Dancing with Challenge Practice Lab
with Nichol Chase
Dancing with Challenge: Practice Lab is a monthly gathering for anyone seeking greater resilience, clarity, and well-being amid the complexity of modern life. Together, we’ll explore practical, evidence-informed approaches that help us meet life’s inevitable challenges with greater steadiness, wisdom, and compassion. Drawing from yogic and Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and contemporary research on stress and resilience, each session weaves together guided meditation, breathwork, embodied practices, contemplative reflection, and conversation—offering simple, sustainable tools for living with greater presence, purpose, and ease.
From September through December this year, we’ll explore selections from Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error and The Feeling of What Happens alongside Robert Thurman’s Inner Revolution, bringing contemporary understandings of the embodied mind, emotion, and consciousness into conversation with Buddhist perspectives on selfhood, interdependence, and human flourishing. Through selected readings, contemplative prompts, embodied and meditation practices, and shared reflection, we’ll investigate these ideas not simply as concepts to understand, but as invitations to examine our own experience—and discover how they might help us meet challenge with greater awareness, flexibility, and wisdom.
Nichol Chase is an educator, musician, and contemplative teacher specializing in resilience science, trauma-informed care, and embodied wisdom practices. She is a Garrison Institute Fellow and founder of the Wisdom Building Method School, where she developed a 300-hour trauma-informed yoga teacher training integrating movement, mindfulness, and music. Nichol has presented at UCSF, UC Berkeley, ACHS, Spirit Rock, Kripalu, Esalen, and BrainMind. She is the co-author of a chapter on trauma-informed yoga for the Palgrave Handbook of Third-Wave Psychotherapy, alongside scholars from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, James Cook University, Bangor University, and Santa Clara University. A classically trained ballerina and opera singer, she brings a refined aesthetic sensibility to her teaching. Her work focuses on equipping individuals and communities with practical tools to navigate stress, heal trauma, and cultivate resilient, meaningful lives.