Poetry in Motion is Vaila Robertson's integrated practice of massage, myth and guided meditation, rewriting the story your body holds so you can move through life with ease and vitality.
IGoing through a major transition in your life or identity?
IIStuck in a loop, repeating the same patterns?
IIICarrying chronic pain or tension that stretching and regular massage just won't shift?
The old stories live in the body. This is where they begin to move.
This work meets people at the thresholds of a life.
Or moving through loss or grief. Or perhaps everything looks well from the outside, and still you feel stuck, stagnant, unsure how to move forward. Whatever your threshold, the old identity no longer quite fits, and the new one is not yet fully lived. That is exactly where this work begins.
The stories we live are carried in the body. Held in muscle and fascia, in the breath and the subconscious, they quietly shape our reality: how we move, love and create, long after the mind has let them go. Poetry in Motion works at every level of the story: Alchemy of Touch™ bodywork to release what the body grips, Seasonal Archetype Mapping to understand the roles you play, name the chapter you are living and identify the blocks that stop you from moving on freely, and Yoga Nidra to embed this picture in your subconscious and inhabit a more easeful, vital and poetic reality.
Explore the sessionsAlchemy of Touch™ is deep, integrative bodywork drawn from Eastern and Western healing traditions. It works with the muscle and fascia, where the body stores its tension, defences and old patterns. Through slow, attentive touch, these held stories soften and release, freeing the body to move, and you to live, a new chapter.
A dynamic understanding of the roles you inhabit, the ones that help you thrive and the ones that keep you stuck.
Weaving together Wu Xing seasonal analysis and Jungian archetype theory with the empirical backbone of Big Five personality profiling, your mapping gives you a holistic picture of the season you are living in now, and the blocks stopping you from flowing into your next chapter with ease and vitality.
After a short seasonal archetype quiz and a thorough personality assessment, you receive a 40-page document that maps out your story, raising your self-awareness and helping you understand your behaviours. It becomes the foundation for our first conversation, and for re-writing your next chapter.
Yoga Nidra is a guided meditation that carries you into a deep, sleep-like state while the mind stays awake and aware. In this hypnagogic threshold the subconscious becomes open and malleable, so new realities can take root. Together we tailor the images and visualisations to your own story, seeding a new chapter in the subconscious for it to manifest in your life.
Certain gifts are bestowed on each of us to share with the world, to help us remember our humanity, our love and our freedom. Mine were Words and Touch.
For two decades I trained in the art of storytelling, as a brand and advertising strategist, before I realised that the deepest stories we carry, the ones that quietly shape our lives, live not in the mind but in the body and the subconscious, and that touch and poetry can help them move in ways the mind alone cannot reach.
This work has brought me to tears of love more than once, from the connection and presence of it, from watching the old stories melt out of the body as physical and emotional freedom opens up in someone.
I'd love nothing more than to share it with you.
Begin here.
Start moving your story today. This short, reflective quiz draws on the Chinese Five Elements to reveal the season you are living, the archetypes shaping how you show up, and the pattern quietly keeping you stuck. It is more than a moment of insight: your results become one of the foundations of your first Poetry in Motion session with Vaila, the ground we map, release and rewrite from. A few honest minutes now can change where the deeper work begins.
Take the quizAs a curious creature with an appetite for life, you have probably tried a great deal by now. You've read the books, received the bodywork, exhausted your therapist. You've done the breathwork, the plant medicine and the yoga, signed up for the workshops and retreats, and whispered mantras into the dark, knowing there is more to be lived, that love and liberation sit just within tasting distance. Each moved something, for a while, and then the old pattern settled back like a season turning on itself.
What we carry lives too deep for insight alone, or for a good massage, to reach. This is closer to a form of therapy, working with the body, the mind and the subconscious together, until the old story and the tension it holds begin to loosen their grip.
Together we find a new story for you to step into, and then, over time, we make sure you can truly occupy it, filling that new space in your body and your mind rather than shrinking back into the old patterns, tensions and fears that keep you small and in discomfort. Change like this is lived, not glimpsed, which is why the work unfolds over a series of sessions rather than a single one.
After more than a decade of searching, this is the practice that finally moved me at my core. That depth, and that ease, is now my gift to you.
Vaila
The first of the three practices, offered on its own. Deep, integrative bodywork drawn from Eastern and Western traditions that works with the muscle and fascia, where the body stores its tension, defences and old patterns. Through slow, attentive touch, these held stories soften and release, freeing the body to move.
Where the real alchemy and change lie. This works on every dimension of the story at once, the body, the mind and the subconscious, so what shifts, shifts at every level. Twenty years of practice distilled into three hours, and more potent still repeated monthly. Your full archetype profile is included.