about Anneke

education & training

B.A. in Global Health - University of Connecticut

Work Practice Apprenticeship - Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, 2022-2023, ongoing

Embodied Jewish Anti-Zionist Practice Group - Sanctuary Embodied, 2024

Somatic Coaching Certification Program - Strozzi Institute for Somatics, 2024-2025

Somatics, Trauma, and Resilience - Strozzi Institute for Somatics, 2024

Somatic Bodywork I - Strozzi Institute for Somatics, 2025

shaping story

My embodiment story goes a little like this:

I have a long and rich history of living while disconnected from body and self. This went OK; I still managed to accomplish things and have fun and beautiful experiences, until just out of college and working as a full-time farmworker, I was crushed by burnout and chronic pain. 

I feel now that the severe pain that laid me out was a great gift. Something had to give - and it was my back!

By grace, privilege, and stubbornness, since that period I have been walking steadily towards healing and aliveness. For one year, I lived and trained in Soto Zen at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. I continue to visit there and practice as a student of the dharma. 

Longing for embodiment training and a framework rigorously engaged with social conditions, I was led to the work at generative somatics (now the Politicized Somatics Practitioner Collective), and on to train at the Strozzi Institute for Somatics. Today, I am grateful and delighted to be so much more resilient in body and spirit, practicing daily, working with land and experimenting with all kinds of playful movement.

I know what it's like to be disconnected from the body, and to deeply long for ground, freedom, and balance. I've traveled the path of embodied transformation and felt my world open up. I will continue on this path for as long as I can envision. 

Alongside somatics and meditation, my practices include many kinds of movement, cooking and serving, tending land, poetry, reading ten books at a time, mischief and play, love and friendship.

about jewel mirror somatics

"It is like facing a jewel mirror;

form and image behold each other -

You are not it,

in truth it is you..."

-Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi

The name "jewel mirror somatics" pays homage to the weaving together of Zen Buddhist and somatics training in my practice. 

The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi gives a taste of the lyricism, mystery, and mischievousness of Zen teachings. Poetry, and the Zen practice of koan study, invite the logical mind to rest and other ways of knowing to emerge.

This poem also teaches the way that the all is contained within the one, and the one contained within the all. Our actions and transformations ripple outwards to profoundly impact the world.*

*(For more on this, please see teachings by Thich Nhat Hanh, Grace Lee Boggs, adrienne maree brown, and Kazu Haga, among countless others.)

poetry

salty-sweet blueberry kiss

I had earnest intentions

tried to carry them with out a body

mercifully, I failed- it was quick

in a relative sense, and brutal

I continue to fail at this.

I now practice body and self

it hurts like hell, in a good way, yeah-

I am totally dis-organ-ized and

anyone who knows me knows

I cannot stand disorganized.

I am despair and terror unwinding

I am letting go an exhale held by generations

I am big and soft and dangerous

I am a clear pool of gratitude

unbounded.

click here for more poems :-)