“It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.“ — Oriah Mountain Dreamer

This course is about rediscovering authentic self-expression as your birthright. You will be picked up exactly where you are and honoured as the person you are right now, with your current body, personality, thoughts and feelings. You are given the space you deserve to unfold fully. Through a variety of exercises, you will be guided to authentically express yourself in movement and give your body back its voice. You will explore yourself through movement in time and space. You will play and make beautiful mistakes (spoiler alert: there are no mistakes!). You will put happy or crappy emotions into motion and move stuck energy. You will practice letting go. Of your thoughts, your feelings or your current perspective. You might even lose yourself in the dance – but only to find yourself back in the here and now, fully alive, fully you.

Date: Tuesdays from 20:15-21:45 (90 minutes)

Price: 15€/12€ (with discount card)

Discount Card: 60€ (value of five visits)

Course language: English

Registration: Feel free to drop by. Try to arrive a little earlier as we start on time.

Location: Pavilion of the Escola de Medicina Tradicional Chinesa, Rua De Dona Estefânia 175, 1000-154 Lisboa

Walk right through the garden of the TCM school and freedom awaits!

Contact: lea.baum@aol.com

In our performance and consumerist society, we are so trained to believe that happiness is waiting for us outside ourselves in the future, with the next gadget, holiday, better body and so on. Even personal development, as the name suggests, seems to be aimed at becoming someone, or healing ourselves, rather than realizing that we are perfect as we are now.

“We are always on the threshold of life,“ said Ralph Waldo Emerson over a hundred years ago, and this sentence is more relevant than ever. While our attention is absorbed in thought (or in our phones), life passes us by. We disappear into a world that is not real.

We are challenged to bring a counter-movement into this world. By moving and expressing our feelings against the norm, instead of seeking happiness externally and postponing it into the future, we directly experience that everything we need to be happy is within ourselves at this very moment.

Lea has worked with a wide variety of people of all backgrounds, ages and mental and physical states in the past.

She has experience with various mental conditions such as depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, personality disorders, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders, somatic symptoms, autism and ADHD.

After studying painting in her early twenties, she travelled to India and Thailand to train as a yoga teacher and massage therapist. She then studied dance and movement therapy in the Netherlands and worked as a masseuse in her own practice for over ten years alongside her studies, where she was able to strengthen her intuition and sense for the human body. After graduating, she worked in various clinics as a dance and movement therapist and finally established the first body therapy in a day clinic in Cologne, Germany.

In addition to her movement classes, she loves to express herself as an actress and model and also enjoys being behind the camera as a filmmaker of short films.