INCARNATIONAL GESTURES With Dr. Mia Kalef
Dear Practitioner, Welcome to your Incarnational Gestures guided series! These gestures grew out of a series of classes I was invited to teach online. To my delight and surprise, I discovered that participants could feel their own embryonic and birthing bodies entering into wholeness and healing when I practiced with them even at great distances. Participants reported the same effects while listening to class recordings, long after class finished. When participants started asking for an audio series, I trusted that you too might experience similar benefits. “Gesture” is a word I learned from the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) as introduced to me by my mentor and friend, Jaap van Der Wal. Goethe was a Phenomenologist, and understood that through every phase of growth, and through every shape and function of its body, an organism can “teach” itself to an other. He believed that the organism’s soul guided these teachings, and that that soul could be felt by those willing to come into close attention. Although he did not study human embryonic growth, others did later, applying his principles. Everything we do from growing our first cells, to expressing an organ is language. Poetry, really. We, as practitioners can learn to speak what the embryo gestures, and through that deep call and response, come into more coherence with our history, our bodysouls, and all living beings. Your body formed in the dark. We could say your first relationship is with Mother Darkness. You made yourself with light. You came here as a slip of light cleaving from the great beyond and when you entered this world, you wrapped yourself in light.
Copyright, 2021, Red Alder. For permissions contact Mia Kalef mia@miakalef.com
INCARNATIONAL GESTURES With Dr. Mia Kalef
Whether you are practicing Central Channel, that first journey into this world as light, or are exploring your masculine inheritance with Sperm Consciousness, or are moving ahead and practicing for birth with Burgeoning, you are the best one to know what your embryo or birthing body is teaching. By investigating your Incarnational Gestures, you can bring early challenging experiences into a more coherent experience in the present, over and over. I can share that it is rewarding and healing to experience how the practice evolves and heals over time. What we practice as embryos gets us ready for life. That’s why practicing Incarnational Gestures can lend more support to every day adult life. Each gesture is recorded as I am practicing. During each recording I endeavour to hold the greatest degree of wholeness, coherence, and compassion available to me, so you might feel the invitation for the same. There will be times you’ll want to go faster, slower, to take breaks, and will want to repeat. Trust your pace. Each time you practice you will discover something new. The gestures are designed for daily, weekly, or monthly practice. You can introduce them when you are problem-solving, triggered, celebrating, or learning something new. You can use them to enhance what is already going well and to practice for new steps you want to take in your adult life. The gestures address prebirth and birth healing, support pregnancy, enhance yoga and body-centred practices, and can be done by anyone, whether they understand embryology or not. Previous experience is having grown a body. My wish would be that in these gestures you find a companion to your evolving journey of becoming ever-more human. My indebtedness to the schools and students, who without, the work might not have emerged.
Mia Copyright, 2021, Red Alder. For permissions contact Mia Kalef mia@miakalef.com
CENTRAL CHANNEL At conception, you cleave from your sources and enter this world as a slip of light. You descend from above towards below. Follow the gesture as you explore bringing light through the central space that becomes the vertical axis of your body. Some days may require an hour of practice, others less. Take the time you need, knowing every day is different. EGG CONSCIOUSNESS The egg that was once you resonates in you still today. Practice bringing more coherence, wholeness, and light to your egg consciousness, integrating challenging inheritances from feminine lineages and cultures, and enhancing the presence of feminine wholeness in your body and life.
SPERM CONSCIOUSNESS The sperm you once were carries resonance from the masculine lines and masculine culture. Engage this gesture to explore the brightest, most coherence version of masculinity as it lives in you today. Challenging masculine inheritance will naturally arise and can be compassionately held in this gesture.
CELLULAR BREATHING Every cell breathes with the rhythm of life. During your first week after conception, you learn your earliest movement, breath, when you are only one cell. Your cells multiply, and later support how you breathe with lungs. Practice this gesture to enhance your natural breathing, and to bring vitality, relaxation, and circulation to your cellular experience. COMING INTO RELATIONSHIP At the end of the first week after conception, you became a blastocyst. A being who becames ready for connection with an other. This is the gesture that brings you into conversation and connection with the home you will take up for the rest of your growing time. Originally you did this with your mother. It might have been everything you could have wanted, and you’d like to experience that again. You might be looking for something more. In this gesture you can experience your first relationship in its most beautiful form. PRIMITIVE NODE, PRIMITIVE STREAK, NOTOCHORD After you come into relationship you begin to grow a whole new layer of your body. In this gesture explore how you create yet another aspect of your soul home for the rest of your life. AMNION AND YOLK SAC You grow these two structures to nourish and protect yourself even before you come into relationship. They grow and become more pronounced after coming into relationship. Enjoy playing with these structures and benefitting from nourishment and protection today.
BURGEONING This gesture takes you into the experience of translating vital force up and down your body. It is used for movement, mobilizing life force, for enacting your will at every age. Use this gesture when it’s time to begin, time to continue, time to complete. It brings energy- similar to that of birth. It allows birth to complete, even if it was interrupted the first time.
Music and Sound Design: Edgardo Moreno Voice on all recordings and Piano on “Coming Into Relationship”: Mia Kalef Copyright, 2021, Red Alder. For permissions contact Mia Kalef mia@miakalef.com