a student of family/systemic constellations. On these paths, their pursuits and involvements have been eclectic: as a few examples, Sage has been a practitioner with the Decolonizing Wealth Healing Collective, led Queer and Trans Yoga for All Bodies, offered kickboxing with marginalized communities, DJ’d the Portland Community Dance for many years, and co-created a wellness center called Justice in the Body which explored the question ‘how can we be free in our bodies in an unfree world?’. Their personal experience of being trans and adopted inform their passion for creating conditions which nurture access and belonging for all participants.  

Join Brook and Sage for this third conversation in the Big Waves series Ripples and Rumbles: Subverting Knowing.

Link to join will be emailed to registrants in the week of the conversation.