Hello Reader,

• 3 minute read — and a quick neck reset you can try today​
• a musing on agency, autonomy, and the machines we trust with our bodies
• mini-workout:UnWreck Your Neck ( 9-minute reset with a band, chair & yoga block)
• strength, mobility & decompression — trapeze workshop (online too)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about agency and autonomy in our bodies.

And I suspect many of us have been thinking about it too — especially lately, as a lot of long-standing assumptions start getting questioned.

Ideas about beauty, power, success… who gets to define them — and why we accepted them so easily.

For years we unquestioningly adopted a whole constellation of expectations about what a body was supposed to look like and how it was supposed to behave. Those ideas didn’t arrive with a warning label explaining where they came from or whose interests they served. They were simply presented as the status quo.

And when something is presented that way, the instinct is usually to maintain it — not question it.

Years ago I started noticing how deeply that mindset had seeped into other areas of my life — not just in how I evaluated my own body, but in how I approached my work.

How many times had I bought into a system believing it would solve all of my problems — or my clients’ problems — simply because it arrived packaged with authority?

A particular machine.
A proprietary method.
A perfectly engineered apparatus promising the optimal pathway.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. I’ve trained in many of them and still appreciate what thoughtful design and precise engineering can offer the body.

But over time I realized that many of the answers I was searching for could just as easily have been discovered on my own.

Often with less equipment.
Less expense.

And sometimes, more accuracy.

At a certain point those thoughts stopped being philosophical and started becoming practical.

I began wondering what would happen if I simply asked a different question when I walked into the studio each day:

What experience do I actually want to create for this body?

Six years ago, when I moved into my private studio, I decided to test that idea. Instead of adding more equipment — which is the usual direction these things go — I did the opposite.

I started taking things away.

One afternoon I stood in the middle of the large shared studio where I had been teaching, surrounded by machines I had spent years collecting… and started listing them for sale. Over the following months, one piece at a time, the equipment disappeared. When I eventually moved into my much smaller private studio, the space felt completely different — quieter, more open, and suddenly full of possibility. What remained was one large machine, a sling, some stall bars, and a cupboard full of props and folding chairs.

That was enough.

Actually, it turned out to be more than enough.

Once the room was no longer filled with machines dictating how movement should happen, the space itself became far more flexible. One day it might function as a strength studio. The next day it might become a breathwork space or an inversion playground. Then everything disappears again and the room becomes open floor.

Studio owners tend to appreciate how quickly a room can transform when the entire setup fits inside a cupboard - More importantly, it shifts the creative responsibility back where it belongs — with the teacher.

Once you start noticing how the body organizes itself under load, you realize you don’t actually need much equipment at all.

A strap and gravity can teach the spine things a thousand-pound machine cannot. A folding chair can suddenly become a decompression device. A band can become an entire shoulder rehabilitation lab.

If you’d like to try a quick example of this, here’s a short routine you can do at home. (It only takes a few minutes.)

It’s a 9-minute reset I call:

UnWreck Your Neck — 9 Minute Routine

Props: chair, yoga block, theraband

It’s remarkable how much can happen in a room once the equipment stops dictating the choreography.

You might even call it a little "Range against the Machine" :)

Somewhere along the way, I noticed that one of the simplest pieces of equipment in the room kept showing up again and again in the work: a Yoga Trapeze hanging from the ceiling.

Instead of dictating a pathway the way many machines do, it creates an arc of movement that responds to how you organize your center and how much weight you place into the system.

Your body simply won’t go further than it can manage.

And when it reaches its edge, the arc brings you back.

The body organizes the movement, not the equipment.

Lately I’ve been enjoying exploring these ideas more deliberately — seeing how much strength, mobility, decompression and coordination can emerge from very simple setups when the body is given the right environment to organize itself.

Next Saturday, March 22nd, I’ll be continuing that exploration in a small two-hour Yoga Trapeze immersion here in Monterey — experimenting with supported inversions, spinal decompression, strength work and mobility flows that grow out of this simple setup.

I’m also opening the session for online participation this time so those of you further away can join from home.

If you're curious to see what we'll be exploring, the session details are here:

​Session Details​

Sometimes the most interesting training environments turn out to be the simplest ones.

I’d be curious what you’ve discovered when you strip the equipment away.

Welcome to my world.

Domini Anne

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