I was in Ealing. I negotiated a path through quiet suburban tree-lined streets to my destination: a huge imposing Victorian house. I pushed a door bell. I was visiting Orianne, the woman behind Womb Wisdom Keepers.
I had originally asked whether I could come along to one of her events and was offered a polite but firm ‘no’. After registering for one of her yoga Meetups (which was cancelled due to a lack of registrations), I contacted Orianne directly, and explained my quest. She agreed to meet.
The door opened. I was greeted with a beautiful smile and was beckoned inside. After being offered a cup of tea, we went into a fine garden to chat.
Orianne had moved from London from Belgium and had recently started her ‘mind, body and spirit’ business. Her Womb Wisdom group was all about connecting with our inner selves, and having a space to work through different kinds of issues, whilst at the same time connecting with and to our femininity.
Orianne also ran sessions about ‘slow leadership’. Slow leadership, as far as I understood it, was about how organisations can learn how to adopt a more feminine perspective, and develop a more supportive and nurturing environment. This led us to chat about the ever present role of competition in business, and the fact that corporations always strive to ‘get bigger’. A simpler aim is to create a sustainable business for the business owner and essential employees without the distraction or desire for perpetual expansion.
Her work on slow leadership is was linked her work on Family Constellations. I hadn’t heard of this before, but I understood it to be a form of therapy that explores our unconscious connections to issues that affected our ancestors. For a few minutes, we chatted about Epigenetics, which is about how the environment causes certain genes in a genetic structure to be turned on or off. The argument being that an incident that occurred to one of our ancestors can have a lasting effect in our own life.
Orianne also spoke about the two types of Yoga her group advertises: Anukalana yoga and Tantsu Circles. From what I gathered, Anukalana yoga was all about breathing and movement. Orianne demonstrated a few postures. It looked fun; I could see that it could be relaxing. Tantsu was different. It was described as a ‘bodywork practice’ where one person supports another, creating cradling postures. I had told my friend Mary about Tantsu, and tried to encourage her to come along to one of the Meetups that Orianne advertised, but Mary wasn’t having any of it.
We also chatted about Neurolinguistic Programming; Orianne turned out to be a practitioner. ‘I’ve been to an event about NLP. It was… a bit unexpected. It was all about how to become rich’, I said, recounting my experience of the cult of Caitlin Tindle. Orianne laughed and then went onto describe her understanding of NLP which sounded a whole lot simpler than the one I had been exposed to: through visualisation and making explicit goals, you can uncover new ways of approaching problems and figuring things out.
As well as being a NLP practitioner, she was also a Kinesiologist. I had never heard of Kinesiology before, but I now understand there are two definitions. The first definition being the scientific study of human kinetics (or movement); the second definition is that it is a chiropractic technique that draws upon eastern medicine.
Towards the end of our chat, Orianne gave me a beautifully designed flyer about Ecstatic Awakening Dance, adorned with pictures of butterflies and information about residential retreats. I asked Orianne whether she had heard of something called Biodanza, and recounted my story of being involved in a group hug with over thirty people.
‘It’s very different to Biodanza; there is no touching of other people’ replied Orianne. She explained that Ecstatic Dance wasn’t at all like Biodanza: that it was a ‘solo practice’ where you connect to your body, be wild and release endorphins.
I really enjoyed meeting Orianne, but in terms of a Meetup experience, I couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. There’s a huge difference between being told about something and experiencing it for yourself. Orianne’s events were, of course, very experiential; you need to experience them, you needed to participate, and share, and carry out the movement and breathing exercises.
I left wanting to experience the different types of yoga for the simple reason that I still didn’t quite ‘get’ what yoga was all about. I was, however, very welcome to come back and give Anukalana yoga a try.
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