Focus:
Moving from illness as an identity to living as a person who has no illness.
Repetition:
My cells are healthy. My body is well. I am free. I am love.
Increasing Movement When You Are Ready
You have been doing the work. Week after week you have changed what you eat, how you sleep, and how you care for your nervous system. Your microbiome is being restored, your inflammation is quieting, and your cells are regenerating. And now something new may be stirring.
Not the frantic urgency of a New Year’s resolution or the punishing voice of diet culture, but something quieter and far more ancient: a desire to move, a pull toward strength, an almost childlike urge to go outside and play. This week’s invitation is to answer that stirring. Not with a rigid fitness program from the outside, but with movement that honours what your body has been through and meets it right where it is.
We are not training for looks or for punishment. We are taking back our birthright as human beings designed to move through the natural world: to dance, carry, climb, stretch, shake, rest, and begin again.
Each of the teachers I share this week offers a different doorway into this. What they have in common is an understanding that movement is not separate from healing; it is healing. And the most powerful kinds of movement are the ones that bring you back to yourself.
Somatic Dance: Where the Body Says What Words Cannot
Somatic movement starts with a simple idea: your body is not something to control, correct, or override, but something to listen to. The word soma comes from the Greek for the body as experienced from within, not the body in a mirror or on a scale, but the body as a living field of sensation, memory, breath, and wisdom. Somatic dance puts that into motion.
There is no choreography, no right way to move, and no one to perform for. You close your eyes, breathe, and let your body do what it naturally knows how to do when it is given space and permission. You might shake, sway, or cry. You might stand completely still and feel something enormous shift in your chest. All of it counts, and all of it is the practice.
This matters so much in our work because trauma does not live only in the mind. It lives in the nervous system, in the fascia, in the jaw that clenches at night, in the shoulders that have been braced for years, and in the gut that tightened long ago and never fully let go. Somatic dance lets that stored energy finally finish its cycle, not by analysing it, but by moving it. A trembling hand, a deep sigh, a sudden exhale: these are the body’s language of release.
Sah D’Simone and the Somatic Activated Healing Method
Sah D’Simone is an author and the founder of the Somatic Dance Institute. His work brings trauma-informed healing and learning through movement together into what he calls the SAH Method (Somatic Activated Healing). It is a bottom-up approach: instead of trying to think your way to healing, you change how you feel in your body first, and the mind follows.
Sah grew up in southern Brazil, moved to the United States at sixteen, and spent years wrestling with identity, addiction, and the weight of generational trauma. After training in contemplative psychotherapy and clinical care at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, he found that dancing with his eyes closed, staying in his body and letting sensations rise and fall, became his bridge between inner stillness and the body’s own ability to heal.
A typical session might include gentle shaking, intuitive movement, grounding, and audible exhales. His method works on the emotional residue of painful memories without asking you to relive the trauma. As he puts it, the invitation is to “drop the story and be with the feeling.”
If you have spent months quietly restoring your body and now feel the urge to move, his approach is a way to begin that asks for no performance, coordination, or experience. If the idea of dancing makes you uncomfortable, Sah would say that what you are really feeling is the discomfort of being fully present in your body, and that is exactly where healing begins.
Find Sah D’Simone at sahdsimone.com and @sahdsimone on Instagram, with weekly virtual Somatic Dance Sundays and his podcast, Solving the Riddle of Being Human.
Jules Horn: Fascia, Breath, and the Nervous System
Jules Horn is a somatic healer and the founder of Mindful Movemend in Topanga, California, where he blends fascia release, breathwork, and nervous system regulation. Before this work, he spent over a decade as a fashion model, deeply disconnected from himself and his body. When he broke down physically, mentally, and emotionally, that crisis became the doorway into the work he now shares with over a million followers.
His approach centres on the fascia, the continuous web of connective tissue running through every part of the body. In his view, stored trauma and chronic tension do not just live in the muscles; they live in the fascia and shape how we hold ourselves, breathe, sleep, and experience the world. He uses slow, intentional fascia release, craniosacral work, and breathwork to help the body unwind patterns held for years or even decades.
What makes his work so fitting right now is its gentleness. This is not about pushing harder; it is about softening. His Holistic Healing Blueprint weaves fascia release, gentle detox, deep hydration, and ancestral nourishment into a daily rhythm. He teaches that healing is not handed from practitioner to client; it is awakened from within, because the body already knows how to let go when it has the right conditions and rhythm.
His membership includes live classes twice a month with replays, guided breathwork, somatic tools for emotional release, and a private community.
Find Jules Horn at mindfulmovemend.com and @jules_horn on Instagram, with his membership, courses, and private sessions.
Lola Agni: Strength and Somatic Practise for Women
Lola Agni founded Agni Flower, a movement practice that brings strength training and somatic work together specifically for women. Her approach recognises something mainstream fitness often misses: women’s bodies carry unique histories of childbirth, hormonal shifts, and cultural messages about how women should move, how much space they should take up, and how strong they are allowed to become. She creates a space where women can reclaim physical strength without giving up sensitivity, intuition, or the deep body awareness that somatic practice builds.
Her philosophy is strength that grows from the inside out, rooted in awareness rather than imposed by an outside program. If you are ready to build strength, her approach lets you do it without leaving behind the body awareness you have built on this protocol. Instead of keeping somatic work in one corner and strength training in another, she brings them together, so you can lift, carry, and build real physical capacity while staying connected to your breath and the wisdom of your body. This matters especially for women in perimenopause and beyond, when strength training is essential for bone density, metabolic health, and longevity.
Find Lola Agni at agniflower.com and @lola_agni on Instagram.
Tim Matz: Move Like a Human
Tim Matz is a movement coach, traditional bow hunter, father, and the founder of Move Like a Human. His whole platform is built on the conviction that we were not designed for treadmills and fluorescent-lit gyms, but to move through the natural world: to carry, climb, throw, crawl, balance on uneven ground, draw a bow, swing from rings, and move with the integrated, whole-body wisdom our ancestors took for granted.
Based in Oregon, he brings together kettlebells, steel mace training, gymnastic rings, traditional archery, mobility work, and nervous system care. What sets him apart is the framework holding it all, a four-part training system that weaves movement into daily life, beginning in the morning. Starting your day with the right kind and amount of movement, he teaches, changes your life.
His work goes far beyond the physical. He talks openly about “revillaging,” deliberately rebuilding local community and deep bonds between people who share values. In a culture that has isolated men into consumers of content, his community gives men space to train together, ask questions, share struggles, and build the kind of friendships our ancestors formed naturally through shared work and land, including virtual men’s groups for confidential connection.
He also teaches about circadian biology and a biologically appropriate diet, because movement cannot be separated from sleep, light, food, and connection to the land. His year-long program is designed so members eventually do not need coaching at all, becoming self-sufficient in their own health, which may be the most ancestral outcome of all.
Find Tim Matz at timmatz.com and @move_like_human on Instagram, along with his Move Like Human app, Skool community, and podcast.
Training in Nature: The Most Ancestral Gym There Is
Every one of these teachers is pointing toward the same truth: the natural world is the original training ground. Our ancestors did not exercise; they lived. They walked miles every day over uneven ground, squatted to forage, reached overhead to harvest, carried children on their hips and water on their heads, danced around fires, swam in rivers, climbed trees, threw stones, and rested on the earth. Every muscle, joint, and line of fascia in the human body grew up in conversation with gravity, terrain, weather, and life outdoors.
Indoor fitness, no matter how well-meaning, uses only a fraction of what the body can do. A treadmill moves in one direction, and a trail does not. A barbell is a fixed, predictable weight, and a fallen log is not. A gym floor is flat and sterile, and the forest floor is alive with roots, rocks, slopes, and softness.
Outdoors, your body has to constantly adapt, balance, and respond. Your sense of where your body is in space sharpens, the small stabilising muscles that waste away in a gym wake up, and your feet, with their more than two hundred thousand nerve endings, start receiving information again instead of being buried in cushioned shoes on flat floors.
Nature also works on the nervous system in ways indoor spaces cannot. Sunlight on your skin sets your circadian rhythm, cold morning air stimulates the vagus nerve, and birdsong and wind turn on the parasympathetic nervous system. The layered view of a forest relaxes the eyes and lowers cortisol, and the microbes in soil, especially Mycobacterium vaccae, have been shown to raise serotonin when we breathe them in or touch them.
You do not need a gym membership to rebuild strength. You need a hill to walk up, a tree branch to hang from, and a boulder to sit on, step up onto, or carry. You need a patch of grass to roll, stretch, and lie flat on, water to wade into, a winding trail, and dirt under your feet. These are not second-best substitutes for a gym. They are the original, and the gym is the substitute.
When the Body Is Ready, It Wants to Play
There comes a stage in healing when the desire to move stops feeling like discipline and starts feeling like play. That is not a small thing. Play is one of the oldest instincts we have. It is how young animals learn to coordinate, get along, handle risk, understand space, and feel joy in their bodies. It is also one of the best ways to encourage neuroplasticity in adults, helping the brain rewire itself, learn new patterns, and let old ones go.
This protocol has asked a lot of patience from you. It has asked you to slow down, restore, and wait. This week is not the end of that patience, but it may be the moment your body, nourished and listened to, starts asking for something new. It wants to climb, to dance, to throw something, to be barefoot in the grass. It wants to get strong, not to prove anything, but because strength feels like freedom.
This is the ancestral way. Movement is not punishment for what you ate, and it is not a transaction. Movement is your body’s expression of being alive: its celebration, its grief, its rest, and its play.
Your Practice This Week
Move your body for at least 15 minutes a day, not as exercise but as expression; put on music and let your body move however it wants, because there is no wrong way.
Spend at least 20 minutes outside with your bare feet on the earth or grass, walking slowly and breathing, and let the ground teach your feet to feel again.
Choose one teacher from this week whose work speaks to you and explore what they offer, whether that is following them, watching a video, or trying a class, and let the inspiration land in your body, not just your mind.
Notice when movement feels like joy; that is the signal, so follow it and do more of whatever makes your body feel alive and free.
If your body is not ready for vigorous movement yet, honour that completely. Somatic dance, gentle fascia release, and slow barefoot walking are all deep, powerful physical practices, so start where you are.