The Foundations of UZAZU Embodied Intelligence
A 3-Day In-Person Training for Coaches & Therapists
Using a holistic, somatic framework for growth and healing, unlock the power of embodied intelligence in your professional practice. Learn to access a full spectrum of balanced states through simple movements and body postures. Develop your capacity to identify and shift imbalanced states and to facilitate integrative change in 1-1 sessions.
This Training Could Be a Fit for You If...
Embodied Intelligence: Activating the Wisdom of the Whole Self
Cultivating embodied intelligence helps us develop our capacity to coherently sense & respond in life-affirming ways to any situation.
"Intelligence" is not only a property of individual cognitive processes in the brain. In truth, intelligence co-emerges from the mind’s interaction with the body, environment, and culture. We refer to this more integrated understanding of intelligence as “Embodied Intelligence”.
A Comprehensive, Research-Based Approach to Cultivating Embodied Intelligence
UZAZU helps make sense of both our environment and our own felt experience, in service of optimally adapting and responding to our environment in a highly individualized way.
The UZAZU method helps professionals quickly identify where, and in which contexts, someone’s mind-body integration is becoming compromised or distorted. It equips those who use it with a set of simple postures and movement patterns to cultivate the states that will help them restore and strengthen their capacity to sense and respond to life.
UZAZU offers a unique approach to embodied facilitation
The Learning Journey of the Foundations Training
This 3-day in-person training introduces you experientially to the movements and postures that comprise working with the UZAZU's Nine Modes of Engagement. As a helping professional, you will learn how to work with the states of balance and imbalance corresponding to the Modes. You will learn a framework specific to UZAZU for embodied 1-1 facilitation. You will come away from the training ready to bring this work to clients.
Access
Balanced States
1. The Three Layers of Body, Mind, and Awareness
Understand how the three layers of body, mind, and awareness support the integrative top-down and bottom-up processing of energy & information.
2. The Three Bodymind Dimensions Framework
Learn to activate the 3 Core Bodymind Dimensions (Stimulus, Response, and Orientation) as an easy, precise way to understand & shift your embodied state.
3. The 9 Core Modes of Embodied Engagement
Combine the 3 Bodymind Dimensions with specific body movements, postures, cognitions, and imagery to activate a full spectrum of potent, balanced flow states.
Rebalance
Dysregulated States
Use simple movements and body postures to identify and shift imbalanced states.
4. Identifying Imbalanced Activation-States
Identify & safely activate a full range of imbalanced states in order to understand how our bodymind creates them, and further reflect on how they manifest in daily life.
5. Two Primary State-Rebalancing Processes
Learn two easy-to-use effective techniques for helping clients shift out of dysregulation or stuckness and into states of more coherent flow.
6. The Ecology & Assessment of Embodied States
Understand the dynamic ecology of someone’s overall patterns of state-activation and how these patterns help shape key challenges & growth opportunities.
Facilitate
Embodied Change
7. The 5-Step Embodied Change Sequence
Learn UZAZU's framework for facilitating embodied 1-1 sessions. Using this reliable framework, bring clarity & resolution to clients’ most pressing issues.
8. Four Core Dynamics of Embodied Facilitation
Learn how to bring four key aspects of interpersonal embodied facilitation to support more potent, engaged collaboration & better outcomes.
9. Integrating UZAZU with your Current Methods & Work
Integrate UZAZU into your current methods and practice and learn effective strategies for facilitating embodied 1-1 work online.
What people are saying about using UZAZU with Clients
UZAZU has had such a profound impact on me, both as a practitioner and as a person. As a Somatic Movement Therapist, I used to rely on the various somatic practices and tools I’d trained in, but when I discovered UZAZU, I realized its immediacy, simplicity, and practical application really made it stand out—it’s mostly the only tool I use now! UZAZU helps clients shift into a positive frame quickly and effectively, and provides a simple, easy-to-use system for helping them learn to rebalance themselves in difficult situations. I appreciate the positivity that UZAZU brings to my work and how quickly it can bring beautiful breakthroughs and progress to my clients.
Corinne Vergote - UZAZU PRACTITIONER, Somatic Movement Therapist, Bodyworker
“It felt like UZAZU Embodied Intelligence really offered me the map, the framework, the developmental structure, and then tools to really support someone. Now that I have an embodied map, I can take any issue and kind of map it with the UZAZU and get a much more well rounded view of this is what's going on, so I can get to the roots of the issue easier.”
Dr. ALBERT VILJOEN, EXECUTIVE COACH & UZAZU PRACTITIONER
"I came to UZAZU with a background in dance, yoga, Feldenkrais, and other somatic practices. I find UZAZU to be a great complement to these other practices, and has become the main frame through which I offer my 1-1 work now. What I love about UZAZU is that it's so practical, and can be used in the moment, in real life. It helps us change our state and respond to our environment without having to take a long yoga class or similar practice, just to regain balance. In that sense, it means that state regulation, balance, and embodied living are integrated into our daily lives, rather than being a separate thing we do outside of our day to day. UZAZU is a unique model, system, and practice for addressing the challenges of responding in the moment. I appreciate its simplicity, immediacy, and power."
Ashley Handel - Somatic Educator + Embodiment Coach
Embodied intelligence for me is all about how our body, other bodies, the world, all come together in our experience. It's what makes us who we are and gives us the ability to listen, respond, care, and create. That's why I find UZAZU so special, as it gives us a language to connect with our body, with ourselves and others. I feel passionately that cultivating our own embodied intelligence is also an important form of resistance to the disembodied culture that has so distanced us from the earth, ourselves, and each other. By getting more deeply in touch with our bodies, we can learn things that the culture won't ever reveal to us. What sets UZAZU apart in the world of embodied practices and healing is that it brings together the creative body, mind, and imagination, integrating inner and outer experiences in an intuitive way that other modalities haven’t quite for me. It's like discovering a whole new world of human experience that I never knew existed, and now I have a way to tap into it and find my inner resources at any moment. I see UZAZU as a gift for anyone looking for more embodiment, and for anyone who is doing healing work, as it helps give us access to such a vast array of embodied human experience.
Kellie Ryan - CHSE (Certified Holistic Sexuality Educator), Uzazu Practitioner, LMT
How the Training Works, and What You'll Get
While UZAZU trainings provide you with a robust underlying theory & framework to help inform skillful embodied work, the focus is primarily on experiential learning.
You'll be invited to engage interactively and experience the various postures, movements, states, and state-shifts yourself. Then you'll be guided in practicing and applying what you're learning with your co-trainees. These two modes of working -individually and relationally- are each followed with time for reflection and integration in small groups and within the whole group.
We benefit from the rich range of diverse experiences and perspectives in the room as we learn by doing, together.
Your trainers attend with great care to the coherence and flow of participants' experience.
This three day experience offers an intensive journey, so come prepared to engage, practice, absorb and integrate!
Here's what's included when you join the Foundations training:
Locations & Dates of All Upcoming Trainings:
From a tai chi studio in Portland, Maine, USA, to a former Victorian spa-hotel in Scotland, we're delighted to present four live & in-person trainings in 2023:
Portland Maine, USA
April 28-30, 2023
Portland Maine is our 'home turf' and we're excited to offer this to our local community and to all from the USA & beyond who wish to join!
Findhorn Foundation, Scotland
May 23-26, 2023
A recent graduate of the Practitioner Training lived and worked here for 20 years, and we're thrilled to join her in this beautiful location with this rich community!
Affligem, Belgium
May 19-21, 2023
Near where Dylan lived for 20 years (in Holland), we're happy to bring UZAZU back to (close to) where it all started, 20 years ago.
Munich, Germany
June 1-3, 2023
Indoors, we'll be together at a beautiful studio space. Outdoors, Munich offers iconic architecture, a thriving cultural scene, excellent transportation, and renowned cuisine—we'll be staying on for some vacation afterwards, ourselves...
We're excited and grateful to be giving these live, in-person UZAZU Trainings again—the first we've offered since just before the pandemic. These are the four we have planned for 2023; we'll announce here more trainings in the future, in other locations in the USA and Europe. If you'd like to help host a training near you, reach out and let's see if it's a fit.
Meet the Trainers:
Dylan Newcomb
Dylan works 1-1 with coaches, therapists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and cultural creatives of all kinds to cultivate and access the specific embodied states that help empower them more effortlessly to thrive in their personal and professional relationships and take joyful, effective action on their authentic inspirations. He has led over 200 workshops and trainings for helping professionals and laypeople, teaching about self-regulation and state-shifting.
Dylan spent the first fifteen years of his adulthood (1999-2004) as a dancer, choreographer, and composer. He studied both dance and music composition at the Juilliard School in New York City and danced with the world-renowned Netherlands Dance Theater before going on to enjoy a successful multi-award-winning career as a freelance choreographer & composer.
Driven by an interest to understand the deeper effects of sound and movement on people’s experience, behavior, and relational dynamics, Dylan co-founded the Danslab Institute for Movement Research in 2003 (today called Cloud at Danslab), generously funded by the Dutch Government and multiple other grants.
After several years of research into how vowel sounds affect people’s thoughts, emotion, and behavior, Dylan began shaping his sound-movement research findings into a model—and a method—for helping people identify various forms of embodied state imbalances and then shifting and re-patterning them. This research is what led him to what is now called UZAZU Embodied Intelligence.
Dylan also holds certifications in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Healing from the Body-Level Up (HBLU), Psychological Kinesiology (Psych-K).
He lives with his wife Kyung-sun Baek and their 11-year-old daughter Kiana in Freeport Maine.
Deb Grant
Deb has co-presented workshops on polyvagal theory with Deb Dana, including at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts as well as at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. Among her many collaborations with Deb Dana, she co-authored a chapter in the book entitled Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory: The Emergence of Polyvagal-informed Therapies (Editors Stephen Porges and Deb Dana).
Deb is a Body-Mind Centering® Somatic Movement Educator and a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist, and holds two yoga teacher certifications. She teaches improvisational dance using somatic and relational approaches, offering students ways of using dance as a personal practice for health, well-being and embodiment.
Frequently Asked Questions
“Most of my clients won’t be able to use embodied approaches effectively, or even at all. They’re generally just not ‘embodied enough’ to work well in this way.”
>Your clients are ultimately coming to you for relief from their pain and solutions to their challenges and desires, and there is no one approach to accomplishing that. In the foundations training, we address the basics of how to frame working with embodiment so that you can gradually & skillfully introduce it. By knowing how to introduce bringing movement and body awareness to sessions, and how to help them understand and align with the value of bringing more of their whole, embodied self into that process, you'll find that most clients are willing to ‘go there’ with you.
>Facilitators find that UZAZU is applicable to a full range of issues and life areas addressed in psychotherapy (including trauma work), coaching, business, and education. The core focus of this work is on state-awareness and state-shifting, central to what makes us capable of relating with ourselves, feeling and being empowered, connecting effectively with others, and collaborating. As the body tells us a deeper or more accurate truth about how we are dealing with or relating to a situation we help clients bring out a more full experience of their lived reality. Through movement explorations specific to them we then help them experience greater coherence, organization, and integration in their systems.
>If done poorly or awkwardly, yes—’bringing in embodiment’ can be a misstep. However, when embodied approaches are introduced in a sensitive, articulate and attuned manner, facilitators of UZAZU often report that the level of client-satisfaction and rate of client progress rapidly and dramatically improves, leading to deeper trust and a higher level of collaboration.
>Indeed, working in a deeply embodied way can bring up strong emotions and energies. In our Foundations Training, we provide three easy-to-use strategies for handling these kinds of moments and states. So, whether you’re a therapist or coach or consultant, etc*., you’ll be able to feel confident you can safely ‘venture into the wilderness’ of doing more embodied client-work, knowing you’ll be able to offer them a safe container regardless of what comes up. *Of equal importance to having the skills to help safely contain and/or work with strong feeling states is having the ethical clarity and commitment to work within your scope of practice. For help with these considerations you may wish to seek consultation from a trusted expert in your field.
We also have a pre-recorded version of the Foundations training. It provides about 18 hours of training, and works very well in an online format. You can click here to read more about that option.
*Dylan has been teaching UZAZU primarily online for over 9 years now, and we feel very satisfied with teaching in an online context. We've worked (and keep working) to optimize the effectiveness of our online teaching methodologies, and we consistently receive feedback on how surprisingly engaging & transformational it is for people.
You will also have access to the our online UZAZU users community, where you can share and ask questions to other members.
We highly recommend you join a 'time-zone appropriate' Practice Pod, for practicing using & applying what you’ve learned— students find it to be powerful and effective to connect and meet together for practice.
Additionally, Deb provides paid consultation for individuals and small groups who are interested in having support and input for bringing UZAZU to their professional work. You are welcome to reach out to her to check on her availability.