The Wild Woman’s Way is Michaela Boehm’s original body of work and draws from her decades of experience leading women’s groups, 30k+ hours of counseling practice, her early training in a Kashmiri Shakta tradition of which she is now the lineage holder.
This work is designed to provide education, inspiration and practical exercises for living as a woman in today’s world.
All offerings draw from Michaela’s decades of professional and personal experience and are an invitation to remember the innate wisdom of the body—not to be defined by our looks and shapes and sizes, but the living, feeling body as a portal to unlocking who we truly are.
This approach explores feminine embodiment, full bodily expression of who we are, our relationship to pleasure and intimacy, and how to counteract stress and trauma in the body.
What is the Wild Woman?
The Wild Woman is a part of each of us. She is not the crazed and uncivilized creature she is sometimes made out to be, but the part of us that is deeply and inextricably connected to natural life. She is connected to all things in nature, including her own body, whom she cares for and utilizes as an instrument of perception. She represents the part of each woman that comes from nature and is part of nature.
Each of us has that native, embodied wisdom—a wild, untamed, undomesticated body-mind and heart that knows what is true for us. This looks and feels different for each woman, and no two are ever alike.
We often yearn to be more, move more, feel more, wider, fuller, louder, more passionate…. and this intensive is a chance to discover how to embody your unique expression.
The Wild Woman is not a fixed idea or a template into which we need to fit ourselves, but rather a portal, an entry point into our vast and rich inner landscape.
Feminine Embodiment
Embodiment has become quite the buzzword and there are many ways to define it. In this work we define it as an ability to feel the messages of the body and to connect and integrate the body with the thinking mind and felt emotions.
In this context, embodiment can be understood to mean coming back into the body.
Embodiment is the process of becoming alive to the signals of our bodies, a sensual recognition. Being with the full array of sensory and emotional perception—the sublime as well as the ugly—allows us to savor the full human experience: body, mind, and spirit – alive, open, and integrated.
Engaging with the Energetics of a Woman’s Body
Each woman has a unique expression, informed by her physiological and psychological makeup, her personal history as well as her personal choices. All of this determines how we each relate to our bodies. Yet amidst the variety, there are principles that apply to all of us.
Within the Wild Woman’s Way we use a framework I call “Energy Distribution,” which teaches us to pay attention to how life force energy is distributed within the body at any given time. As women we are uniquely connected to our lower bodies. Power to create, intuition, and our ability to feel pleasure sit in the lower part of the body.
Many women nowadays experience the gradual loss of connection to the feelings and sensations of their body, especially the lower body. With stress and overwhelm comes numbness, maladaptive coping mechanisms (in the form of overeating, addictions, etc.), and disconnection.
When we “get into our heads,” and prioritize thinking and doing over feeling and being, our thoughts and actions take on a compulsive quality and our body gets tense and tight. Headaches, a clenched jaw and neck pains become all too common.
Once we are in the mode of getting things done, it is not easy to get back to the relaxed, open state of flowing naturally. Even when we know that we should slow down, the body’s energetics don’t cooperate and we feel stuck in mental loops.
Being able to detect these feelings of stuckness, tightness, and tension is the first step towards distributing the energy differently. Simple movement of the hips, thighs and lower body can effectively counteract the effects of a body stuck in “go”.
The Wild Woman’s Circle provides exploration and experiential insight into your energetic habits and offers simple yet effective ways to “re-embody” and experience flow.
Coming Back to Pleasure in the Body
Women often ask me “How do I escape the seemingly inevitable reality of disconnection and stress, and their effects on my body, without giving up the ability to be successful and productive?”
The answer is to reclaim our natural state of aliveness and pleasure and to become fluent in the ability to change between both the outer world of work and the inner world of embodied connection.
Vitality and sensual sensations happen in and are accessed through the body. Trying to think our way into them is like trying to ride a bicycle by reading books about the Tour De France!! Thinking and talking about reclaiming your pleasure is a start, but alone it will not translate into having the bodily wherewithal to open, soften, and relax. Physical closures, contractions, and habits that are acquired through repetition can only be undone by consciously practicing new patterns within your body and nervous system.
As humans, we learn through repetition. Every activity is wired into the body-mind through repeating an activity. When we learn something new, our whole system interconnects. What first felt foreign and almost impossible to do, over time and repetition becomes the pattern we use automatically.
All patterns have somatic, emotional, and mental components. Once a pattern has been learned, it is accessed automatically and becomes second nature. We can counteract existing patterns of stress and closure by learning new, simple activities that over time become the new “go-to” patterns of our body.
First we create awareness of tension and tightness in the body and counteract those constrictions by bringing the energy into the lower body. The easiest way to do this is by moving the body in unstructured ways, either in the form of dancing, embodiment practices like we offer in The Wild Woman’s Circle (WWC) or The Non-Linear Movement Method® (NLMM).
Second, we bring attention to sensual experiences that are already available instead of looking for quick fixes and external stimuli, which often require even more “doing”. The feeling of your hair brushing across your neck, the sensation of fabric swishing around your hips, a delicious bite of chocolate, a sip of tea or the smell of fresh flowers all can inform your senses and connect you with the perception of pleasure. Over time, these small sensual perceptions train the body to be more aware and alive for sensual connection with a partner and ourselves.
In addition, we engage with movement, sensory exploration and ritual to increase aliveness and sensuality, and with that, pleasure in the body.
Creating meaningful intimate relationships
We begin with your relationship to your own body. Before we can deeply connect with others, we need to become sensitive to and educated about our own energetic dynamics. Once you understand your own reasons for any numbness, tension, and strain that you may carry in your body, you can undo the related habitual body patterns and restore yourself to a state of pleasurable aliveness and sensual well-being.
From there we can connect within an intimate relationship from a place of empowerment. Being able to feel ourselves also allows us to set appropriate boundaries and with that we can be more generous when we actually want to interact.
The practices of sensitization, relaxation and full feminine expression through the body allow us to be more available, sensitive and expressed with the intimate partner of our choice. You’ll be able to play within the full range of expressions, without getting stuck in “go” mode and heady disconnection.
The same applies to connecting with friends, family and finding a “tribe”. The more we are empowered through our feeling bodies, the better we can make decisions and honest, authentic connection with others.
Working with Trauma, Heartbreak, and Stress
We work with these feelings and emotions through the lens of the body. Once we understand that the body has its own innate intelligence and mechanisms to release stress, sadness and trauma, we can support our body as it releases and restores.
It is sometimes useful to speak about and consider what has caused the issue, so we can cognitively understand and potentially prevent further injury. This can be accomplished via a therapist, good friend or even through journaling. For the body’s intelligence to start the release, we need to allow for unstructured, non-linear ways of movement. This way physical hold-patterns, constrictions and bracings can loosen as the emotional content gets “washed out” via emotional and bodily release.
Michaela created “The Non-Linear Movement Method®” (NLMM), to aid in this process gently and without force. The body knows what to do, and NLMM provides the movement to access your bodily genius. We will use this somatic movement as a way to work with past experiences as well as training the body and mind to be connected and integrated.
Want to learn more?
If you would like to participate in an ongoing Wild Woman’s Circle, find a teacher near you on our Certified Teacher Page.
If you are interested in a live event or mentoring with Michaela, visit her main site for all available online and in-person events.
If you are unable to join us in person, we are now offering the foundational material as a Women’s Online Course.
For free instructions and practices take the Wild Woman’s Way Quiz, which connects you with 8 free practices in video format.
Michaela’s book “The Wild Woman’s Way” offers insights, inspiration and practices for further engagement.