Self-Exploration Witnessing
...a safari into Self
Upcoming WORKSHOP: The RELEASE VALVE
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We begin with the body. Just you and your body.
Everyday you have physical impulses that go unheard, emotional truths shoved to the side and thoughts dragging you by the collar. This is the place where you will listen, allow, release and follow them on a safari into yourSelf; discovering where your imagination, creativity, spirit and True strength/Nature lives.
This is mental, emotional, spiritual and physical fitness training for the creative-intuitive-heart mind.
for more info or to schedule a session go to ONEspace.us
---
We begin with the body. Just you and your body.
Everyday you have physical impulses that go unheard, emotional truths shoved to the side and thoughts dragging you by the collar. This is the place where you will listen, allow, release and follow them on a safari into yourSelf; discovering where your imagination, creativity, spirit and True strength/Nature lives.
This is mental, emotional, spiritual and physical fitness training for the creative-intuitive-heart mind.
for more info or to schedule a session go to ONEspace.us
Who is it for?
For Actors: A powerful approach to exploring physicalization in development of your characters and in breaking through personal barriers that keep certain character tones/types out of reach.
For Dancers and Choreographers: Invaluable to developing expression inside of your technique and for encountering choreography unique to your body and its story.
For Writers: A unique opportunity to get up on your feet and use your body/yourSelf to more deeply explore and understand the characters you are putting on the page.
For Everyone: Enhance your PRESENCE in your own life. Learn about yourself. Strengthen your body. Dance your own dance. Give your spirit room to breathe. Enjoy yourSelf/Life more. Encounter your internal picture book and discover how you yourself are writing it. Fun! Fun! A little scary, but that's what makes it Fun!
Let your creative juices flow without judgement, simply because you are alive - and kicking feels good!
schedule a session
For Dancers and Choreographers: Invaluable to developing expression inside of your technique and for encountering choreography unique to your body and its story.
For Writers: A unique opportunity to get up on your feet and use your body/yourSelf to more deeply explore and understand the characters you are putting on the page.
For Everyone: Enhance your PRESENCE in your own life. Learn about yourself. Strengthen your body. Dance your own dance. Give your spirit room to breathe. Enjoy yourSelf/Life more. Encounter your internal picture book and discover how you yourself are writing it. Fun! Fun! A little scary, but that's what makes it Fun!
Let your creative juices flow without judgement, simply because you are alive - and kicking feels good!
schedule a session
The goal
Our goal: free the body, encounter your spirit, grow its voice, strengthen the body so that it can effectively carry and express your spirit.
Ultimately, if "all the world's a stage..." then our goal is to enhance your stage presence. YOUR presence - first inside of your own body, then, naturally, within the world.
schedule a session
Side Effects
Regular participation in SEWing may lead to the development of REAL functional fitness. "Functional Fitness" is being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it! Not just carry the groceries and pick up your child, but whatever strikes your fancy in the moment. Therefore, functional fitness is the capacity of your body to safely and freely express your spirit.
SEWing exercises your body in a way that gives it a break from the repetitive motions of your daily routine (including your gym workouts) lets your emotions flow unbridled and truly allows for stress to leave your body.
SEWing is an approach to creating personally authentic performance material and a playful avenue for personal exploration and growth. Though it is a bit of a therapeutic process, it is not "therapy". It is an artistic process that many find therapeutic: enlightening, empowering and energizing. It is an exploration that builds health: strength and resilience of the body, mind and spirit.
schedule a session
SEWing exercises your body in a way that gives it a break from the repetitive motions of your daily routine (including your gym workouts) lets your emotions flow unbridled and truly allows for stress to leave your body.
SEWing is an approach to creating personally authentic performance material and a playful avenue for personal exploration and growth. Though it is a bit of a therapeutic process, it is not "therapy". It is an artistic process that many find therapeutic: enlightening, empowering and energizing. It is an exploration that builds health: strength and resilience of the body, mind and spirit.
schedule a session
Testimonials
(I have not edited down the testimonials as the SEWing process is elusive. If you are curious what SEWing is and are feeling drawn to trying it yourself, you will read these lengthy testimonials happily, I'm sure.)
-------------------
From:
Rosannah Riess, Dancer & Aerialist
"What has SEWing meant to me?
...it’s like suddenly discovering I’ve got a Versace gown on underneath the smelly old overcoat I cover myself in. Shed the layers. The really good stuff is on the inside. The SEWing method connects artists to their art by being a conduit for honesty and understanding. It enables artists to manifest and express what was once jumbled and unknown...
SEWing is a doorway - an avenue. SEWing is an exercise in self and honesty. SEWing has allowed me to delve into the unformed, unspoken, inarticulate world of my “self-yet-to-be” and my “art-yet-to-be-created” and to snorkel, as it were, through this turbulent sea of innumerable mysteries. The SEWing practice is structured to empower wild exploration and productive abandon. It is an anchor and a life-line, allowing me to leap into the unknown material within. Through the SEWing practice with Candace Younghans, I have experienced startling self-discovery and moments of unparalleled, confident self-expression. SEWing practice is a definite, simple tool and yet, may be used to create the infinitely complex. I find it absolutely necessary for authentic character development.
Beginning with exploration, the process quickly allows one to identify and then clarify the seed of a character. Continuing to apply the process iteratively enables the amassing of great amounts of information and detail, a format for evaluating the discoveries, and then a means of implementing these insights into performance. The process is challenging and ecstatic. At the end of a session, I always feel more like myself - never that I have simply shrugged on someone else’s knowledge.
.......and that’s my experience of SEWing with Candace Younghans."
---------------------------------
From:
an actor/director after 5 sessions,
"My experience of SEWing thus far...
Almost immediately, I could feel my body changing shape. I wasn't necessarily overweight, but I had lost a lot of my tautness. I feel new muscles forming, and I like it. It makes me feel natural, as if I were born to be strong and I'm coming home to this discipline.
Much more importantly, I'm learning how to live inside my body, which is also a way of saying "being present." I spend an inordinate amount of time on the computer for work, giving the helm to my logical, thinking self. Acting gives my right-brain a workout, but my body was still left out of the equation. How can one be truly living in the moment when the body is ignored?
Clearly, the body stores emotions, experiences, truths. The more I begin to work with movement, the more I'm understanding that my body is an inexhaustible warehouse of information, and in fact, knows how I'm feeling long before my logical mind does. I might have had an inkling of this insight before, but the evidence is now coming at me in full force. So, another benefit of SEWing is that it's creating a quicker, more accessible dialogue between my thinking mind and my own deeper truths.
Much of the benefits I'm talking about perceivably could be achieved through other methods. And that's fair enough - to each his own. What I personally find helpful--in addition to the above--that is very specific to this work includes:
1. It's not therapy, so there's a discipline to the work that keeps me grounded by definition
2. At the same time, I feel fully safe to express emotions as they come up (and they invariably come up), which I don't get in (e.g.) a fitness class
3. I love that I can go at my own pace and have a "coach" there to guide me
4. There's something inexplicable but necessary about being witnessed. As these truths-through-movement surface, I find I *need* someone there to validate them. This validation is simple: it needs absolutely nothing more than just observing/listening, but without it, something inside feels incomplete.
5. By definition, the work exercises my focus on the *now*. There's nothing to learn, and yet I'm learning a lot, on all sorts of levels.
6. It's teaching me how to communicate my inner world through movement. How cool is that? I love to communicate, and I'm realizing how much of my life I've had to stifle movement. I can't get enough of this new medium.
7. Did I mention it makes me feel great?
To those who haven't done this work, I would describe it as one part physical training, one part movement-as-diary, and 10 parts life exploration. Very cool stuff."
-----------------------------------------------------------
schedule a session
-------------------
From:
Rosannah Riess, Dancer & Aerialist
"What has SEWing meant to me?
...it’s like suddenly discovering I’ve got a Versace gown on underneath the smelly old overcoat I cover myself in. Shed the layers. The really good stuff is on the inside. The SEWing method connects artists to their art by being a conduit for honesty and understanding. It enables artists to manifest and express what was once jumbled and unknown...
SEWing is a doorway - an avenue. SEWing is an exercise in self and honesty. SEWing has allowed me to delve into the unformed, unspoken, inarticulate world of my “self-yet-to-be” and my “art-yet-to-be-created” and to snorkel, as it were, through this turbulent sea of innumerable mysteries. The SEWing practice is structured to empower wild exploration and productive abandon. It is an anchor and a life-line, allowing me to leap into the unknown material within. Through the SEWing practice with Candace Younghans, I have experienced startling self-discovery and moments of unparalleled, confident self-expression. SEWing practice is a definite, simple tool and yet, may be used to create the infinitely complex. I find it absolutely necessary for authentic character development.
Beginning with exploration, the process quickly allows one to identify and then clarify the seed of a character. Continuing to apply the process iteratively enables the amassing of great amounts of information and detail, a format for evaluating the discoveries, and then a means of implementing these insights into performance. The process is challenging and ecstatic. At the end of a session, I always feel more like myself - never that I have simply shrugged on someone else’s knowledge.
.......and that’s my experience of SEWing with Candace Younghans."
---------------------------------
From:
an actor/director after 5 sessions,
"My experience of SEWing thus far...
Almost immediately, I could feel my body changing shape. I wasn't necessarily overweight, but I had lost a lot of my tautness. I feel new muscles forming, and I like it. It makes me feel natural, as if I were born to be strong and I'm coming home to this discipline.
Much more importantly, I'm learning how to live inside my body, which is also a way of saying "being present." I spend an inordinate amount of time on the computer for work, giving the helm to my logical, thinking self. Acting gives my right-brain a workout, but my body was still left out of the equation. How can one be truly living in the moment when the body is ignored?
Clearly, the body stores emotions, experiences, truths. The more I begin to work with movement, the more I'm understanding that my body is an inexhaustible warehouse of information, and in fact, knows how I'm feeling long before my logical mind does. I might have had an inkling of this insight before, but the evidence is now coming at me in full force. So, another benefit of SEWing is that it's creating a quicker, more accessible dialogue between my thinking mind and my own deeper truths.
Much of the benefits I'm talking about perceivably could be achieved through other methods. And that's fair enough - to each his own. What I personally find helpful--in addition to the above--that is very specific to this work includes:
1. It's not therapy, so there's a discipline to the work that keeps me grounded by definition
2. At the same time, I feel fully safe to express emotions as they come up (and they invariably come up), which I don't get in (e.g.) a fitness class
3. I love that I can go at my own pace and have a "coach" there to guide me
4. There's something inexplicable but necessary about being witnessed. As these truths-through-movement surface, I find I *need* someone there to validate them. This validation is simple: it needs absolutely nothing more than just observing/listening, but without it, something inside feels incomplete.
5. By definition, the work exercises my focus on the *now*. There's nothing to learn, and yet I'm learning a lot, on all sorts of levels.
6. It's teaching me how to communicate my inner world through movement. How cool is that? I love to communicate, and I'm realizing how much of my life I've had to stifle movement. I can't get enough of this new medium.
7. Did I mention it makes me feel great?
To those who haven't done this work, I would describe it as one part physical training, one part movement-as-diary, and 10 parts life exploration. Very cool stuff."
-----------------------------------------------------------
schedule a session
Candace's credentials
After working 8 years as a personal trainer and 15 years exploring different arms of the performing arts and the creative process I've decided it's time to bring what I've coined, SEWing (Self-Exploration Witnessing), out of the closet.
I first began developing SEWing in 2001 and then used it to choreograph a solo piece on a dancer in 2002, she and I have been working together and exploring SEWing ever since. I began guiding other performers and writers in SEWing in late 2009. In 2010 I exposed the process to an audience by creating The SEWing Show. It premiered in April of 2010 and ran for 5 months.
As a personal trainer I've been certified through:
NSCA, National Strength and Conditioning Association
and
ACE, American Council on Exercise
At the university level I have completed course work in:
Dance Kinesiology,
Health Education,
Exercise Physiology,
and
Nutrition
In my performing arts training I have studied:
Yoga
Pilates
Feldenkrais
Alexander Technique
Viewpoints
Meisner Technique
Classic Stanislavsky
breathe for Voice and Speech
I first began developing SEWing in 2001 and then used it to choreograph a solo piece on a dancer in 2002, she and I have been working together and exploring SEWing ever since. I began guiding other performers and writers in SEWing in late 2009. In 2010 I exposed the process to an audience by creating The SEWing Show. It premiered in April of 2010 and ran for 5 months.
As a personal trainer I've been certified through:
NSCA, National Strength and Conditioning Association
and
ACE, American Council on Exercise
At the university level I have completed course work in:
Dance Kinesiology,
Health Education,
Exercise Physiology,
and
Nutrition
In my performing arts training I have studied:
Yoga
Pilates
Feldenkrais
Alexander Technique
Viewpoints
Meisner Technique
Classic Stanislavsky
breathe for Voice and Speech
Click here for an appointment or more information
I work out of Ashland, Oregon