I can’t wait for you to finally see this.
In August, Kiki and I, along with the Co-Awaken team, spent a month teaching the deepest work we know through our founding cohort of True Contact. It’s our program for cultivating secure attachment with Life through the dyad practice.
I knew I wanted to capture what was happening for the people in the room, so that you could both understand and feel the dyad practice we’ve used for the past five years.
I’d never produced a film before, but something in me knew that this needed to exist. I built my own tools to make it. It’s been the most intricate weave of storytelling, creative expression, and engineering I’ve ever devoted myself to — and a practice of trusting that whatever vision I had would be possible.
Sharing it has me nervous and exhilarated.
And now it’s here: the short film above, five minutes long.
I’m incredibly proud of what we made, most of all for the stories it holds:
A depth psychologist getting to work on the parts of herself she’d hidden for fifty years. A hospice chaplain who’d tried everything for decades, including medicine journeys, feeling something foundational finally shift in four weeks. A woman learning that even sensations that feel like death can be touched and survived, and that on the other side, there’s so much liberation.
These are the stories of what happens the moment another human stays in presence and contact with you long enough that something inside finally gets to move.
The dyad practice itself began inside my relationship with Kiki.
It carried us through the hardest stretches of our life together: living nomadically without a stable base, a miscarriage, fertility struggles, Ember’s birth, and everything after.
I think of what we teach in True Contact as a sacred technology.
The form is simple, and deep: two people, dropping beneath the words and stories into the sensations most alive in the body. One person goes directly into their own material. The other meets them with presence and physical contact, pushing and pulling through the arms, following what the body is asking for.
Through that simple form, Life itself makes contact with the places yearning to be touched, and the body gets to learn:
Even here, I am held by Life.
That’s what we mean by secure attachment with Life itself.
The way the practice can break through the stories we put on ourselves and each other and reach places held deep in the body has felt as powerful to me as some of the medicine journeys I’ve been on. I’m not the only one with that experience.
This summer, we watched that technology begin to spread to other people.
And it’s been deeply moving. We want so much more of the world to experience it. That’s why I made this film.
Alongside the film, we’ve also built True Contact a new home: the practice, the story behind it, the people being changed by it, and the field forming around it.
And if something in the film touches you, there’s a next place to join us: two full days of embodied dyad practice, learning how to stay in contact with yourself, another person, and Life itself.
True Contact Weekend Intensive
Saturday and Sunday, November 7–8, 10am–5pm
In person in Boulder
We’d love for you to come experience the practice with us. The details and the application are on the True Contact page.
We made something we love about something we love.
And we’re really happy to finally share it with you.
Deep gratitude to my dear friend Violet Starkey, who shot all the footage and interviewed everyone you’ll see in the film.
