Daniel Bernhard

Somatic Laboratory: Come Alive and Create!

This current moment in human history demands a maximum level of presence and care from all of us – and the full spectrum of everyone’s creativity! Toni Morrison says: „This is precisely the time when artists go to work.“. But unfortunately, this our society is also perfectly designed to choose to numb ourselves in endless doomscrolling instead or spiritually bypass. We are less and less used to freely expressing the healthy physical and emotional impulses where they happen: in the body! In this Somatic Laboratory, we will experience a set of embodied practices and mental tools that can easily support us in accessing our body’s healthy impulses again. These practices include guided movement sequences, exercises for nervous system regulation and lots of space for free creation. By diving right through the deep layers of collapse and numbness we will discover our more subtle sensitivities and the massive, primordial rivers of aliveness that are to running through our veins at all times. From that place, everyone can become a vessel for the Greater Creativity to work through them. This is an invitation to absolutely everyone. Because we are all artists, sculpting, imagining, designing our own life and the ecosystems around us with every breath we take, through our thoughts and our actions. No matter whether you are a creative professional or so far did not regard yourself as a creative person, you are absolutely welcome and needed in this big work of collective imagination! We need new stories, new designs, new technologies, new imagery, new plans for adaptation, new ways or organizing. To get there, we will make use of the fact that we are many. A healthy response to the current conditions will not emerge through an isolated genius. It will be facilitated by collective intelligence. The natural world, especially plant and animal spirits will be by our side as well to guide us, so that we may remember that we are nature, too: always boundlessly creative. Daniel Bernhard is an artist, a somatic coach and a certified Pantarei practicioner with 22 years of experience working as an author, director and performer in theatre.