Your Emotional Body
Reclaim the calm state you were born to embody and awaken your potential for greater expressive range vocally, physically and emotionally. Learn reliable and well-researched physical methods to help you calm your nervous system and reduce anxiety, develop skills in emotion management, and become more holistically resilient. Personal agency is strengthened by learning to accurately identify how you feel, while managing your communication delivery through breath and embodiment techniques to improve message choices and accuracy. Improve your health and overall wellness by attaining a balanced relationship with emotions in yourself and others. Learn how this knowledge can positively impact your personal and professional life forever!
“The Emotional Body course is an extremely effective method for exploring basic emotional patterns in the body. Knowing how to get into an emotional state is a very effective way to know how to get out of an emotional state that you are caught in. Knowing how to get to "zero," that is, knowing how to find a place in yourself that is neutral is incredibly freeing.” Richard Hruby, Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
Modern life has created conditions where it has become increasingly difficult to identify and manage emotions. Anxiety disorders are the world’s most pressing mental disorder since the pandemic, with levels rising dramatically globally, with 300 million suffering from anxiety disorders globally (WHO). At the same time we are experiencing a mental health support shortage. For example, out of the 95.2 million Americans who report suffering from anxiety, almost 2 million wanted counseling but did not receive aid, and 122 million Americans (1/3 of our population) live in officially designated mental health shortage areas and are unable to gain access to professional care. Until this shortage is remedied, we could all benefit from developing body-calming self-care skills and emotional resilience.
We hold within our bodies highly intelligent neural pathways that are extremely responsive to new patterns. Self-motivated transformation is possible if you acquire the skills and apply them mindfully.
Our bodies also hold clear memories of original patterns, like the calm and protected womb state. After birth we begin to express our needs through basic or primary emotions—our first language. The basic emotions with which we started life remain with us as we mature, even after we have begun the practice of mixing basic emotions into complex emotional expressions (much like how colors expand from primary into secondary and tertiary colors) and these core primary emotional needs influence all that we feel, think, do, and say. Meanwhile, we hold strong physical needs to retain the calm balanced safe state that we had pre-birth, and for many, the months after birth as we were held, protected and nurtured.
These universal needs and modes of expression are human nature’s building blocks influencing our communication and bodily needs for the rest of our lives.
Laura Bond’s Emotional Body® method helps you develop the ability to sense, reconnect with, and manage these organic expressive tools. Using research-supported interdisciplinary techniques, gentle and gradually developed body-scanning and mindful movement lessons designed to help you learn emotional resilience, fluency and physical emotion regulation.
“To be able to “get into” the emotions and then “get out of” the emotion is just fascinating! I think there was considerable attention given to ensuring psychological/emotional safety so that participants felt safe to participate fully.” - Eng-Chuan Neo (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
Discover the limitless personal and professional benefits of learning these skills! Below is a list of increased abilities described by pre and post surveys from previous subscribers and course participants.
Increase your abilities to:
Describe bodily sensations
Embody emotional states
Sense emotional states before becoming dysregulated
Shift emotional states to more desirable or helpful states as needed
Let go of emotional expressions and restore to a calm state
Regulate levels of emotion
Obtain specificity & repeatability with emotional expression & communication
Create stronger and more meaningful social connections with others
Develop a common language for emotion
Understand better ways to monitor lingering adverse effects of emotion
“The Emotional Body is about discovering and cultivating emotional clarity, deep personal freedom and creativity. Goodbye boredom, hello humanity!” -Mark Lichtenberger, Feldenkrais Method® Authorized Functional Integration® Teacher (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
Why subscribe?
Comfort beverages (specialty coffees, alcoholic drinks, smoothies) average around $12 per drink. Less money than spent on one comfort beverage could pay for a month’s subscription to the Emotional Body’s calming, centering, and emotion management skill development lessons that will provide you with a lifetime of benefits.
With a paid subscription you can have access to a method that…
• Provides a unique collection of holistic evidence-based body-calming techniques that you will not find anywhere else
• Combines mindfulness, breath patterns, and subtle, yet effective muscle movement techniques that open and manage emotional pathways
• Empowers you with proven approaches to calm your nervous system, become aware of dysregulating patterns, and improve your overall wellness
• Presents easy-to-remember lessons and activities you can apply anytime in your life, with no special equipment required, just your incredible body!
Now—be honest, can your “comfort drink” provide all that?
Non-Subscribers (New Readers, who are always welcome to explore this content to see if it is a good fit for you before Subscribing) will have access to the Free-posts for 4 weeks after their publication. Then they will be archived and only available to our Subscribers.
FREE Subscribers get access to all free posts & lessons (current & archived) that are beyond the average Substack post. Each post averages OVER 2000 evidence-supported words of wellness-centered information & 25 minutes of recorded self-help lessons EACH. PLUS course & special discounts, along with notifications of upcoming courses and special discount offers in newsletters sent out averaging four times a year.
PAID Subscribers get unlimited access to ALL posts, free and those marked paid, averaging OVER 2000 evidence-supported words of physical emotion-regulation method information & 60 minutes of lessons; special discount offers & ability to give gift subscriptions to others. You can also now post comments and join the community of people interested in the same topic, including chat access with Laura Bond. A special bonus only available to paid subscribers, and available nowhere else, is access to NEW supportive research about book chapters and audio recordings from the book, The Emotional Body.
Founding Subscribers have all the benefits of paid subscribers, PLUS invitations for Zoom calls & Q&As, significant discounts on online and in person courses that can equal or exceed the subscription value (Currently new Founding Subscribers receive immediate free access to the Reclaim Your Calm course, a $150 value!), advance notice of upcoming courses and my eternal gratitude for your demonstrated support of this platform.
Publications or Posts will include advice, stories, and short lessons various ways individuals can benefit from learning these methods.
The Newsletter will provide subscribers with pre-public announcements about upcoming workshops, courses, and special offers.
“One of the most exciting moments for me was outside of the workshop. I have PTSD and I experienced a trigger. Usually this means I hyperventilate and cry and dissociate. It usually takes a fair bit of time to calm me down, and then I generally stay in a dissociative or semi- dissociative state for many hours after the event. This time I immediately went into zero breath, and within a matter of a minute or so, I was able to communicate, move, see and speak. I have done a lot of work on managing panic and anxiety, including a great deal of breath work, but I have never experienced such a wildly effective technique for taking my body back to a neutral state.” - Kristel Harder, Actor and Singer (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
About the Author
A 30-year luminary on evidence-based physical methods to restore the body and cultivate emotion and expression development, Laura Bond’s pioneering Emotional Body® method, publications, courses and teacher-trainings in Pure Expressions® have empowered 1000s.
“With expert ease, she managed to break down the learning process into easy-to-digest portions and had confident, detailed, patient answers at the ready as our curiosity grew with each new step. Speaking neither down to us nor over our heads, Laura matter-of-factly gave us the tools, information, and support we needed to do and explore the work. From providing a safe emotional space to neuro-scientific explanations and everything in-between, she had it all.” - Margaret Hild, Actor/Director/Spoken Voice Coach (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
She is a writer, teacher, trainer of instructors, and scholar dedicated to providing safe and reliable techniques for physical emotion regulation for personal expression development for all individuals and promoting holistic wellness initiatives. She is a Faculty Emeritus with UNC Asheville where she taught performing arts courses along with personal expression development and physical emotion regulation and resiliency.
She is a master trainer of Estill Voice Training®, and is a certified Trainer in Kinēsa®, a Feldenkrais®-Inspired Movement System for Pain Relief and Heightened Physical, Emotional & Spiritual Wellbeing. She is currently completing a year-long internationally accredited and certified Mindful Art and Meditation Teacher (MAT) training program, by the acclaimed International Mindfulness and Meditation Alliance (IMMA) and the global Mindful Art Alliance (MAA). In 2024, she also completed the Brown University's Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, is certified in Mental Health First Aid for adults and minors and has trained in over 50 hours of the consent-based and trauma-informed practice of Theatrical Intimacy Education. Laura was also awarded UNCA's Ruth Paddison Distinguished Professorship (2022-2025) for promoting interdisciplinary connections between fields where she creates and supports somatic wellness initiatives. She applies her experience and training of all these methods with care and consideration for consent practices and remains trauma-informed and aware of mental health needs within her unique interdisciplinary style of teaching and coaching.
“Bond has been at the forefront of disseminating this technique by setting up and running intensive courses on a regular basis not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, Canada and Mexico as well. Apart from in Chile, where the technique was developed, Alba Emoting has been primarily used as a tool for actors, but Bond has been striving to change that. Her teaching approach makes Alba Emoting accessible not just to actors, but to professionals such as psychologists, ontological coaches, social workers, or any person looking to find a better understanding of emotion through the physiological patterns. Through Bond’s teaching method, [the EEP] can be easily applied to any profession or simply for personal use in one’s everyday life. Bond has also been the first instructor to actively integrate [the EEP] with the Feldenkrais Method, a form of somatic education, which enables participants to experience [the patterns] on a deeper level.” - Jessica Beck, CL5 Master Alba Instructor, Emotional Body® Lead Instructor/Trainer, Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
Her primary research and teaching centers around the development of a physical emotion regulation method using somatic education philosophies with the evidence-based emotional effector patterns (EEP). After over 30 years of practice-research, teaching and writing in this area she developed new ways to teach the EEP and founded a new method for physical emotional regulation and somatic resiliency, called the Emotional Body® method. Her research and practice began by studying and applying the EEPs to her teaching in the late 1990s and continued by collaborating and co-teaching with Feldenkrais® method practitioners since 2005. She engaged in an intensive teacher-training sabbatical in Chile in 2006 with neuroscientist and research psychologist Susana Bloch, an original member of the team that discovered the EEP. Laura is a master teacher and practitioner of Alba Emoting™, a method for teaching the EEP developed in the 1970’s by Susana Bloch.
“Laura is highly qualified and competent both in using as well as in teaching Alba Emoting™. She is a very persistent, studious, intelligent, ethical and reliable person, who has attained a perfect understanding of the power and significance of my work.I particularly acknowledge and appreciate Laura's long time continuous interest and dedication to Alba Emoting™, and fully trust her.” - Susana Bloch, original researcher on the BOS team, and founder of the Alba Emoting method (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
Laura Bond teaches the Emotional Body method and related mindful and holistic wellness practices in courses, workshops and intensive trainings nationally and internationally. She has presented on these methods in international summits, conferences and podcasts. She has also served as a professional consultant and workshop instructor for individuals and specialty groups from such diverse areas as city officials, prison inmates, cancer survivors, scuba divers, therapists/counselors, somatic practitioners, actors, artists, public speakers, performers, and first-responders. Laura develops specialty lessons to help each learner gain approachable and reliable methods for such needs as expanding expressive capabilities, developing public speaking skills, acquiring physical emotion regulation methods, and providing short and easily accessible somatic resiliency methods.
“Laura is an exceptional teacher – the perfect combination of the knowledgeable authority in her field and a winsome guide and coach who safely takes you to new discoveries without any criticism or condemnation. She provided a safe learning environment." - Timothy Wilds, College Professor in North Carolina (from Emotional Body course Testimonials)
She also offers private lessons, workshops and courses for national and international attendees using in-person and online delivery methods. She is the author of two books: TEAM for Actors: A Holistic Approach to Embodied Acting, and The Emotional Body: A Method for Physical Self-Regulation, which is the core text used in Emotional Body courses. She is a contributing author providing a chapter in the Routledge Press book, Trauma and Embodied Healing in Dramatherapy, Theatre and Performance.
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