FESTIVAL STATES
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
A field guide for meeting what is happening with a little more support, awareness, and choice.
What Festival States Is
Festival States grew out of a simple question: what might help when you are in the middle of an intense, beautiful, confusing, or overwhelming experience and need something you can actually use right then?
Festivals can bring joy, connection, awe, movement, exhaustion, stimulation, vulnerability, emotion, and moments when it is difficult to know what you need. Festival States offers short somatic practices for meeting some of those experiences through the body, senses, movement, contact, and the environment around you.
The guide is meant to be used in real time. You can begin with a state that feels closest to what you are experiencing, or enter through one of the Core Practices if you already have a sense of what kind of support you want.
WHAT “SOMATIC” MEANS HERE
Somatic simply means beginning with what you can notice through your body and lived experience.
That might include sensation, movement, contact, posture, your senses, the space around you, or the way your body responds when something changes.
You do not need to understand nervous system theory to use the guide. The practices are designed to give you simple places to begin.
HOW TO USE THE GUIDE
Start where you are.
Choose the Festival State that feels closest to what you are experiencing, or begin with a Core Practice if you already have a sense of what kind of support you want.
You do not need to move through every step. Try one thing, give it a moment, and notice what happens. If something feels supportive, you can stay with it. If it does not, leave it and try something else.
There is no particular state you need to reach. The guide is here to offer simple ways of staying connected to yourself, your surroundings, and what feels available in the moment.
CORE PRACTICES
Festival States is organized around six foundational ways of working:
ORIENTING
Connecting with what is around you
GROUNDING
Feeling support beneath and around you
SELF-CONTACT
Using your own touch as a source of contact and support
MOVEMENT
Following movement, rhythm, and available energy
CONTAINMENT
Coming back toward yourself through contact, pressure, and support
BOUNDARIES
Exploring your edges, space, distance, and choice
Choice Matters
Everything here is invitational.
You can modify, skip, pause, or stop any practice. There is no correct way to move through the guide and no state you are supposed to reach.
The point is not to make yourself feel a particular way. It is to have a few more ways of noticing what is happening and discovering what feels supportive in the moment.