(Above: Dylan Newcomb)
If you’re an Integralist, you ought to be aware of the UZAZU embodiment practice. Developed by Dylan Newcomb, it’s basically a new, integrated bodymind practice (like yoga or tai chi) informed by Integral theory.
Dylan, Mind-body Master Coach and Trainer and graduate of the renowned The Juilliard School, created the practice more than a decade ago in the arts and dance scene. At first, he called it The 16 Ways (I’m guessing this is based on the numerology of the I Ching’s core symbols, one of the sources of inspiration for the practice’s pattern-making).
He taught more than 100 workshops across the global and continued his research into all aspects of embodiment methodology. He even received research grants from Dutch cultural institutes.
Although he built up a solid base of practitioners, for the last four years or so, Dylan slowed down. He attended to his roles as a husband and father and expanded his repertoire to include a private coaching practice.
In “The UZAZU Story”, Dylan describes how he didn’t stop working on UZAZU during this slow period; rather, he took an “inward turn”…
Working one-on-one with private clients over longer periods of time gave Dylan the opportunity to deepen UZAZU’s effectiveness with a wide range of topics, from life-purpose to re-patterning limiting beliefs, to working with family systems and marital dynamics to integrating early-childhood trauma.
In tandem to this period of intensive 1-1 applied research, Dylan immersed himself in intensive additional study in the UZAZU-related fields of Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience, Polyvagal Theory, Phonology, Dynamical Systems Theory, Personality Theory, and Developmental Ego Psychology.
This ‘inward turn’ for the modality turned out to be surprisingly healthy for the further maturation of both UZAZU’s underlying theoretical clarity and the depth and effectiveness of it’s embodied techniques & practices—leading to the birth of what Dylan informally refers to as ‘UZAZU 2.0’.
Newcomb is now getting ready to launch the first complete online course for learning and practicing UAZAZU in 4+ years. This is a prelude to a new series of live workshops and certification trainings.
One of the things I find most fascinating about UZAZU — and I’ve been a fan-at-a-distance of the “old UZAZU” for several years — is that there is no other embodiment practice out there that brings together Integral theory, somatics/embodiment, and vowel phonosemantics.
I’m not yet quite sure what UZAZU 2.0 has to offer, but the old version gave its practitioners a way of experiencing vowels — the most fundamental building blocks of all the Sacred Word traditions — as having subtle energetic relationships with one another that can be felt in the full bodymind. For example, you could pronounce the vowel “O” and embody it through dance movements in a manner which helped you to draw connections to the felt realities of words like Organize and Oversee, and then connect those concepts to coordinates within the “Integral map”.
The spiritual technology was still experimental, but it was definitely promising to be the first of a more sophisticated breed of embodiment methodologies. In short, if the new UZAZU is anything like the old one, it will be something genuinely new and exciting on the spirituality scene that only comes along very rarely.
If you’re interested in exploring what “the new UZAZU” is all about, there’s still time to catch a webinar with Dylan on Thursday.