photo credit: Josh Behan
KEITH M. COWLEY - Embodyssey® Instructor
A native to Southern New England, Keith Cowley developed Embodyssey® after 20+ years of exploratory training into the foundations of traditional meditative movement modalities and internal martial arts. In the early 2000’s he had created a lifestyle for himself that he was able to train for many dedicated hours a day, hunting deep for the answers to questions he’d posed after experiencing martial epiphanies in moments he referred to as Presence. One of his most influential instructors had given him the greenlight to teach a series of progressive foundational internal martial arts training concepts which he did for several years with a small group of already experienced students. Teaching only strengthened his skills and intention, enabling him to test his theories.
The more he trained, the more glaring was the realization that the connective culture behind traditional arts with origins in other countries was fundamentally missing in America. And while those modalities have their benefits and are successfully adopted by many highly skilled practitioners, he remained conflicted about further seeking or representing a lineage path of study. Doing his own research, he believed he could challenge tradition by proving that the style he’d connected with the deepest and had been teaching the foundations of was historically non-martial in its origin. Rather, it had become a hybridized martial tradition over time. However, being too young and ambitious, and without enough formal training in the art to be taken seriously as an innovator, he was quickly snuffed by lineage instructors. Cowley knew that challenging tradition was not going to get him the answers he sought. Traditions as a rule defend the box they are restrained to. Taking the hit he instead decided to reevaluate and continue to distill his foundational training experience into his own personal training system, then called Personal Circle Method (PCM). He knew there was significant merit to his realizations. He’d just have to find the language.
Imbued with a more grounded vision, Cowley differed further to lessons derived through submissive experiences in Nature, particularly during an intense all-season 365 daily woodland retreat in 2012. Forming a personal philosophy of "Body as Teacher, Nature as Preacher" he spent the rest of an obsessive decade revisiting the structural integrity of primal movement and mechanics. He determined there are only so many ways the body can integrate with its surroundings efficiently, and spending lengthy periods of time in those positions can incite internal dialogues that can free the form of its tensions. And as a substitute for the countering ego, the sparring partner, Cowley found that Nature had the same power to challenge us through fear of the unknown. He developed environmental referencing techniques, cues from the physical and spatial world that influence the body’s ability to release tension while deepening a sense of mindfulness and integration. The result was a new system of structurally-integrated mindfulness training that can be continuously refined beyond the mat and thus became the framework for Embodyssey®. In 2018 he published a primer for this work entitled Body as Teacher, Nature as Preacher.
Additionally, Cowley is a naturalist educator and lifelong wild food forager. He brings his intimate experience with the natural world to the table as another method to re-connect us to the earth. He currently resides in coastal Westerly, Rhode Island where he offers workshops, seminars and lectures, foraging walks and awareness/immersion hikes to his community. For more about his foraging work, visit www.ethicalforager.org
Cowley is the author of Environmental Connection (Wild Animal Publishing, 2012) and Body as Teacher, Nature as Preacher (Wild Animal Publishing, 2018).