Wild Soma Being and Becoming: Embodied Practices for Collective Thriving

With Andrea Nann, Julia Aplin, Roula Said and Shannon Litzenberger

June 22 - 27, 2025

Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 23, 2025.

Date and Time Details:
Program begins: June 22, 2025
Program ends: Jun 27, 2025
Click here to view a sample program schedule.

Location: Hollyhock Cortes Island

Address: Cortes Island, Strathcona, BC, Canada

Package Pricing: Click Register Now to view availability of accommodations and all-inclusive pricing. For more information on accommodation types, click here.

Scholarships : Hollyhock programs are enriched by welcoming a multitude of voices and experiences that reflect global plurality. The Hollyhock scholarship program is one of the key strategies we employ to expand program access to underrepresented and marginalized communities. Click here to learn more and apply.

Terms & Conditions: For information on cancellation policies, health and safety, and to read Hollyhock’s Community Policy on Respectful Conduct, click here.

  • Private Cabin Oceanfront – CAD $4,355.00
  • Single w/ensuite Oceanfront – CAD $3,355.00
  • Single w/ensuite – CAD $3,155.00
  • Single w/shared bathroom – CAD $2,730.00
  • Couple w/ensuite Oceanfront – CAD $5,295.00
  • Couple w/ensuite – CAD $4,900.00
  • Couple w/shared bathroom – CAD $4,505.00
  • Twin w/ensuite oceanfront – CAD $2,650.00
  • Twin w/ensuite – CAD $2,450.00
  • Twin w/shared bathroom – CAD $2,250.00
  • Three-share w/shared bathroom – CAD $2,045.00
  • Women Dorm – CAD $1,800.00
  • Male Dorm – CAD $1,800.00
  • Mixed Dorm – CAD $1,800.00
  • Tent Site Single – CAD $1,775.00
  • Tent Site Couple – CAD $3,300.00
  • Commuter – CAD $1,600.00
  • All Packages Include CAD $1,475.00 Tuition and meals

In this time of intersecting social, political, and planetary crises, how do we embrace and honour all that is arising in us as bodies? What if we listen closely to what we feel in our hearts, what we know in our bones? Can we resonate care and connection across our differences, tuning into our sense of aliveness and embracing a fully embodied, relational way of being in the world in service of collective thriving?

Wild Soma invites you to soften your mind and connect to the wisdom of your body. Move through embodied practices that invite new ways of relating to self, others and our world. Explore ways of recasting the body as self, in specific relationship to the social, cultural, temporal and planetary ecosystems we live within. Resonate inside circles of kindness, wonderment, and connection, illuminating a sense of interconnectedness within the living world. Discover creative practices that gesture toward a world aligned with thriving.

Program Highlights

Wild Soma will guide you through intentionally designed practices and experiences that center embodied ways of knowing, being and moving into action. These include:

  • Practices of somatic attunement that foreground embodied knowledges such as feeling, sensation, and emotion
  • Practices that support expanded attentional awareness
  • Relational practices that support connection to community within the human and more than human world
  • Creative practices such as ensemble-based imaginative play, including movement and vocalizing

Together we will explore, experience, feel, inquire, move, sound, connect, question, visit, listen, align, attune, accept, breathe, walk, dance, embrace, invite, honour, celebrate, grieve and rest.

We will do this through games, personal reflection, small group activities, guided movement meditations, nature connection activations, informal dance, non-verbal group discussion, verbal group reflections and other creative engagements.

This experience will leave you with:

  • An expanded awareness of embodied ways of knowing, being and doing
  • A repertoire of individual and collective practices designed to support your wellbeing and aliveness, including sensory, attentional, relational, and creative practices
  • An enhanced capacity for cultivating life-giving relationship with self, others, and the world around you
  • A better understanding of how embodiment is a world-making gesture

Testimonials

“I recommend you jump all-in to the Wild Soma retreat experience. This seriously thoughtful program is in equal parts deep learning, Being shifting and delightful fun. I can’t recommend it enough.”Deborah Farquharson -artist, past participant

“It was a rich delight to experience the exquisite integrity Wild Soma brings to their workshops – a rare quality that is grounded in the diverse and complementary expertise of their leadership, in the inclusive, welcoming invitation with which their practices are offered, and in the ways those practices support a gentle opening of the heart, the imagination, our embodied sensitivity – and ultimately our full, relational humanity. If you have a chance to experience Wild Soma, jump at it!” – Philip Shephard, Creator of The Embodied Present Process, Author of Radical Wholeness and New Self, New World

Daily Schedule

A detailed schedule will be emailed to you about 30 days prior to your program. Click here to view a sample program schedule.

 

About the Presenters

Andrea Nann

Andrea Nann is a contemporary dance artist, arts educator, founding artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company, and founder/co-creator of Conscious Bodies Methodology, an embodied community practice. Andrea dances to reach across distance and to experience herself and others in celebration of possibility, plurality, imagination, originality, and belonging. A graduate of York University’s Department of Fine […]

Learn more about Andrea Nann

Julia Aplin

Julia Aplin has been studying and practicing movement for over 40 years. She has an intense curiosity about the human body in motion and draws on a variety of tools and techniques in her current practice. Julia danced full time for 15 years with Dancemakers, under the Artistic Direction of Serge Bennathan performing around the […]

Learn more about Julia Aplin

Roula Said

Roula Said is a singer, dancer, musician, actor and poet of Palestinian heritage based in Toronto, Canada. Roula has been studying, teaching and performing Arab music and dance for over 25 years. From within her tradition as practiced here in the west (where she has also explored many other styles of movement, music, voice and […]

Learn more about Roula Said

Shannon Litzenberger

Shannon Litzenberger (she/her, Tkaronto) is an award-winning contemporary dancer, choreographer, director and embodiment facilitator. Inspired by the borderless landscapes of her prairie homeland, she creates sensory-rich multi-disciplinary performance experiences that animate our relationship to land, community and the forgotten wisdom of the body. An imaginative creator, she often develops unique collaborations across art forms and […]

Learn more about Shannon Litzenberger

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