Sarah Gray | "Tzara"
BA Hons. BMCA. SELF. RYT-200.
(she/her)
Founder and pluri-disciplinary artist, Body-Mind Centering® Somatic Movement Educator and Somatics Experimental Learning Facilitator®
“Through the transmission of somatics
it’s my intention to create a sacred space
where there can be flow
supporting personal transformation,
community coherence and
ecological sense-making.”
I live and work in Totnes (Devon, South West, UK) and I invite you to encounter the practice of Body-Mind Centering® or BMC®. I offer sessions for groups and individuals in somatic movement and yoga including hosting collective learning labs and study groups.
Cultivating a living arts practice
and an artful living practice
I have been studying BMC® for over ten years in France, Estonia and the UK. Concurrently, I certified as a Somatic Experiential Learning Facilitator®, or SELF®, with the School of Experiential Learning (SOEL) in Devon, UK. I am a regular teacher with SOEL contributing to the two-year Holistic Studies in Human Anatomy course and Saturday Somatics community workshop programme.
Practicing yoga since 2012, I am a registered Yoga Teacher at the 200-hour level granted by the Yoga Alliance, completing an immersive teacher training programme in 2017 with Yoga Health Mandala in Goa, India. I continue my professional development in yoga, learning from first and second generation Scaravelli-inspired teachers, locally and internationally.
I hold a first class BA Honours in Theatre with Choreographic Practices from Dartington College of Arts and am a company director, DJ and radio maker with community arts station, Soundart Radio, 102.5fm.
What is BMC®?
Empowering practitioners to be
experts in their own living bodies
In my experience of studying BMC® for 10+ years, I would describe it as a person-centered and experiential learning approach to explore our innate capacity to feel and act in the most effective way possible in relation to gravity, breathing and our earliest survival pattern - our felt sense of comfort.
The material we study is rooted in holistic human anatomy, with a particular interest in embryology, infant developmental patterns, cellular breathing and movement consciousness.
This work can offer pathways to connect us to our ancestral and personal patterns, whilst appreciating those we share with all living beings.
Multi-layered, but also radically simple, somatics is an inclusive and collaborative process that is ongoing, fluid and expressive empowering practitioners to be experts in their own living bodies.
BMC® is always changing and responding
to new knowledge and research.
Influenced by western anatomy and the latest scientific discoveries, while underpinned by ancient, eastern energy arts and wisdom, somatics is always changing and responding to new knowledge and research.
In the practice, we are guided by our own experiences, emerging in each moment, and we take time to deeply listen, be curious, and respect all life processes within and external to us.
We research and explore together with an openness to learn from, and with one another and to take active interest in where our personal experiences can resonate or differ from our collaborators.
Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen founded the School of Body-Mind Centering in 1973 creating a community of practitioners, students, educators and teachers across the world. There are now 15 schools registered in Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Asia.
Sound
Explore sound as a medium of touch,
listening as an act of both giving & receiving, & voicing as a means of expression & somatization
As part of self-led solo arts project Sound Journeys, Tzara produced a digital sound-walk for Dartington, presented at the Schumacher College symposium Language, Landscape and the Sublime in June 2016. For more information, contact directly.
Tzara with Soundart Radio co-hosted a number of Soundcamp weekends part of REVEIL, marking international dawn chorus day, leading embodiment workshops with participants to explore listening as a somatic enquiry. The next Soundcamp is happening during May Day weekend 2027.
Site
Facilitating experiences
to offer up the opportunity to rediscover
our relationship to place.
We are always exploring the context - our place, the landscape, our memory, and pattens of movement. Tzara is interested in rituals on rural and urban terrain, at threshold places.
Tzara's work (2005-2025) centers on the Dartington Hall Estate through broadcast, walking, listening, spoken word, embodiment practices and sound recording.
Somatics
To create the conditions for more choice
"The key to physical, psychological and spiritual well-being lies in our Soma,
which can perhaps best be defined as the essence of bliss or Ananda
arising from the core of our being"
Frawley, D. 2013. Soma in Yoga and Ayurveda. Motilal Banarsidass: Delhi, India. p.13
The origin of Somatics or "Soma" is greek, meaning "of the body". Somatics is an umbrella term for a family of related practices, which have been developing since the early twentieth century. Today we can see a wealth of unique, established approaches and methodologies each with a different quality and focus -- from early pioneers like Moshé Feldenkrais and Frederick Matthias Alexander to Elsa Gindler (Gymnastik), Emilie Conrad (Continuum) and Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen (Body-Mind Centering) -- to name but a few.
In a world of information,
can we embody and grow our felt knowledge?
It is challenging to describe somatics, as it is essentially an experiential practice and can only be discovered through first-person encounter; to directly experience; to pay attention to; to notice. By bringing greater awareness to our whole selves we begin to become present to embody the reality of the constant, continual living process of change.
Cultivating a greater capacity for self-care,
in the context of our community
and our place in the world.
Overcoming unhelpful patterns and habits, opening the possibility and availability to respond, and embodying what it could mean to be 'neuroplastic' (our nervous system’s capacity for adaptive changes in response to stimuli) -- these are some of the possible benefits of regular somatics practice. Developing this response-ability is a process. It is one where love and patience are required.
For me, somatics practice is a process of
deepening my sense of trust and knowing
for myself and with the pluriverse.