About NAIO

THE MEANING OF NAIO

Naio is an Ancient Greek verb for “I dwell”,“I abide”, “I inhabit”, this implies a continuing, moving and alive process of embodiment that has a sense of stability and order, to dwell in or abide. How do we come home to the wholeness of life in ourselves? Language itself can be seen as movement. We move our lips to create sound. Sound is vibration, which is movement. Ancient Greek word roots often have a wholeness or moving meaning within them, a sense of poetry.

Naio can also be translated as implying a fullness and flow, an overflowing fullness.

How can we dwell in the overflowing fullness of life?

ABOUT NAIO™ A HOLISTIC AWARENESS PROCESS

NAIO™ a holistic awareness process uses somatic education principles to support well-being. Our personal selves are a microcosm of a macrocosm, a vast cosmic plenum of creative flow. A dynamic wholeness in flux, permeated by an ordering principle, an Open Order. As the earth itself, we are water-based life, in a process of Physis, Ancient Greek for Being and Becoming. The flow of life is a continuous process of becoming, made explicit through our biology; that is the earth, nature and our bodies. Open Order can be conceived as a Matrix, with emergent coherent ordering, that is the bodily expression of being, implicit within the becoming. NAIO™ supports awareness and engagement with this embodied process.

The natural orchestration and flow of life reveals itself as wave-form, a dynamic polyrhythmic flow, with varietal periodicity, in enfoldment and unfoldment generating lived experience. From the pulsing of cells to the murmurations of birds in flight we can see various expressions of wave-form. This flow, with its waves, rhythms, pulsations, vibrations, undulations and spirals is the vital dynamics of life. Underlying these expressions is what ancient greeks called the Logos – an Open Order, within the Dynamic Wholeness. We can look at health in this context, we can explore its etymological roots from Proto-Indo-European meaning, complete, total, unbroken, whole.

Open Order can be considered a cosmic generative intent that is eternal, life giving, affirming, sustaining – Being - orchestrating constant movement, change, and evolution – Becoming.

Listening and appreciating the flow of life, can connect us to a deepening sense of being alive. NAIO™ listens, acknowledges, and co-operates with the subtle polyrhythmic expressions that can be sensed, and experienced within the whole body as an ordering and organizing coherency, an immanent quality of health and well-being.

CONTRIBUTIVE FIELDS

NAIO™ holistic awareness process brings together knowledge from diverse fields such as neurobiology, evolutionary biology, physics, philosophy, phenomenology, trauma, somatics, embryology, ecology, psychology to support the subjective lived experience in each person.

THE PRACTITIONERS ROLE

NAIO Practitioners procure Open Awareness and compassionate connection in collaboration. They use gentle touch to guide clients' engagement of their experiential and sensory capacities. This supports awareness of the polyrhythmic and varietal movements of life intelligence as it organizes, conducts and maintains living experience. People experience a sense of innate flow, spaciousness, relaxation and harmony. The movements are often non-linear, spiral, wave, circular, pulsing, undulating, fluctuating and effulgent. NAIO™ a holistic awareness process supports movement awareness, self awareness, self-regulation, co-regulation, creativity, resourcing, reorganizing, and renewal which the underlying flow of life intelligently orchestrates.

The trained practitioner has refined their capacity for self-regulation and coherency, holding an orientation to wholeness and health. At the same time, they acknowledge the interdependent nature of our existence, and any conditional forces occurring.

They honor their client as a sentient being with multi-dimensional experience such as the transpersonal, the imaginary and symbolic, the inter and transgenerational, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical, and more.

NAIO™ a holistic awareness process is a way to orient with the immanent ground substrate of existence and engage the generative living processes within our biology, our bodies that support a greater sense of well-being.

WHAT HAPPENS IN A SESSION?

A session can occur in different settings and lasts between one and one-and-a-half hours. The client is covered in loose comfortable clothing at all times, and usually lays upon a table or mat. Gentle touch and movement awareness support an experience that releases, relaxes and dissolves conditioned mental, affective/emotional states, body tensions, and patterning. Practitioners often enter a meditative state and with gentle conversation and calm presence support a client in finding their way to an improved sense of bodily-being, and overall flow. Practitioners may have felt-senses and perceptions arrive in them, and may ask orientating questions and provide touch, that may collect impressions and feelings to support their clients in a collaborative relational process.

WHY IS IT A PROCESS?

NAIO™ holistic awareness process is not a technique applied to someone. Life is an evolutionary, emergent and generative process. NAIO holistic awareness process honors this by listening and bringing awareness to this process. Doing so supports embodied awareness of the vastness of life. It is a holistic awareness approach to wellbeing based on the practitioner’s soft, listening, gentle touch and awareness of movements that support the client to experience themselves in new, non-habitual and creative ways. NAIO holistic awareness process can often induce deep relaxation, a by-product can be the resolution of imbalances. It can be considered a form of education. Through experiential awareness it introduces new ways of sensing, feeling, moving and relating. The experiential learning process transforms our relationship and understanding of the body, movement, life experience and perception in a gentle and progressive manner.

PARADIGMS

We often create paradigms as a way to organize information or understand something. They are a model - a representation.

Often there can be a perceptual challenge that occurs in interpreting the model/paradigm for that which is trying to be understood or being guided to become aware of, by the model. This can be problematic. Paradigms can become a constraint, self and other limiting, static and perhaps entropic at some point, rather than a creative act that supports exploration, discovery and freedom. Humanity is continually generating various paradigms, when positive, open, they can be a wonderful creative act that supports deepening understanding, growth and flourishing.

Why is Naio™ called a holistic awareness process USING SOMATIC EDUCATION PRINCIPLES?

NAIO™ holistic awareness process places wholeness as primary. Often when we try to understand something we apply an existing model or paradigm that we know - to that which we are trying to understand. To ask if NAIO™ holistic awareness processi s energy medicine or energy healing would be reasonable to ask. So also to ask if it is a form of bodywork. NAIO™ is a bodily oriented holistic awareness process that learns and participates with the various movements of life, evolving in each of us. It engages the implicate ordering movements of Wholeness within and with the biological movements of our bodies. Using somatic movement education principles, a creative and exploratory approach to embodied biology is a focus - all the different layers of bodily-being and becoming (physis) such as cells, tissues, matrices inclusive of energy, vibration, light and space. It is life that is the process. NAIO™holistic awareness process is an approach that supports awareness and engagement with the unfolding process of life through lived experience - without reducing the holistic experience. As it engages our bodily and sensory experiences, and is participating with the movements inherent to life, it is a form of somatic movement education. NAIO holistic awareness process honors that much about life is a mystery beyond the categorical constructs and language that we use.

IS Naio HOlISTIC AWARENESS PROCESS an Earth and nature Connection OR ECOSOMATIC Practice?

The earth and nature itself are a manifestation of a vast cosmic process that orchestrates life. We are earth, nature and life itself. Within the seamlessness of holistic life awareness, NAIO holistic awareness process supports listening and deepening our connection with our bodies, the earth and nature. Through exploring evolutionary, collective and individual biological themes and motifs practitioners broaden their awareness of what it means to be alive and embodied which creates an attuned capacity to be present with their clients in an expansive, compassionate and spacious way.

WHAT IS SOMATIC EDUCATION?

The Greek word “soma,” meaning “body” or “living organism,” encompasses the tangible and corporeal aspects of human existence. In ancient Greek thought, soma represented the vessel through which experiences, sensations, and consciousness were expressed. Somatics is an interdisciplinary field that encompasses movement, therapy, and embodied awareness. In the realm of movement and therapeutic practices, the term “somatics” has gained prominence as an approach that delves into the holistic understanding and embodiment of the human experience. Somatics focuses on the conscious exploration and integration of the mind, body, and spirit.

BACKGROUND

The founder of NAIO™ holistic awareness process, Prue Jeffries, MSME/T spent life in the water immersed in the natural world - as a surfer and water-person. From young, Prue kept alive her openness to creativity and the transpersonal. Her personal experiences inspired her to delve into existentialism, philosophy, phenomenology, metaphysics and more when young. As one of the world’s best professional surfers, she created an experiential and multi-field approach inspired by personal, mainstream, and holistic influences for wellness and performance. NAIO™ holistic awareness process originated from her personal experiences and approach to supporting people informed by water, the body, and nature, and refined by ongoing studies and teaching in well-being approaches over the last 30 years.