Sophie Claire Annen
Expression
My services and medicine stem from who I am, they are my lived experience.
I was born in Ticino, Switzerland, from a family who taught me to go after what I believe in, who invited me to step out of my comfort zone, keep my mind open and introduced me to spirituality from a young age.
Thanks to the education I received I was able to experiment, discover and choose from different forms of expression from a young age.
In my household, music has always been present, at every celebration and road trip.
At 10 years old I was on stage, acting and singing songs written by father: loving the feeling, blushing at the attention I was receiving.
All my life I have been trying to make sense of this duality that lives within myself: I can be extremely light and playful, and meet you in the deepest depths, I can be confident and assertive and be faced with deep insecurities and people-pleasing.
It wasn’t until I learned to embrace all these parts of myself as a whole and see them as a gift through which I am able to hold people and their experiences, that I could let go trying to understand why I would keep swinging from one extreme of the spectrum to the other.
Body
The relationship to my body is what has brought me where I am today. A relationship that has always been reflected in all my personal relationships and areas of life.
Even as a professional dancer, for years I hated my body. The unwanted attention it was getting from men, yet never good enough reflected in the mirrors of the dance studio or to be met with love.
At the time, the way I chose to cope with inner conflict and pain was to numb them out, in order not to feel. My body was my main tool, yet I was completely dissociated from it, scared to face the power that lived within it.
In my personal relationships I had walls built around my heart, terrified at the idea of fully opening up and be met yet desiring it more than anything in the world. My sense of self solely relied on outside validation, whether it was there or not.
Performing on stage allowed me to feel the confidence I didn’t feel in my everyday life, as if I was granted permission there. In intimacy, performing translated into shapeshifting into whichever version would suit the person in front of me.
Love
My life could be marked by the times I experienced love as something outside of me, unreachable and only meant for other people.
I remember exactly the moment I sat on my couch, sobbing for a whole day, experiencing heartache and deciding that something had to change. That day, I made a promise to myself.
I promised myself that I would stop basing my self-worth on the outside and I would start to treat myself with the same care and respect I reserved for others.
From that moment onwards, I had to face all the ways in which I had abandoned myself, not honoring and respecting myself. I had to look at all the habits, patterns, and addictions that were running my life, and face the truth of my own actions.
Since then, I have been diligently and deeply working on my relationship with myself, my body, my movement, my femininity.
Through this process, I learned how to re-build trust in myself, starting to follow through with my choices, keeping my own word and living in integrity with it. I turned inwards and started listening with presence, patience, love, the one I have always longed for. I learned to attune to my body and trust its whispers, I learned not to run away from feeling and power, but to stay and face them, because the greatest gift lies on the other side.
Today, expression, body care and love are the foundations of my work in the world.
I create experiential containers in the form of retreats, longer programs and individual sessions where the body is given space; it is listened to, tended to, it is taught what safety feels like, so that it is free to contact all of itself, in its Wholeness.
My experience in guiding dance classes and creating choreographies for different dance and circus schools, for people living with Parkinson, in leading a dance company with dancers with Down Syndrome, in facilitating creative processes and creating site-specific performances, in holding groups for multiple days during retreats, has taught me how to hold a variety of processes while showing me the beauty and range of the human experience.
I pay particular attention to the accessibility of my own offerings, while holding every human being accountable for themselves, not viewing the limit as a restriction, but as a well of new, unique possibilities.
