Shake the Dust: Women, Movement, and Nervous System Freedom

Why I Facilitate Shake the Dust

What does movement have to do with women’s health? And why, when I keep banging on about doing less and being, am I holding a class that looks like it’s all about doing more (hello, fire energy 🔥)?

Here’s the truth: Shake the Dust is a movement revolution.

As women, we’ve been conditioned to be presentable, to fit into roles, to be pleasing, pleasant, pretty, and obliging. We carry this conditioning in our bodies—stress, trauma, expectations, all the ways we’ve been told to shrink, behave, conform. We can’t think our way out of cultural conditioning, no matter how much we analyse it. Because, as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk says, “The body keeps the score.”

And so, we move.

Shake the Dust is a cathartic movement practice. It invites you to step into perpetual motion, to shift between effort and release, to feel where resistance sits in your body, and to move through it. You’re guided to shake off the ‘shoulds,’ the ‘coulds,’ the ‘I need to be’s.’ To notice what feels comfortable (and what doesn’t). To meet yourself—your true self—and your emotions, fully and unapologetically.

The Myth of Stillness

So what about doing less? Shouldn’t we just rest?

Here’s the truth: To do less, we need a regulated nervous system. A dysregulated nervous system cannot rest—it’s stuck on high alert. And paradoxically, stillness can sometimes further deregulate an already frazzled system. When we’ve been conditioned to be on all the time, switching off doesn’t always feel safe.

That’s where movement comes in. Shake the Dust gives your body permission to process, to release, to complete the stress cycles trapped inside. It allows emotions to move (because emotions are energy in motion). And with practice, with undoing and unlearning, with finding yourself beneath all the layers of societal BS—you might just find yourself able to truly rest.

Movement as Medicine

Shake the Dust isn’t about doing more. It’s about reclaiming your body. It’s about breaking free from the ways we’ve been told to move, to suppress, to hold it all together, to be nice and neat. It’s about nervous system freedom.

Rest doesn’t come easy—but it’s necessary. We’re not going to change the world by swallowing the same old BS. So, we move. And through movement, we find our way home to ourselves.

Are you ready to shake? 🌿