The Work

What actually happens.

Ninety minutes, fully clothed, in silence, in a quiet room in Battersea, London. You do nothing at all. The work is what the body does once nothing is being asked of it.

This describes NERVANA, the suite Kilian created and practises nowhere else. The first session is ANTARA, and it is ninety minutes. The rooms that open after it are sixty. The oil work, Abhyanga and Marma, is practised here too.

You do not have to be fine here.

You arrive and you say you are fine, because that is what you always say and it is mostly true. The work does not go by that answer. It goes by what the body is still holding while you give it. What Kilian needs to know, he asks.

You lie down, dressed. The room is quiet, and it stays quiet. Nothing is done to you in the way that word usually means. There is no oil, no conversation, no performance of relaxation. For a while, not much seems to be happening at all.

Then the body stops holding.

Given a room where nothing is required of it, the body does what it has not had permission to do. First the obvious places. Then places you did not know were holding. Somewhere in the sixty or ninety minutes, the bracing you have mistaken for yourself lets go, and underneath it is a quiet you may not have felt in years.

Bracing is not a decision, which is why you cannot stop it by making one. It is the nervous system holding a position it was never told it could leave. That is the part of you this work is addressed to.

Nervous system regulation is the modern name for this. The form Kilian practises is older than the name.

Sometimes what surfaces is only rest, very deep. Sometimes it is more than that: something long carried, finally set down, occasionally with tears you did not plan and will not be embarrassed about, because no one is watching and no one will ever know.

You leave lower, slower, lighter.

You walk out at a different speed from the one you walked in at. Most people are quiet for the rest of the day. The change is not dramatic. It is the specific relief of putting down a weight you had stopped noticing you held.

He will tell you what you will feel. He will not tell you how. The how was learned in India, from teachers you cannot book, in a form that has never been shortened.

What it is not

Not massage. Not therapy.

It is not massage. It is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for it. It is not religion, and it asks you to believe nothing. It is not a treatment for an illness, and it makes no medical claim. It is slow work with the breath and the nervous system, done with touch and with stillness. It is not for everyone, and he will tell you if it is not for you.

Ninety minutes · Fully clothed, in silence, one to one · Battersea, London · In English or French