This past weekend, I had the honour of guiding a Breathwork, Cacao, and Pasifika Movement workshop with the extraordinary women of Pitch Face Choir. Over one hundred women gathered — hearts open, bodies ready, voices alive. We came together to breathe, to move, to reconnect with the lands and waters that have carried us.
Leading up to this, my own heart was heavy. I had just received the news that my uncle — my mum’s brother, Joe Stanley or as we called him Uncle Sale — had passed away. He was a man full of music, stories, and wisdom. An economist who travelled the Pacific, helping island nations understand their economic positions. A man who, when I was six years old, welcomed us to his home in New Caledonia with a piano, laughter, and endless songs.
He would play Tom Jones, Elvis Presley, and Engelbert Humperdinck while I twirled around him — his music filling the room with joy. I can still see his eyes lighting up as he spoke with Mum about their childhood, their years on the cacao plantations. I used to record their conversations, wanting to hold onto every story — how he’d cleverly assign the hardest weeding jobs to his brothers and sisters, keeping the easier tasks for himself, laughing as he told it. He carried so much knowledge about how their father, my papa, ran the plantations — the rhythms of business, the seasons of harvest, the value of labour and land.
When he spoke about those days, his voice softened, and his eyes shone, tears would appear. Those memories were his music too.
So as I entered the workshop space, I carried him with me. His stories. His laughter. His songs.
We began with breathwork — breathing in our intentions, breathing out our blessings for the community we moved with. The cacao grounded us, connecting us to the earth, to memory, to the unseen. Then we dedicated our movements — each woman dancing for someone or something that had supported her through life’s storms: a loved one, a river, a tree, a mountain.
As we moved, I danced for my uncle — for the piano, for the plantations, for all the stories he carried that now live in me.
We breathed, we wept, we laughed. Together, we softened into grace.
Because that’s what movement does — it brings us home to ourselves, to each other, and to those we’ve loved who now move with the wind.
For my uncle —
whose hands once touched cacao, whose songs filled our hearts,
and whose laughter still dances in the breath between worlds.
