Two Workshops in the US

This spring and summer, Jatun Risba brought two workshops rooted in their long-term embodied practice to audiences in the United States.

Interesse: embodying blissful emptiness

Interesse was a one-day immersive somatic workshop held at PMT House of Dance in New York City, co-hosted with Nini Mai. Through authentic movement, rhythmic breathing, vocal expression, and deep listening, the workshop invited participants into a space of grounding, release, presence, and collective attunement. Drawing on Tibetan yoga and breathing practices, as well as Grotowski's physical training methodologies, it offered practical tools for nervous system regulation, emotional release, resilience, and self-healing.

Together, participants moved through states in-between: consciousness and subconsciousness, self and others, life and impermanence — through guided somatic exercises, spontaneous movement and vocalization, breathwork, witnessing practices, and moments of stillness within motion. Interesse has been Risba's daily practice for several years, and one that profoundly shaped their relationship to body and health — it is the practice through which they found their way back to transcend the condition of multiple sclerosis (2012–2019).

Interesse & Calm Mind: Somatic Practice and the Arts of Liberation

The second workshop was a collaboration with fellow USA artist John DiLeva Halpern, presented by the Institute for Cultural Activism International at Jade Lake Retreat in East Meredith, NY. Where the first workshop centered Risba's own practice, this one was a genuine two-artist encounter: Risba and Halpern each drew on their own lived experiences of self-healing to offer accessible approaches to resilience, somatic awareness, and transformation through movement, breath, voice, and calm abiding.

Two very different paths, arriving at a shared conviction that the body itself holds the tools for its own liberation. Structured around contemplative somatic and vocal exercises drawn from Tibetan lineages and somatic training, the workshop invited participants to explore body, sound, and meditation as pathways to healing and creativity — Risba's somatic instructions and movement work opening the body's self-healing forces, paired with Halpern's Shiné (Calm Abiding) meditation cultivating the relaxation and focus needed to sustain that awareness.