Lia Sheyen is a movement lover and Certified Conscious Movement teacher, guiding workshops and classes since 2021. With nearly a decade of experience in conscious dance modalities, her exploration of movement was born from a deeply personal need to understand inner restlessness, discomfort, and anxiety, to meet them through the body and find her way back to joy and aliveness.

Her work is rooted in her lived experience, where dance, music, art, and meditation become doorways back to authenticity, beyond societal expectations and learned identities. She is a certified Azul Conscious Movement teacher, a promoter of forest bathing practices, and works through a somatic approach informed by IFS (Internal Family Systems) and art therapy practices.

Her path is also shaped by a love for travel, adventure, wild nature, and artistic exploration. For the past three years, she has been living in Guatemala, on Lake Atitlán, surrounded by the depth and beauty of the Mayan cultural landscape.

Through conscious movement, Lia invites people to reconnect with spontaneity, vitality, and the natural flow of life, exploring the body and allowing movement to unfold without effort. In this space, people can soften the body, feel deeply, express freely, and surrender to the present moment — embracing their beautifully imperfect humanity! To find Lia visit: https://www.instagram.com/liasheyen/ https://mailchi.mp/3fda1cba36af/spirals-of-freedom-azul-conscious-dance-with-lia-sheyen To learn more about Azul visit: https://pathofazul.com/

Julia is a lover of dance. She began dancing at parties in her teenage years. In the 1980s and 90s, Julia co-ran clubs and raves in London. She developed a workshop exploring the rave experience called Spirit in the House.

For the past 3 decades, Julia has practised as a Transpersonal Psychotherapist, with a special interest in the wisdom of the moving body and exploring body symptoms.

She is a Certified teacher in Open Floor movement practice and Ecstatic Dance. She a member of the International Conscious Movement Teacher's Association (ICMTA), and runs regular Flomotion and Open Floor dance sessions in London.

Julia writes regular blogs on themes connected with dance such as Dance and Defence Against Loneliness, What is Dancing with Awareness in the Body, Community Dance and Dance Movement Psychotherapy. Visit https://www.flomotion.dance/ for more information. Or follow Julia on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flomotion.dance/

Kathryn Dickason is a scholar and journalist based in Los Angeles. She specializes in Western medieval Christianity, with particular interests in dance, iconography, gender, French literature, Dante, and medievalism. More recently, she has developed a secondary research area in contemporary ecstatic dance.

Dickason holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University and also served as a residential research fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. Her first book, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred (Oxford University Press, 2021), explores the sacralization of medieval dance in Western Europe.

Currently, she is writing a long-form profile on Max Fathom, the founder of ecstatic dance, as well as her second book, tentatively entitled Wheeling Incarnation: Medieval Dance in the Visual Arts.