The Knead System
A process of self-discovery through touch designed to bring you skills and sensitivities that allow for a deeper story.
Why?
Digital life has largely removed touch from our lives. This has contributed to a culture of separation, anxiety, and touch starvation. We caress our phones day and night, but less and less do we touch each other. This has devastating effects on our sense of self, our connection to each other, and our relationship to the natural world.
A decade ago, sensing all this, we began to reimagine touch and connection for the age of screen addiction. After much experimentation, we created The Knead System.
On a basic level, we teach people how to touch and experience gentle pleasure. On a more advanced level, we teach people how to live more faithfully with their deepest stories.
To return to touch is to return to the beauty and ground of our senses, to the inherent majesty of our existence, and to the connectedness we share with all things and all time.
What we teach and value is what’s missing in the age of screen addiction and social media delusion…
Getting out of your head and into your body
Slowness
Eye Contact
Focus
Quiet and solitude
Presence
Physicality
Depth
Conscious Pleasure
Digital Detachment
Part One
Mythic Conversation
What is the shape of your current story?
Our souls operate not on facts and particulars, but on grand stories.
In fact, we are wired for stories, and without a story for yourself that is clear and devotional, you will break into a million little pieces in this world.
So we start by you telling us your current story, in your words, and in return we give you our full attention and the sympathy of the possible.
But…
…we are after something specific, so we’re redirecting you away from your resumé story and into a mythic one.
Who are you underneath those layers of repression and deflection that we all carry around to make it through the day?
Tell us, please.
We are paying close attention to your body, to your eye movements,
to the pitches and peaks of your enthusiasm,
…your downturns and discomforts.
We are not judging, but just observing and trying to feel our way into all parts of you.
Something about what James Hillman called “the sympathy of all things.”
You’ve told us so many things about you, but what sticks for us might not be the things you would imagine.
Instead, we get a glimpse of who you really are, not who you think you are.
There are fissures and fault lines in your story. A crack. A knead. We can sense this.
This becomes the tiny portal into your nascent possibility.
Now we need the divining rod of touch to add more shape to your story….
Part Two
Long Form Touch
To be touched is to be blessed
Now comes the touch, which reveals your essential story from a different vantage point and with a different language.
Unlike your verbal story, which points to a version of you that can be carefully curated, your responses that come from touch are pure and unvarnished, and flow…
…naturally like a river…
…beyond the mind’s constant patrol,
…and in line with the soul’s flight.
As the saying goes, the body knows the score.
Touch can be routed around or avoided by the brain, out of busy-ness, or fear, or both, but the responses you throw off once you are touched always tell the truth about you:
A deep ache, a sonic desire, a trembling fault line….it’s all in there, waiting to be given light.
Will you caress the contours of your aches and desires once they are shown to you in raw form?
Our touch is slow, patient, involved, and orchestral.
There are textures, lengths, frequencies, and repetitions.
The more we carefully and lovingly move energy in you and through you, the more we are getting some gently traced imprint of your deeper story, the one carefully hidden from view.
Perhaps even from you… ;)
In fact, probably from you.
We proceed.
After hours of this touch, you are…
floating, liminal, open, ecstatic.
You’ve found the edge of yourself, simply through surrendering to the touch of another.
Now we’re getting somewhere…
Part 3
Soft Transformation
You cannot un-see a revelation
In just a few hours, we’ve made a full circle using two different languages.
Talk and touch, touch and talk.
We’ve traversed the dark side of your howling moon.
We’ve initiated the infinite and unbounded version of you….
…bypassing the brain’s tight grip on your inherent wildness.
Suddenly you can look at all this new material from the vantage point of the soft ecstatic, the monk with the fresh revelation.
For a brief moment, finally, you are absorbed in a vision of what is possible for you.
Part of you will go quiet at its truth. No words are necessary.
The game at this point becomes integration.
You must take this crystalline version of yourself into each present moment, despite daily hardships and transitory emotions.
You are, however, bound by the beauty of this new vision of yourself and…
….cannot….go….backwards.
There is an obligation implied in any revelation.
You must go into the wind and become the thing you secretly dreamed of for yourself.
“In learning to touch, you are risking your ego, risking to connect, risking to be who you are.”
What you will learn
How to quiet yourself
How to unhook yourself from the addictive and shallow rhythms of social media
How to build ‘ecologies’ around you–containers of beauty and reciprocity
How to see and feel your body as a place of wonder and delight
How to prioritize eye contact and physicality
How to create the conditions to be blessed through touch
How to touch consciously
How to massage with skill and awareness
How to give and receive pleasure
How to plumb the hidden stories that touch reveals
How to think about and process the deep emotions revealed through touch
How to live squarely and in concert with the deepest part of yourself
And many other lovely things…
