Reader

I just came back from ten days in the Netherlands a few days ago. I was there as an assistant at a practitioner training - people learning this work, learning to be with bodies, learning to hold what comes up in another person without flinching or fixing.

I wasn't teaching. I was watching, guiding supporting and holding space.

And something in me is still settling from what I saw.

There's a particular quality that enters a room when people stop managing themselves.

Something shifts. People start actually looking at each other rather than performing looking.

That happened in this room, slowly, over days. And once it did, what became possible was remarkable.

I watched anger find its edge and become grief. I watched people who had been numb for years - who came in apologizing for not feeling much - slowly, carefully, begin to feel again. The body doesn't open through force. It opens when it finally understands it doesn't have to fight the room. When softness is met with softness, with patience, with someone willing to stay in it alongside you.

The numbness isn't the problem. It's the last layer of protection before something real. And when it's treated that way - without urgency, without an agenda for what should happen next - it moves. Every time.

What made me most humble wasn't the depth of what I witnessed. It was the people themselves.

These were practitioners, therapists, bodyworkers - curious people who already hold space for others professionally.

And they came anyway.

They lay down on the mat anyway.

They let themselves be seen anyway.

That kind of willingness is not a given.

I've been in this field long enough to know what gets in the way of it. There's a particular kind of person who is deeply interested in this work - who reads about it, who talks about it, who knows the language of trauma and the nervous system and somatic release - and who uses that knowledge, quietly, to stay one step removed from actually experiencing it. The understanding becomes a buffer. The expertise becomes a way of not having to feel.

That's not a judgment. It's one of the subtler ways we protect ourselves. And it's hard to see in yourself, precisely because it looks like engagement.

Real willingness looks different. It's less articulate. It doesn't know in advance what will happen. It shows up anyway and stays in the room with what it finds there - including the parts that are uncomfortable, confusing, or slow. That's the thing that actually opens the door.

Not insight about the process, but the readiness to be inside it.

My calendar for April is open.

Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons are available - sessions in person in Berlin-Kreuzberg, or online.

If you're curious, that's a start. But what makes the work move is something beyond curiosity - a genuine readiness to look at what's there without already knowing what it should be. If you feel that in yourself, even quietly, even uncertainly, I'd like to hear from you.

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Bis bald,

Johannes

Für alle die Deutsch sprechen - hier geht es zu der neuen Seite in Deutscher Sprache: https://dearmouring.berlin/​

Johannes Ebert Bodywork // 13351 Berlin // hello@johannesebert.com // +49 173 29 88 497
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