Life has a mysterious way of enrolling us
into the exact curriculum necessary for
us to fulfill our divine assignment.

Unknowingly, my education in somatics &
relating began at the age of eight when my
family and I packed our bags to move to a
new province. What I left behind was a
social architecture in which I thrived as a
natural leader of my peers, deeply bonded
to all, well-oriented within the structure of
my social life, and comfortable in my
blossoming body. What was waiting for me
was a seemingly alien ecosystem of new
faces, foreign places, and a nervous system
unprepared for my new identity as the
‘new girl.’ In the span of a few years, I
jumped from school to school, as my family
moved to Ottawa and then later to
Montreal, only to return home just before
my highschool career began.

Those early years matched my previously
well-developed social patterning with new,
survival-based strategies. “Who do I need to
be, in order to fit in here?” I became an
expert in the arts of reading the person in
front of me, manipulating my expression to
please and appease, and dissolving my
selfhood in the name of camouflaging into
my environment. I became a master of
relationship, at a time when bonding felt
like a matter of life or death.

My posture became one of hunched
shoulders, clenched jaw, and numbed body.
I was being schooled in the intricate and
intimate connections between my relational
reality, my internal landscape, and the
expression of my body.

My embodied experience became one rooted in tensed performance rather than easeful authenticity.

By the time I graduated highschool, I understood more about relating and embodiment than I did about calculus and algebra. 

I was more called toward, and enlivened by, the mechanics of ‘loving and being loved’ and the ‘art of being in a body’ than I was by any flimsy and faded fascination of my teenage peers. 

My elementary and highschool careers primed me to fall in love, curiously, with the “how we connect”, the “how we be in a body” and the “how our body informs our relating, and vice versa.”

Intimacy had revealed her intricacies to me, and I was hooked. 

I became fascinated by the idea that, by moving a certain texture through my body or taking on a specific posture, I could inform a new availability for life, and for connection. I frothed at the thought that I could learn to love better by becoming more creative with my embodiment. I lit up as I learned that my relationship with my blood and bones had a direct impact on the ‘who I be’ and the ‘who I see’ in connection with another. 

The more I could feel me, the more clearly I could see the one in front of me.

The deeper I arrived into my own body, the wider my capacity for intimacy.

The relationship - and the life - that called to me demanded that they first come to life inside of me.

So, if you’re wondering why I do
what I do, what I’ll say is this:

I have a vision of generations who won’t need to spend decades of their lives
restoring their wholeness and suturing the wounds left by a disembodied,
disconnected, and lonely world. I have a vision of generations who engage life
from cells that only know safety, from bones that have only ever felt settled,
and hearts that cohere with the core of the earth.

I have a vision of a fully-liberated, freely-feeling, playfully-living human who
engages with the riches of life unhurried, unrestricted, and unfurled from the
tensed ways of generations past. I see a euphoric human experience for us all
 - one where we indulge in the sensing + experiencing of the body, as if it
were our only reason for being. One where we belly up to the buffet of the
soma, eager and grateful to get to feel, to get to touch, to get to connect. One
where holding and being held is of primary concern. One where communal
song, dance and story are daily medicines. One where knowing deeply and
being known honestly are natural impulse. A world of restored curiosity. A
world where feeling and feeling felt are as promised as the breath. A world
of reignited co-weaving.

I have a vision of a circular world. I see communities that have remembered
and restored the ancient art of togethering. I hear voices of women who have
unclosed their throats. I see a people who pass along the ways of gathering,
the wisdoms of *‘we’*, and intimacy as the backbone to our beingness. A
world of eye gazing, hand holding, heart giggles and reciprocity. Bodies
synced to the cycles of the earth, and souls happy to inhabit the flesh.

What starts as a desire for richer,
realer, and more rooted romance
effortlessly becomes an entirely
new way-of-being.

What begins with the intention of healing and repatterning one's sexual expression and intimate ecosystem naturally calls forward an entirely new way of letting life in.

The work we do to become better lovers, better partners, inevitably makes of us better participants of life.

There are infinite paths one could choose to take on the way to a more integrated + liberated living… So, I say, why not choose the path of pleasure? Why not trust the teachings of intimacy to take us allllll the way home? Why not slip down the slide of our own sensuality? Why not choose the path of relationship? Why not love our way upward, and forward, into all that life aches to offer us?

A sensitive, giggly, girly-girl aroused by poetry, prayer and decaf-oat-lattes, Avery is a personal trainer and dancer / dance educator, an energy worker of over 8 years, a somatic therapist, an eco-inspired artist of relating, and a to-the-core devotee to a Love greater than herself. 

As a steward of a new era of intimacy, and a teacher to deep-feeling-hopeful-romantic women, Ave’s work pulses at the intersection of spirituality, self-practise and somatics. She is the founder of Embodied Love Club, the host of The Relational Mystic Podcast, and is writing her first book titled “The Edge of the World is Inside You.”

the BIO

LINEAGE and LEARNINGS

I don’t work alone, nor did my work begin with me. As a young girl, I carried within me a felt knowing that I was here to carry out, and carry on, a mission that had been set in motion generations (and generations and generations) before me. Like one big relay race, the baton had been passed to me, and my divine assignment was to pick up where my ancestors left off. And so, I bring the echoes of my ancient relatives to the space. I move in tune with the elder voices of the winds, the far reaches of roots from the tallest of trees. I create in consultation with the oceans, with depth, with pregnant silence and the moment after an exhale. 

And I bow. And I bow. And I bow. 

To the stars onto which I clung in my darkest of nights, to the sun who taught me the unwavering love of the masculine, and to the whispers of my grandma’s grandma’s grandma. I heard you. I hear you. I thank you. 


It’s the rhythms of the underneath reality that I chose - and choose - to attune myself to. 

My body hums a holy deep, slow and wide. 

The core of me is the core of this earth. 

The me that is me wouldn’t be if not for the devoted, ceaseless merging of spirit with soil. 
I am a child of sacred union. The all, in one. Intimacy, in body.

And I love. And I love. And I love.

To the degree that the trees revealed themselves as my teachers, so too have many humans, and their works / offerings / expressions. To name, nowhere near all, but a few of the makers who have touched - and continue to enrich - my becoming: John Wineland and his oh-so-rich-and-oh-so-real work in the arena of embodied relationship and intimacy. Luis Mojica, in all his gorgeous and glorious explorative restoration of ‘how we be in a body’, and the architecture of his leadership - the posture of it, the steady of it, the slowed of it. Dajé Alōh, as the one who oozes way-making in the forests of story-telling, ritual-weaving, and soil-sourced stewardship - an exposing of the sacredness of the modern-day coach. Charlotte Brennan and her proximity in mentorship - a true wisdom-keeper and teacher of mine in energetic therapies, spiritual warrioring, and integrity-tending. Ruth Douthwright, all curiosity, ferocity, and engagement - her movement artistry and innovation continue to unfurl inside me, and make up the scaffolding of this body.

Robin Wall Kimmerer and her Braiding Sweetgrass, which became a bible-of-sorts to be held at the altar of my forward motion and conscious creation - an awakened remembrance of what is “good medicine for land and people alike”, that “grief can also be comforted by creation,” (and ohhhhh so much more.) Lorin Roche and The Radiance Sutras, to which I turn, again and again, as a spine to my way-of-being, priming my body for love by teaching me to “meditate on the symphony of my own life currents” and to “enter the palace of the Creator” - a true adorning of my days with the poetry of intimacy.