Zuza Engler

Zuza Engler grew up in Poland and came to conscious dance almost by accident, when a friend took her to a barefoot dance evening in San Francisco in her twenties. That night began some thirty years of dancing, training and sitting practice. She teaches two free-form conscious dance practices, Soul Motion and Open Floor, and she has long practised Buddhist meditation and Gestalt, which shape how she guides people to notice what is happening inside them as they move.

She gathers her teaching under the name Moving with Life, which she describes as embodied inquiry: dance, stillness, sharing in pairs and small groups, and time outdoors, with as little instruction as possible. From her base in Sebastopol, California, she leads a Sunday morning dance practice, a yearlong training for a small group of eighteen, recorded courses and a free half-hour dance on Zoom each Wednesday. She trains and mentors other movement teachers, offers continuing-education hours to therapists, and leads week-long retreats at Esalen and in Costa Rica, often alongside her husband, Scott Engler.