Dancing with the Shadow · a weekly online gathering for women

You were never meant to hold it all in.

A trauma-informed movement practice for women who are tired of being strong in a world that keeps asking for more. We meet the shadow through the body, gently and on purpose, so you can carry yourself differently back into your life.

Join the waitlist

Why this matters

We are living inside systems that fracture us.

Workplaces that run on our depletion. Care systems stretched past breaking. Histories and inheritances we never chose, still living in our bodies. Most of us have learned to cope by holding it — in the jaw, the shoulders, the breath we forget to finish.

We can restore a woman again and again, and still send her straight back into the structures that wore her down. That doesn't make her healing pointless. It makes it necessary.

We can't dismantle the system in an hour on a Tuesday. But we can strengthen the self who has to live inside it.

Dancing with the Shadow tends the individual. It builds the ground beneath your feet, so the fracture out there doesn't have to become the fracture in here. And when you're ready to turn toward the system itself, that's what Kōkiri Rising is for.

Where this began

Long before I called it shadow work, I called it survival.

When words were too heavy, I painted. And when painting wasn't enough, I danced — alone, in empty gym classrooms with the lights half off, long before I had any training or language for what I was doing. My body knew the way back to myself before my mind did.

Years later, after finishing the dense theory of spiritual direction, my body asked for the same thing again: put it down, and move it through. So I listened.

It became a daily practice I called Initiation, then a weekly room of women. And I began to notice something. The way a woman moves mirrors how she shows up in her relationships, her money, her work, her learning. When one begins to shift, the others follow.

I've brought this room online so it can reach the women who are rural, isolated, stretched thin, or simply far from a circle like this. It's the same room. It's just closer now.

— Kia

Inside the hour

Every gathering follows the same six movements, so your body learns it's safe to arrive.

Ground

Feet on the floor, breath slowing. We arrive in the body before the mind takes over.

Intend

A quiet intention for what you're willing to meet today — nothing more than you're ready for.

Meet the fear

Through the Micro Method, we find where it lives in the body: its shape, its colour, its size.

Sweat for God

We move it through. Shaking, stamping, spiralling — until it loosens its grip.

Rest and reflect

The nervous system settles. The insight has somewhere soft to land.

Return with joy

Free movement and celebration, so what shifted comes home with you.

Backed by science · held with reverence

Science explains the mechanism. Ceremony gives it meaning. This practice is built on both.

Movement shifts mood

A 2019 meta-analysis of 41 controlled studies found that dance and dance movement therapy reduced depression and anxiety and improved quality of life, with most effects holding months later.

Feeling is a skill

Interoception — your ability to sense what's happening inside your body — is closely tied to how we regulate emotion. Like any skill, it strengthens with practice.

What we track, we can see

The companion logbook records body sensations and a 0–10 distress rating before and after each gathering, so you can watch your own change unfold over twelve weeks.

Source: Koch et al. (2019), Effects of Dance Movement Therapy and Dance on Health-Related Psychological Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis Update, Frontiers in Psychology.

Trauma-informed, by design

Nothing here is forced. Everything here is an invitation.

Shadow work asks a lot of the body, so the room is built to hold you. Your nervous system sets the pace, not the playlist.

You choose. Pausing, adapting, or sitting still is always welcome.
You never have to share. Witnessing is offered, never demanded.
Your body, your way. No choreography, no correction, no right way to move.
Come as you are. Cameras on or off, in whatever you're wearing.
It walks beside therapy, not instead of it. This is a practice, not treatment — it can sit alongside the support you already have.

Who this is for

For the woman who holds everyone else, and has nowhere to put her own.

You've talked it through for years, and it still feels stuck somewhere in your body.

You work inside systems that wear you down — health, education, community, care — and you're running on empty.

You're curious about shadow work, but not ready for, or not looking for, one-to-one depth work yet.

You've danced your whole life, or never once. Both belong here.

You long for the sacred to live in your everyday life, not just on retreat once a year.

If you're in acute crisis right now, please reach for one-to-one support first. This room will be here when you're ready.

Wholeness & holiness

"Whole" and "holy" grow from the same old root. Both mean to be made complete.

This isn't about rising above your life. It's about bringing the sacred back into it — into your kitchen, your commute, the way you answer the phone. One hour a week that teaches your body it's safe to be whole, and holy, exactly as you are.