In Awe

Our opening day of the Academy of Mindful Movement’s first ever in-person training put me into a state of awe.  

On January 18, 2026, I walked into the Barefoot Ballroom of our studio in Honolulu, fully lit, with Trainees from ages 19 to 67, from places as distant as Canada to Texas. I was flanked by junior and Senior Intern Trainers from Hawai’i, Tennessee, the Virgin Islands, and Brazil. And we were all about to start moving together IN THE SAME PLACE for this Mindful Movement Instructor Level 1 training. I felt as if I had literally woken up in my dream. I almost had to pinch myself to make sure it was real.

I’d like to tell you about why this training marked such a new, exciting level of expansion for the Academy and share with you some of my “favorite frames”!

Douglas Groesser and I began creating a curriculum for our Instructor Level 1 training in 2020. On July 14, 2021, we opened our first Academy training, in the midst of the pandemic. Of course, we offered it online. By that time, Still & Moving Center had hired movement teachers from across the globe, since distance was no barrier to virtual classes. Still & Moving’s extensive roster of teachers, locally and from afar, composed most of our first cohort of Trainees. Douglas and I had been teaching online ever since that first training.

Douglas is a lifelong academic with extensive teacher training experience in schools and colleges. He’s been active his whole life, playing several different sports, doing outdoor activities, spending decades in gyms, yet he’s not a teacher in any of those fields. As a 2nd Degree Nia Black Belt and instructor, I’ve given our Academy Trainees mindful movement sessions from various aspects of Nia, which combines elements of dance, martial arts, and yoga. 

Over the years, we brought on Academy graduates as Intern Trainers to learn to help lead the training. We aimed to eventually develop Co-Trainers who could deliver the training in our place. Having Co-Trainers would free the two of us to develop our curriculum for the Level 2 trainings to come. Since the new Co-Trainers would already be professional movement teachers and coaches, they would expand the variety of mindful movement we could demonstrate to our Trainees. 

At the start of this first-ever in-person training, we had Intern Trainers, but no Co-Trainers yet.  

Our three Senior Intern Trainers worked tirelessly with Douglas and me to renovate our lesson plan for online training to a more dynamic plan for in-person. Mālia Helelā (hula and lomilomi massage, Hawai’i), Stacey Stone (ELDOA, personal training, and yoga, Virgin Islands), and Dustin Hara (vocal coaching and bowling, Hawai’i) joined me for practice sessions the entire week leading up to the training. Amongst us we dissected our entire online lesson plan and put it back together to provide lots more movement for in-person learning. By the time we finished our preparatory week, we had invested at least 200 people hours in the newly crafted course, and our Senior Intern Trainers knew the material from the inside, out!

Once our exciting first-ever in-person Academy training in Honolulu started, the Senior Intern Trainers and I shared leadership of the training equally throughout the course, with all of us leading both speaking and moving portions. 

Trainees also loved Junior Intern Trainers Anna Perry and Robin Shepard, leading jazz dance, yoga and aerial yoga sessions. By the end of the week, between myself and all our Intern Trainers, we gave mindful movement sessions in no less than 13 different movement formats!!! Wow!

One of my “favorite frames” from our Academy of Mindful Movement’s first-even in person training happened spontaneously. On Thursday, I was scheduled to present one of our mini talks on the concept “Body Sense, Body Do”, which is a little play on the phrase, “monkey see, monkey do”. Getting called away for an organizational task, I fortunately had my Senior Intern Trainers there to back me up.

Let me explain that as a mindful mover, you are not just supposed to mindlessly follow the leader. Using the Body Sense, Body Do approach, you are supposed to sense what’s going on in your body while you move, then do an internal adjustment to make your move feel safer or more effective. 

“Mālia,” I asked, “Can you do some lomilomi massage with the Trainees, for them to experience Body Sense, Body Do?” 

Then we imagined our Trainees paired up with each other, giving little arm massages. Hmmm…. Maybe not. Wouldn’t one Trainee be sensing the massage and the other Trainee be doing the massage?  That wasn’t the point of Body Sense, Body do! 

“No problem,” responded Mālia, “I’ll just teach them to lomilomi themselves, one arm with their other arm. Then each of them will be sensing how much pressure to apply where on themselves, and doing any adjustments they need to make their massage feel better!” 

Perfect. Stacey and I left that portion of the training in Mālia’s hands – pun definitely intended – with Dustin backing her up!

When Stacey and I came back to the training after finishing our task, all the Trainees were laughing and showing each other their new self-lomilomi skills. Each of them now had hands-on experience with “Body Sense, Body Do”!  They got it in a movement practice I would not have the expertise to lead them through.

Another favorite frame: By midweek, we detected that our Trainees seemed a bit listless – we’d been charging pretty hard, and ‘’hump day” – meaning Wednesday, the midpoint of the typical work week – is a real phenomenon! Never fear, Dustin to the rescue! Using his full body vocal coaching skills, Senior Intern Trainer Dustin led us in a rousing mindful movement session to exercise our voices. The topic was Finding our Safe Edge. Dustin had us sense our way into finding that safe edge of volume with our voices, just as we sense our way into finding the safe edge of our range of movement. 

Trainees woke up and brightened up in that session with Dustin, finding their ‘Safe Edge’! By the end of the week when they gave their 15-minute mindful movement demos, Trainees who had been speaking too softly to be easily heard were now using heartier voices when they cued us through their moves.

Again, I was thankful for a training team member leading a mindful movement format that I have no experience in teaching!

By the end of our first in-person training, the Academy of Mindful Movement had surpassed itself. We had presented a dynamic curriculum of concepts and techniques via mindful movement sessions, mini-talks, slideshows, collaborative movement sessions among our trainees, teaching each other with their new mindfulness methods. We Trainers had given our Trainees an extra set of professional tools to lead their students and clients in more mindful, self-empowered ways of moving. And all of our Trainees successfully demonstrated teaching their own movement practice mindfully on the final day of the training. Ta Da!  

At our final celebration on Friday, my heart was bursting with pride for our Trainees, for our Junior Intern Trainers, and for our three Senior Intern Trainers. Our Seniors had in fact demonstrated such a high level of professionalism in leading the training with me, that we graduated them to be “Co-Trainers” of the Academy. This means that any two of them is qualified to co-lead our future Academy’s Mindful Movement Instructor Level 1 trainings! Douglas and I are now free to work on new mindful movement frontiers. 

And it happened right here at Still & Moving Center, the home where the Academy started.

Again, I was in awe on the last day of this training at the expansive growth of our Academy of Mindful Movement. My heart swelled. And our work continues to ripple out joyfully!