MovingVentures School (MVS) offers training and retreats in the field of holistic and preventative health care, encompassing Esalen® Massage Certifications and a range of bodywork, yoga, dance, and meditation. We work in inspiring locations around the world, with a focus on community service. MVS is a 501(c)3, not-for-profit educational organization.
While drawing students from many countries and backgrounds, we provide scholarships to local people in need, teaching sustainable employment skills while fostering cross-cultural learning and appreciation that bridges racial, religious, economic and social differences.
MovingVentures School is a 501(c)3, not-for-profit educational organization founded in 1996 by Ellen Watson. Ellen is celebrating a quarter century on staff at Esalen Instutue in Big Sur, CA, where she developed the Movement Arts Program and teaches a range of massage, yoga and moving meditation practice. Ellen is a licensed minister and believes that the core of all healing begins in the realm of the heart and the spirit.
MVS also produces workshops for a wide range of talented teachers and artists around the world.
We now are developing a major educational and community service initiative to help U.S. women in poverty to become self-sufficient by providing training in holistic and preventative health, along with employment and business development assistance.
The Dream Center will offer low-income women scholarships to complete our successful somatic arts training program, culminating in certification. MVS will assist certified graduates in securing employment or funding for start up businesses. Bringing together a diverse group of women, The Dream Center fosters friendships, mentoring, learning and understanding that cut across social economic status. We envision this as a replicable model that can inspire other programs throughout the country.
We are actively seeking the most advantageous home for The Dream Center, in a location that holds both need for our services and resources to support our mission. We currently are exploring opportunities in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Atlantam Georgia, among other sites. Your ideas are welcome. The Dream Center will also serve as the world headquarters for MovingVentures School.
During a difficult decade in Indonesia that has seen bombings, devastating tsunami, SARS and record unemployment, MVS established a unique scholarship program that trains local people to earn a sustainable living by providing massage to tourists. One of these scholarship students, a traditional Balinese healer now incorporating Esalen® Massage into her work, was featured in the recent bestseller, "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert. in Bali, we conduct a unique "Karma Kamp" that puts massage certification student to work treating local people with disabilities, many of whom have never before experienced healing touch.
Inspired by Bill Clinton's book "Giving," MVS is deepening our commitment to serve by collaborating with Kubca Samakta, a vocational school for hearing and speech impaired youth in central Java to fund and build a facility where students may learn and practice massage, allowing them to earn a livelihood.
We are proud of the work we are doing in Indonesia, and believe the service we offer to the disabled of Bali and Indonesia is unique to our trainings. We welcome donations to cover the educational expenses for Indonesian students who will join our upcoming trainings on scholarship.
If you can help, please donate through the MovingVentures Boutique.
MovingVentures School is honored to take part in the first annual BaliSpirit Festival of yoga, dance, sacred music, retreat, and ceremony, in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia in 2008. In conjunction with this exciting event, Ellen and the staff of MVS are offering new week-long retreat workshops in the beautiful, flowering jungles of Ubud, followed by our annual Esalen® Massage Certification Training and an advanced session. We invite you to join us for this magical experience!
In the realm of the sensuous, MVS offers restorative retreats throughout the year, such as the popular "Winter Retreat to Paradise" in January, a week of partner yoga and massage at Present Moment Retreat Sanctuary in Troncones Beach, on the Mexican Riviera.
Central to all MVS productions are offerings that: enhance awareness and presence; support integration of mind, body, spirit and feelings; promote holisitic health; enrich relationships to self and others; teach the healing power of touch; teach the importance of developing a personal moving meditation practice.
See the Workshops page for details.
MovingVentures is also committed to producing excellent educational massage and movement resources, and has two videos currently on the market: The Art of Essential Touch, a 120 minute massage DVD/Video, and Wake Up 101, both filmed in Bali, Indonesia. You can find these and other resources and products in the MVS Boutique.
In addition to teaching Esalen® Massage, other work Ellen has developed and teaches includes SpiritsDancing™, an inspirational physical and metaphysical workout for body and soul, Dancing with Rumi™, a practice that combines Sufi whirling/spinning with Gabrielle Roth's 5Rhythms™, and Awakening 101, a dynamic, multicultural moving mediation practice combining asanas from Tibet, India and China.
Esalen® Massage is a healing art that has evolved over the last several decades at Esalen Institute. Deeply influenced by the rhythms of the sea, Esalen Massage supports exquisite awareness in both practitioner and client through the natural flow of breath, and the relaxed giving and receiving of energy and weight. This shared awareness is the essence of the practice. Esalen Massage is known for its long, integrating strokes and for its ability to support deep physical and emotional release. The principles and movements of Esalen® Massage are derived from classic Swedish massage, but the practice has been influenced by Feldenkreis, Rolfing, Trager, Accupressure, and a variety of other disciplines. All of these approaches share a basic trust in the body’s natural ability to heal itself.
The Esalen Institute Massage Crew has organized a professional association, the Esalen Massage & Bodywork Association (EMBA). The purpose of this Association is to ensure the continuing quality of Esalen Massage by establishing and maintaining education and certification standards for practitioners and teachers of Esalen Massage. This organization supports an international community of students, practitioners and teachers.
Every child has known God, Not the God of names, Not the God of don’ts, Not the God who ever does Anything weird, But the God who knows only four words. And keeps repeating them, saying: "Come Dance with Me Come Dance" — Hafiz
Do you ever wonder how the whirling dervishes spin and spin and spin? How the Tibetan monks spin and spin and spin? Practice, that’s how. And you, too, can spin. You spun as a child; spun until you were dizzy and filled with glee, fell down in the grass or on the floor, watched the flow of colors as the world danced by, then got up and spun again. And, as a child, you spun both ways. Whirling Dervishes spin to the left; fundamental to being a Sufi Whirling Dervish. Monks spin to the right; fundamental to being a Tibetan monk. In this new millennium, it is time to embrace the wisdom of teachings from each cultures’ practices and celebrate that Ecstatic Dancers spin both ways, just as we did as children.
In a Dancing with Rumi class, I teach participants the following:
The value of spinning includes:
Ecstatic Dance for body and soul…for physical and metaphysical fitness
Since the dawn of time, peoples from all cultures have used dance as a path to re-establish connection between body, mind, heart and spirit. Dance is the oldest form of spiritual practice. SpiritsDancing is your dance, enlivened by your breath, powered by your heartbeat, and set into motion with the catalyst of music from around the world.
SpiritsDancing™ is an experience, an offering that can lead one beyond the temporal mind into a dance with the Divine. SpiritsDancing is an exploration of embodied presence, and is designed to increase self-awareness, enhance intimacy with Self, others and with a greater dimension of existence.
SpiritsDancing™ is about inspiration; both the physical act of inhaling air, and the metaphysical result of experiencing “divine influence upon the mind and soul”.
We employ a variety of tools handpicked from traditions around the world and used for centuries as ways to ignite Spirit, enliven the soul and tone the body. Once breath is activated and a place of inspiration has been reached, the dancer is willing and able to experience new ways of moving, a wide variety of feeling states, and express those states through movement and sound. While breathing and moving many physical benefits occur; many of the bodys’ systems are activated: cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine, digestive. The muscles are warm and open to releasing holding patterns. Sweating happens, which is a great detox for the largest organ in the body…skin. Internal organs, including the brain, are jiggled, which according to Eastern medicine Is tonifying and preventative. This is a practice that benefits mind, body, heart and spirit. SpiritsDancing is for everybody; no experience necessary…bring along curiousity, permission, and the willingness to move.
is a dynamic, multicultural moving meditation practice combining Tibetan, Indian and Chinese yoga asanas. Ellen chose the asanas specifically for their ability to catalyze energy, develop strength, enhance flexibility, support deep relaxation, and to awaken the spine. In this practice we activate the breath of victory "Ujjayi", and engage the "love muscle" or the "PC" muscle. The PC muscle attaches to both your pubic bone and your tail bone and is the muscle that got you out of diapers as a toddler and will keep you from returning to diapers in later years. Keeping your PC muscle toned can enhance your love-life, a great benefit to all who are fortunate enough to have one. If time allows, the practice is enhanced by beginning with a 45 minute breath and sound meditation titled, "Your Body as a Musical Instrument". This meditation uses the vibration of sound to activate the energies of the chakra system, sending vibration, sensation and pulsation from fingers to toes, root to crown and sacrum to sternum, and all places in between. The asanas, once learned, can be condensed to 15 minutes or expanded to the you have available for practice on a particular day. If you are interested in learning this practice, you may purchase a 50 minute teaching video from the Boutique section of our website.
Each of the Five Rhythms™ is a practical tool of awakening that will release us to dance on the edge, to be outrageous, to transform suffering into art, and art into awareness. Flowing holds the feminine mysteries. Staccato explores the masculine mysteries. In chaos, we are challenged to integrate these principles into the stream of personal energy. Lyrical is the rhythm of trance and self-realization. In stillness, the mother of all rhythms, we seek the emptiness within us and take refuge in it. Embracing the rhythms as spiritual practice is a dynamic way to free the body, to express the heart, and to clear the mind."— Gabrielle Roth
In Waves we explore the dynamic practice of the 5Rhythms™. This cathartic form of ecstatic dance is a workout for the body and soul - a moving meditation - a spiritual practice where we "sweat our prayers." The 5Rhythms ecstatic dance practice has been developed by Gabrielle Roth over a lifetime of study in dance, theater and the healing arts. By dancing the five rhythms (Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness) we embark on a pilgramage of self-revelation rooted in action and movement. Rather than having steps to follow, each rhythm is a different energy field in which you will find your own expression and choreography, thereby stretching your imagination as well as your body. This practice is for elders and young people, passionate dancers and reserved toe-tappers, people who can barley show up, survivors of bad backs, bum knees or broken hearts. The only goals are moving until we are moved, finding the still point within and becoming free spirits once again.
Orrin Hein, President
Christopher Wilkins, Vice President
Sam Goldeen, Secretary-Treasurer
Martha Marcom
Ex Officio Ellen Watson, MVS Founder & Director
Ex Officio Fred Tranfield, Director of Technology
Marion Hunt-Badiner, Advisor to Board
Desiree Cromwell-Moore, Advisor to Board
Susan Seflin, CFO/Legal Counsel
Susan Dormanen, Communications