Zoë Kosovic

My journey to becoming a yoga instructor began in earnest in 2014 when I took an overnight bus ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco. After walking for hours, I met up with a friend for a 2-hour Zumba-thon. Leaving class, I noticed a little heat coming from the upper part of my left calf. My friend and I rested for a couple hours, but later that evening, we were back out on the town dancing. It was so much fun! I got so injured!

I returned to Los Angeles limping, and driving a manual transmission car in the stop-and-go traffic of that sprawling city, my poor left leg got little rest. I started experiencing constant pain that kept me from participating in the activities that brought me joy. My body and spirit felt cranky all the time.

I took my struggling left side to every healthcare practitioner the L.A. wellness landscape had to offer. I tried chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, physical therapy, nutritional therapy, energy work, Applied Kinesiology, foam rolling, and even consulted a medical intuitive and a shaman. Every single skilled provider came up empty-handed when trying to determine and treat the root cause of my injury. Having been mishandled and mistreated by enough (mostly) well-meaning yoga instructors whose hands-on adjustments didn’t consider either my unique musculoskeletal morphology or my trauma history, I didn’t feel like public yoga classes were a safe place for my body. I decided to begin a regular home-based yoga practice where I had space to experiment and experience my body free from external pressures.

My transformation didn’t occur overnight, but as I learned strategies to strengthen the areas that were weak, stretch the areas that were tight, and listen to my internal cues, my body found its way into harmon and I experienced the immense relief and blessing of living pain-free. After enjoying the fruits of my home practice for a few years, in 2017, I became excited to share what I had discovered: an empowering, resilience-oriented, self-paced, consent-based, trauma-responsive movement practice. As soon as I moved from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz, I enrolled in a yoga teacher training.

I’m driven by a desire to offer practical tools and strategies for individuals to free themselves from whatever compromises their sense of well-being. If that sounds like an unrealistic goal, consider that studies are showing that regular mindful physical movement demonstrates the greatest promise of any intervention in addressing complex PTSD by repatterning of a sense of safety and agency in the body. Movement can be powerful medicine.

Wilding brings together the tools and practices that have been the most impactful to my healing, well-being, an maintenace. Wilding brings together mindful movement, breathwork, vocal toning, meditation, emotional energetics, self-massage, and deep rest to care for each facet of our beings while holding the greater picture that we are interconnected. We are an expression of nature.

Wilding taps into the science of flow state to create an immersive experience that incorporates a variety of therapeutic practices including, dynamic movement in all planes, interoceptive mapping an intuitive movement through pandiculation, integrated movement and breath, resilience training through muscular energetic tissue adaptation, brain-balancing exercises for neuroplasticity, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation stretching (PNF), vagus nerve adaptation through breathwork and vocal toning, nerve flossing, self-massage and percussive bodywork, emotional energetics, and self-compassion training.

At its core, Wilding aims to teach you how to listen to your body — how to access your intuition, feel your feelings, and create a trusting relationship with yourself. As a tool for healing, transforming, and navigating the world at this time, we offer Wilding as a fertile training ground to cultivate the qualities and skills you wish to embody in your relationships and the rest of your life.

In an attempt to offer proper credit and respect to the practices and lineages that make our work possible, within the scope of Wilding, you may encounter practices reminiscent of yoga, qi gong, martial arts, EFT tapping, holotropic, pranayama, and vocal training breathwork, Feldenkrais, functional range conditioning, somatic experiencing, generative somatics, interpersonal neurobiology, Tibetan tantric Buddhist meditation, Eastern and Western mystical traditions, neuromuscular bodywork, structural integration, Reiki, energy medicine, Swedish, Thai, Shiatu, and acupressure massage, and more. While some similarities are intentional, other overlap is purely coincidental as human movement is universal. Movement itself is forever free and cannot be owned. ✺