Thomas Hanna – Somatics: Reawakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health

Summary:
Hanna introduced the term “Somatics” to describe practices that cultivate internal bodily awareness and self-regulation. His central premise is that the body and mind are not separate, but different expressions of the same whole. Through conscious movement, one can unlearn deeply held patterns of tension, restore mobility, and reclaim agency over the body.

Ethos Connection:
The work of returning to the inner experience of the body. Hanna reframes healing not as fixing, but as remembering the body’s ability to feel, adapt, and move from within. This directly supports the emphasis on intuitive movement and ritual return.

Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps the Score

Summary:
A foundational text in trauma studies, van der Kolk explores how trauma is stored not just in memory but in the body. He offers evidence that body-based interventions—movement, breath, EMDR, yoga, and somatic practices—can effectively heal where talk therapy may not.

Ethos Connection:
Felt safety. This principle of co-regulation and the necessity of safety in healing directly informs how your offerings are paced, themed, and presented—slow, permission-based, and trauma-informed.

Peter Levine – Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

Summary:
Levine’s work centers on the instinctual wisdom of the body, observing how animals discharge traumatic energy and applying that to human trauma healing. His Somatic Experiencing method focuses on tracking sensation, completing stress cycles, and working with titration (small doses of sensation) to restore balance.

Ethos Connection:
This perspective supports my use of gentle ritual and micro-movements. I often emphasize that healing is not a linear journey, but a series of safe returns — exactly what Levine advocates. The design of short, accessible rituals reflects his principle of titration.

Stephen Porges – The Polyvagal Theory

Summary:
Porges introduced the polyvagal theory, which explains how the vagus nerve mediates our sense of safety, social engagement, and physiological regulation. His work underpins many somatic therapy modalities today and is essential for understanding nervous system responses to stress.

Ethos Connection:
Doesn’t push for breakthroughs or productivity—it offers space for regulated return. The core design of my movement, breath, and stillness practices is to shift the body from survival into safety, aligning perfectly with Porges’ model.

Resmaa Menakem – My Grandmother’s Hands

Summary:
Menakem brings somatic healing into the context of racialized trauma. His work distinguishes how trauma lives differently in Black, white, and police bodies, and how healing must be embodied and lineage-aware. He centers body-based practices for processing generational trauma.

Ethos Connection:
Wild Wisdom’s focus on ancestral somatics and ritual is deeply aligned with Menakem’s call for embodied racial healing. My offerings speak to BIPOC practitioners and creatives, holding space for trauma, lineage, and re-rooting as body-based, collective acts.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen – Sensing, Feeling, and Action

Summary:
Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering approach explores movement through cellular awareness, developmental patterns, and internal sensation. She emphasizes the intelligence of the body’s systems—bones, organs, fluids—and their role in identity, presence, and creativity.

Ethos Connection:
This is a direct mirror of my practice — the body is a site of inquiry, not performance. Cohen’s cellular philosophy supports my movement scores, breath maps, and ritual nooks as invitations to locate wisdom within.

Linda Hartley – Wisdom of the Body Moving

Summary:
Hartley integrates Authentic Movement with Jungian depth psychology and Body-Mind Centering. She emphasizes the use of archetypes, inner imagery, and body-based ritual to access the unconscious and re-pattern habitual emotional responses.

Ethos Connection:
Use of guided movement meditations, image-rich rituals, and somatic writing directly reflects Hartley’s blend of movement + imagination. This text supports my belief that ritual is not only spiritual but psychological, embodied, and integrative.

Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz

Key Works: “Dancing Revelations,” “Black Performance Theory,” and various lectures/interviews

Summary:
DeFrantz is a leading scholar in Black dance and performance theory. His work interrogates how dance — particularly African diasporic forms — resists Eurocentric, codified traditions and reclaims movement as an embodied expression of identity, memory, resistance, and community.

Ethos Connection:
DeFrantz's work validates my integration of somatic ritual within diasporic creative practices. It challenges the binary between "technique" and "spirit" — something you directly disrupt through my work at the intersection of ballet, somatics, and ancestral healing. His framing supports my mission to honor movement as both resistance and remembering.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild – Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance

Summary:
Gottschild uncovers the unacknowledged Africanist aesthetics embedded in Western performance, including qualities like groundedness, rhythmicality, call-and-response, and polycentrism. Her work decolonizes performance history by re-centering Black movement languages.

Ethos Connection:
My work often straddles the tension between formal dance training and intuitive movement. Gottschild’s scholarship names the erasure we’re actively working against. My movement offerings, especially for BIPOC communities, invite the re-embodiment of suppressed cultural rhythm and instinct.

Kariamu Welsh – African Aesthetics in the Americas

Summary:
A foundational scholar in diasporic dance, Welsh defines key characteristics of Africanist movement—polyrhythm, curvilinearity, dimensionality, repetition, and holistic integration. She also developed Umfundalai, a contemporary African dance technique rooted in embodied identity and cultural memory.

Ethos Connection:
This belief anchors Wild Wisdom’s philosophy. My somatic rituals prioritize the body as archive, not just as instrument. The values of curvilinearity, rhythm, and repetition are mirrored in my breathwork and floor-based movement sequences. Welsh's framing also supports my vision of creative healing as a return to pre-verbal knowing.

Jacqueline Shea Murphy – The People Have Never Stopped Dancing

Summary:
This book documents the vitality of Native American dance traditions, challenging colonial narratives of cultural disappearance. Shea Murphy explores how movement functions as memory, land connection, and cultural continuity, particularly in Indigenous communities.

Ethos Connection:
My approach to nature-based ritual and seasonal cycles is deeply aligned with this worldview. Movement is not ornamental or separate from place — it’s a way of being in ethical relationship with the body, with nature, and with ancestral storylines.