WHAT HAPPENS IN A NAIO SESSION?

Opening to the Subtle Movements of Life

When people first hear about NAIO™, they often ask: What happens in a session? The answer can be simple, yet often feels mysterious. A NAIO™ session is less about doing something to someone, and more about creating the conditions for life itself to reveal its fullness through the body.

Orientation: Grounding and Opening

Every session begins with the practitioner arriving into a grounded, embodied, and calm state. This is the foundation for NAIO™ sessions. Through their own regulation and presence, the practitioner sets the tone for the session.

Open Awareness in NAIO™

From here, the practitioner orients through the practice of open awareness. Unlike many forms of mindfulness or meditation that emphasize pure interoception, emptying of thoughts, or focusing solely on the breath, open awareness is spacious and inclusive. While interoceptive awareness has value, an overemphasis on tracking internal states can sometimes create the opposite of regulation, leading to hyper-focus or overwhelm, particularly for those with sensitive nervous systems, trauma histories, or chronic pain.

Open awareness, by contrast, allows grounding in the felt sense while keeping awareness broad and connected to what is present. It includes bodily sensations and awareness of breath, but also the environment, the relational field, and the wider horizon of experience. This breadth and flow of sensory awareness softens intensity, prevents fixation, and creates the conditions for a safe and spacious receptivity in which deeper coherence can emerge. In this way, interoception is not imposed but arises naturally as part of the process — emerging once coherence and resourcing are established. This ensures that self-awareness remains integrated, regulated, and connected, rather than isolating or overwhelming. Through their modeling, the practitioner gently encourages the client toward the same openness, supporting them in discovering a more spacious and resourced way of attending.

The Living Field Between

NAIO™ understands that restoration and transformation don’t happen in isolation. They happen in the interbeing and intersubjective space — the living field between body, being, and world. Within this ongoing process of being, becoming, and world-making, communication is subtle, layered, multi-directional, and non-linear.

It is less about tracking or following phenomena and more about listening deeply to the rhythms of life itself, as they emerge and reveal themselves in the openness created for them. The practitioner does not analyse, suggest, or manipulate tissue. Instead, they hold a clear, open space where the body’s innate intelligence can express, reorganise, and situate itself.

Quiescence: The Moving in Repose

NAIO™ sessions are often quiet — although at times talking and social engagement may be appropriate and regulating — they are profoundly dynamic. Within open awareness, everything is moving: spirals, swells, vibrations, and rhythms. Some describe it as akin to surfing or entering a jazz improvisation. Yet here, you are not riding the wave or performing the melody: you are the ocean, aware of itself, and the music itself — the rhythms, and the spaces between them.

These subtle movements emerge through what NAIO™ orients to as the subtle dynamics of embodiment — the living flows that underlie our physiology and experience. NAIO™ does not divide being into separate “bodies” or rely on imposed constructs. Instead, it listens to the organic, arising movements and flows as they are felt and perceived in the moment. In this way, embodiment is engaged as an integrated field — subtle, fluid, emergent, inseparable from physiology, awareness, and expression. NAIO™ remains within the wholeness of lived experience, attending to the nuanced revelations of intelligence that show themselves at different layers of orchestration within the body.

What may first be felt as consolidations or restrictions can soften, and as patterns dissolve, a new coherency may emerge. Clients often experience release, clarity, or renewal — not because something was fixed, adjusted, or unwound, but because something deeper was allowed to unfold, dissolve, and resolve into a wider field of intelligence and wholeness. This can be sensed in many ways as part of one’s phenomenological experience: tissues softening, broadening, releasing, and becoming more fluid; the perceiving of color, light, or spaciousness; or an awareness arising that can hold and shift a psycho-emotional pattern or way of relating to a situation — bringing a felt-sense of deeper integration or understanding, even when it is beyond words or description.

The Transpersonal Dimension

These experiences are not dissociative or autonomic states, but arise from a deeply resourced, nourished, and regulated space. Because NAIO™ works within this open field of experience, it also leaves space for what many disciplines describe as the transpersonal — experiences that reach beyond the ordinary sense of self.

These may arise as meta-phenomenal events: a shift in the experience of time, a sudden perception of vastness, an encounter with archetypal images, a felt sense of belonging to something greater, or an unnameable intimacy with life itself. Such moments are not sought or imposed, but may unfold naturally as the conditions of openness deepen — always within the ground of resourcing and regulation. In time, clients may engage their own meaning-making around these experiences, weaving them into the fabric of their lives.

Trauma, Neurodiversity, and Health Conditions

NAIO™ recognizes that people come with diverse backgrounds and needs, including histories of trauma, forms of neurodiversity, or ongoing health conditions. Part of the practitioner’s role is to discern and support these differences with sensitivity, so that the practice remains safe and accessible. Openness in NAIO™ is not forced or demanded; it arises gradually from a receptive, resourced, and regulated state. For some clients, reaching this state may require additional support — such as working alongside trauma-informed care, therapeutic guidance, or medical treatment. In this way, NAIO™ remains collaborative, complementing other modalities rather than replacing them.

Because of this, trauma-informed perspectives are interwoven into NAIO™ training and practice. Practitioners are guided to recognize the differences between trauma responses, neurodiverse patterns, and health-related conditions, and to meet these with discernment, patience, and care. Through this layered support, clients can enter into the spacious receptivity of NAIO™ more fully, allowing the intelligence of life to reveal itself in ways that are safe, coherent, and deeply nourishing.

The Role of Client and Practitioner

A NAIO™ session is a collaborative dialogue — between practitioner and client, between the client and themselves, and between both and life itself. The practitioner offers orientation, attunement, and open presence. Over time, the client surrenders into openness, allowing the Open Order — the Logos, intelligence as the body — to reveal itself and to orchestrate the priorities of the session as emergent bodily wisdom.

Together, practitioner and client agree to “get out of the way” and trust the greater wisdom that sustains all life — as it is expressed and experienced in the client’s bodily being, in the relational field between practitioner and client, and in the environment and world they are embedded in together.

Gentle Pathways In

For some, entering such subtle spaces, trusting openness, and connecting with themselves can take time. This is why NAIO™ also offers group practices, such as NAIO™ Self-Care and Touch Classes and Cosmocean™ movement sessions. These pathways introduce gentle, flowing, imaginative movement that prepare the nervous system for deeper attunement and receptivity.

A Different Orientation

In a world that often seeks quick fixes and techniques, NAIO™ offers something different:

• A listening that softens — like the ocean attending to its own waves, currents, and tides.
• An opening that lets revelation arise like a swell, or an eddy in motion.
• A coherence that gathers, the way currents find their form and the body finds ease.
• An orientation to life’s intelligence — subtle, unforced, needing no control.

NAIO™ is a somatic movement and relational practice, honoring the living body and the wider field of life as a process — fluid, dynamic, and whole.

Intelligence as the Body

NAIO™ recognizes intelligence as the body. Sensations, connections, and expressions are not just signals to interpret but manifestations of life’s intelligence itself — knowing what needs to happen and how to work. Because the session unfolds in openness, it creates the conditions for the fullness of life to emerge through subtle embodied dynamics — allowing the wholeness of a person’s experience to organize itself toward deeper coherence.

There is no need to impose frameworks by mapping “energy bodies” or correlating sensations with fixed systems. As a holistic process, NAIO™ attends to the entirety of a person’s being as it expresses itself through bodily form — dynamic, complex, and constantly changing. A session does not follow pre-set tracks or pathways but allows the whole to emerge through attunement, presence, and space.

NAIO as an Orientation to Process

NAIO™ is not a technique but an orientation — to openness, coherence, and the intelligence of life as it expresses through the body. Each session is a meeting place where practitioner and client step aside, allowing what is most whole, most fluid, and most alive to reveal itself.

After many decades in private practice, and through teaching and dialogue with colleagues across fields — from integrative medicine doctors to therapists and somatic practitioners — I developed NAIO™ out of a need I continually witnessed: the need for a way of working that honors subtlety, depth, and relational presence, while remaining grounded, accessible, and attuned to the intelligence of life itself.

In shaping NAIO™, I have also drawn from my own lived experiences that emerged and I navigated prior to any formal training — of interoceptive depth, embodied awareness, and transpersonal adventure. These explorations have shown me again and again that life’s intelligence is already here, waiting to be trusted, listened to, and allowed to move us toward integrating the wholeness we are already held by.

Written by Prue Jeffries, MSME/T, Founder of NAIO™ Holistic Awareness Process.