background & approach
TUNING arose from and continues to develop through decades of movement study, creative & contemplative education, death care training, intuitive mentorship, and lived experience.
My exposure to facilitation, care & intuitive work, and somatic/attention practice began when I was very young. Many of my family members are practitioners of one sort or another — psychologists, psychics, social workers, writers, devoted meditators, guardians and caretakers — and my curiosity and inquiry into their vocational and personal work has been a consistent force throughout my life. With their support and guidance, I began to engage directly with a wide range of therapeutic and somatic modalities, and approaches to body and energy work from childhood onward.
Throughout late childhood, adolescence, and into my early 20s, I was also absorbed in ballet and contemporary dance training, as well as rigorous instruction in Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga practice and Pilates. Later on, I encountered Gaga, Alexander Technique, Klein Technique, and Feldenkrais, and felt deep resonance in their focus on subtlety, integration, and self-study as I began to untangle my embodied experience from earlier movement training.
After receiving a BA in philosophy in 2010, writing became my central focus, and alongside my own creative practice, I began to combine elements of experiment, procedure, movement, ritual, collaboration, chance, attention, reflection, and presence in generative workshops geared towards dancers and writers. Alongside these explorations and my own experiential study, I completed an MFA in poetry, then started Sema, an experiment in shared attention and community-making across time, form, and place. Since 2018, Sema has comprised a poetry-focused reading & workshop series, a group of micro-interviews with writers, and a podcast exploring themes of grief, death, and loss.
In the years after my MFA, I began to receive intensive intuitive mentorship from a family member, as well as training in death care, while continuing to facilitate group workshops and consult with individual writers on their work. As these various areas of experience and education wove together, a more synthesized approach to facilitation began to emerge for me. Named for Pauline Oliveros’ “Tuning Meditation” and informed by numerous contemplative, somatic, and therapeutic methods, as well as the work of Hilma af Klint, Ana Mendieta, CA Conrad, Hildegard von Bingen, and others, TUNING is a somatic, intuitive, creative, and spatial modality that works to support presence, ease, and attention in embodied experience.
TUNING works to support groups and individuals in opening and deepening attention, inviting connection, ease, and experiment with and beyond the body, and encouraging making and being practices rooted in curiosity and care. Group TUNING began in 2021 with group workshops in a virtual space with the hope of offering community, support, and pathways to nervous system regulation during a time of collective difficulty, and has since comprised in-person workshops that facilitate expansion of creative process, engagement with environment, and connection between individuals.
1:1 TUNING developed in tandem with these workshops, tailoring the group approach to support individual somatic balancing and release through subtle body work, creative visualization, breath practice, deep rest, and intuitive insight. Work with spaces applies these lenses to rooms, homes, and other areas of inhabitation, and creative facilitation provides somatically rooted entry points into writing, making, and collaborative + community work.
TUNING continues to evolve thanks to client and group practice, ongoing somatic study, and work with mentors and a group of fellow intuitives. More information about current offerings can be found here.
about
CL Young (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator based in Hailey, Idaho.
Through experiment with location, writing, objects, performance, installation, sound, text, and the body, CL works to record being-in-time and to bring attention to experiences where the material and nonmaterial meet. Young also facilitates TUNING, a somatic modality developed through decades of movement study, creative & contemplative education, death care training, intuitive mentorship, and lived experience.
Young is the author of multiple chapbooks, most recently Rose of No Man's Land (Belladonna* Collaborative), in collaboration with Emily Skillings, and What Is Revealed When I Reveal It to You (dancing girl press). CL’s work has appeared in public and performance spaces in Boise, Garden City, Seattle, Oakland, and Portland, OR, as well as in publications from Annulet, Entropy, Fonograf Editions, Lana Turner, Poetry Northwest, The Poetry Project, The Scofield, Sixth Finch, The Volta, and others.
Awarded a Literature Fellowship by the Idaho Commission on the Arts in 2020, Young holds an MFA in poetry from Colorado State University and has received support and time from Vermont Studio Center, Naropa University, Tin House, the Alexa Rose Foundation, Surel‘s Place, and The Common Well.