Meditation + Contact Improvisation Lab [Berkeley]

January 5, 2027 at 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

The Berkeley Alembic, 2820 Seventh St, Berkeley, CA 94710, USA

A weekly place to research how Contact Improvisation practice can assist / influence / relate to meditation practice and how meditation practice can assist / influence / relate to Contact Improvisation practice. Sliding scale pricing. No one turned away for lack of funds - come talk to us at the door if you need financial assistance. Info & Registration : https://www.berkeleyalembic.org/events About the Facilitators Amma Thanasanti Amma Thanasanti has been practicing meditation for over 45 years. Ajahn Chah, Dipa Ma and the Dalai Lama were her first teachers. She was a Buddhist nun for 26 years, including 20 years living in Ajahn Chah monasteries. She has been teaching meditation since 1989 and leading intensive retreats since 1996.She is the Spiritual Director of Awakening Truth, a 501(c)(3) founded in 2009 that uses traditional Buddhist teachings and adaptive means to support bringing trauma-informed tools to clean up, grow up, show up and wake up to our essential nature. She founded the Integrated Meditation Program to address baseline patterns that meditation practice alone may not shift.She has been dancing contact improvisation since 1976—a practice embodying presence, attunement, trust, joy, and spontaneous collaboration. She also loves communing with trees, rocks, water, oceans, cooking, making herbal potions, and laughing.What moves through her teaching is what she has lived: profound insight experiences, early Buddhist teachings, nature-based wisdom from wilderness, and embodied knowing through dance. While each has a different face, they point her back to the same inquiry—what is happening now, how the field between us shapes experience, and the living truth of this moment. https://awakeningtruth.org/ Nick Smith Nick Smith is a facilitator, organizer, meditator, dancer and body worker focused on improvisation, somatics, communication, touch and relational technologies. Nick offers body work sessions and teaches throughout the Bay Area. https://www.grapes.dance/