I am a Copenhagen based researcher, body therapist, coach and workshop facilitator. I am interested in practices that support me and others in relating and listening better and believe that the ability to relate to myself, others, society and nature is key to living a happy life in service of what is good in the world.
The last 20 years of my life has been a journey of unlearning. Unlearning for me points to the process of letting go of belief systems and fixed patterns of mind and body, trusting experience rather than dogma. The guiding light for me is more harmonious relating to my body-being, to others, to society and to nature.
In all the practices that are important for me; Tai Chi, Dancing, Transformational Connection and Bodywork I am inspired by the principle of Wuwei, pointing to an effortless, spontaneous, and skillful movement with the flow of life.
Tai Chi
I was around 25 when I started practicing Tai Chi, but closer to 30 when I started getting a sense of what it is all about. A friend had recommended a workshop with Sam Tam, a visiting Tai Chi master from Canada. Until then I had been enjoying what the slow, balanced movements were doing to my body (before that I mostly experienced my body as something that was carrying my mind around), but touching Sam changed my understanding of what it means to relate for good.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but what I got a glimpse of was listening mastery in action. Tai Chi is daoist principles translated into a martial art. Its the art of playing in and balancing polarity (represented by the Yin/Yang symbol) and when you meet someone who actually embodies these principles, it feels like nothing you have ever experienced before. Sam Tam is a relatively small and elderly man (he is around 170cm and when I met him the first time he was in his 60s) and he could throw me like I was a child. More fascinating, he would “disappear” whenever I tried to push him. I was simply not able to put any weight on him.
I have visited Sam at his home in Vancouver a couple of times since then and have been practicing under his main student in Denmark, Torben Bremann, who has taught me most of what I know about Tai Chi and Qigong. After 20 years of more or less daily practice I still feel like a novice.
Its quite a privilege to have had a practice to continuously return to for half your life. What I have found for myself is that Tai Chi has become a lens that I understand the world through and a very useful lens at that. The key learnings that I use in my everyday life are connected to on one side being grounded and on the other being able to listen – and balancing those two forces.
In 2015 i went to a Circling & Surrendered Leadership weekend on recommendation from Ronja Lofstad. I found it quite disturbing, but also fascinating enough that I signed up for a 6 month training shortly after. The same year Ronja and I went to the Borderland for the first time and met Daniel Brooks who led an Authentic Relating workshop. These practices would become central for my work and development in the years to come.
I was part of founding the Authentic Relating Festival in Denmark in 2016 where we gathered leaders of various relating practices (Radical Honesty, Circling, Authentic Relating, Improvised Partner Dancing etc.) to give tasters of their work to the participants and to meet and learn from each other.
Since 2015 I have been leading Authentic Relating, Circling & Surrendered Leadership workshops, first in Copenhagen and later around Northern Europe with a few journeys to USA, New Zealand and Australia. I have found these practices to be incredibly powerful for getting closer to truth, freedom and love. And for navigating more effortlessly in life.
Simply put you could say that yang energy is good (power, stability, directionality), but becomes unhealthy when it turns into violence, overpowering, fight impulse etc. Similarly yin energy is good (sensitivity, listening, following), but becomes unhealthy when it becomes collapse, anxiety, flight impulse etc. And the role of the practitioner is to balance these two energies based on the condition arising, so you respond as effortlessly as possible to the situation you are in.
What is interesting for me is the balancing act. It seems to me that to be able to respond appropriately to any situation (any situation involves relating to something that is not me) I need to show up authentically with my power and boundaries (welcoming myself fully) while simultaneously deeply listening to the other (welcoming the other fully). This is surprisingly difficult and Tai Chi as well as Circling practice shows this very clearly. Most people (certainly me) find themselves constantly moving between using force and collapsing, very rarely being able to embody a balanced way of being.
In 2018 I started the Manuvision Body Therapy training in Copenhagen together with Einar Boson. The Manuvision (meaning “seeing with the hands”) approach to Bodywork is based on sensitivity and empathy. The relationship with the client as a body-being is the most important. I experienced the 2 years of education as fitting perfectly to the principles I had already started working with in Tai Chi, Authentic Relating, Circling and Surrendered Leadership.
The years before I started the education I had started to be fascinated by the power of touch and had begun giving intuitive bodywork. I became fascinated with (and even more so during the education) how the tensions we hold in the body translates or our emotional and mental well being. Another way of saying the same is that we are bodies and that everything we are experiencing is translated through how we inhabit ourselves.
The way I see it these days can maybe best be understood through the idea of Karma. The way I use the term is to simply mean “your doing”, as in, your doing (the way you hold yourself in the world) impacts what you experience. The tension I hold in my feet means that my legs are a bit maladjusted, which means that I am compensating in my upper body, which means that my breathing is not free, which means that I can’t fully feel myself, which means that I don’t show up in my relationships in the most loving way. Of course it isn’t that linear, but you get the point i hope.
The last couple of years I have become increasingly interested in embodiment; how I can allow myself to fully embody my inner life when I am relating to others. This interest has come out of seeing myself go through a process of first acting out my emotions, projecting on others and such and from there starting to work with how I can become more aware of myself and simply share (or self-regulate) my experience. However I think this can be overdone and there is for me a lack of life in spaces where we only practice awareness. I find that for myself I want to express fully which means bringing the anger when its there, rather than just sharing that I “notice anger”, but without acting out and blaming or shaming others in the process. For me this is a process of owning my experience more fully.
It seems that, most of the time, we are not really listening. We walk around in our own limited worlds believing that what we see is all there is. We are comfortable in the known, but also profoundly limited. This changes when we start listening.
Time and Place
April 11-13
Gothenburg, Sweden
Leaders
Peter Munthe-Kaas
Tova Ekenberg
Navi Camilla Säregård
With the Relating Arts retreats we invite you into an exploration of body and mind, moving towards effortless being and action in everyday life. The retreats are intimate experiences for max 13 participants and takes place in the beautiful archipelago of Southern Norway.
Time and Place
August 4-10 and August 25-31
Norway
Leaders
Peter Munthe-Kaas
Ronja Lofstad
Wow! you made it to the end. Thanks for reading all of this. If you want to contact me, I should be relatively easy to find. The easiest is to contact me on email peter@munthe-kaas.dk. Otherwise you can find me on various social media or on my website (if you understand Danish). Here are all the links.
All the Love
Peter Munthe-Kaas
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