About Body Comes to Mind
Everything we create starts with one question: How can we help you stay connected to yourself in the midst of it all?
Body Comes to Mind began from lived experience: how our own embodied practice positively changed that way we moved through the weight of work and relationship pressures. At the same time, we recognize how much women are holding.
Many of us have learned to adapt to a culture that rewards certainty, control, and pushing through—often at the expense of the more subtle intelligence available through the body, through feeling, through relationship, and through a steadier connection to ourselves.
As we work with embodied awareness in ourselves, with clients, and with others, we kept seeing a similar shift: moving from relating to ourselves from the outside in to experiencing our own center and alignment from the inside out.
We want to offer work that is practical and immediate — something you experience, not just think about — and that fits inside a life that’s already full, rather than adding another “project” to your schedule.
Our vision for this space is an open, exploratory place where you can experiment and discover what works for you when your whole system is part of the conversation.
Here you’ll find openings, pressure points to work with, and explore ways through your challenges — not around them — all within an overarching commitment to integrity: making choices that align with what really matters to you. A space where your body is an ally, not an afterthought.
What we have designed for you are practices you can weave into your days — moments you can drop into during or between your obligations, or taking deeper time when that’s available. Our intention is that your sense of enoughness, confidence and clarity become part of your lived experience, not something sitting on a distant to‑do list.
Who you are
We imagine this space benefiting women who recognize the desire to shed the cloak of expectations and sink into their own sense of connection — because of, and sometimes in spite of, the roles they hold.
You might be
- Working in high pressure settings with expectations to perform, but actually needing to outperform
- Caring for others while realizing you’ve been neglecting yourself for a bit too long
- Moving through a major transition and noticing that somewhere in the hullabaloo, you’ve lost touch with yourself.
Whatever your role, you know a lot is being asked of you, and you’re no longer willing to lose yourself in the process.
Our commitment is to help you create a felt sense of steady ground under all the busyness; simple practices you can weave into real life; a place in yourself where you can continually return, regardless of what’s going on around you.
Why this works
Concepts alone don’t create the kind of inner shift this work is pointing toward. Meaningful, sustainable change asks for your whole system—not just one part of you. Our work uses simple practices to help you notice what’s happening in your body, brain, and heart, and to make choices from there in real time.
We call this approach Embodied Exploration®. It is our way of teaching embodied awareness through practices that meet you right where you are. It’s a practical, evidence‑informed approach rooted in neuroscience, somatic awareness, and personal leadership, designed for full, complex lives. Over time, a sense of stability becomes part of your normal, not something you access only on retreat or in rare quiet moments.
As you move through these practices, you learn to:
Sense into your body. What is your head saying? Your heart? Your gut? Each has a role to play and offers information you can use to guide you through your everyday — and not so everyday — challenges.
Recognize your patterns. When you pay attention to your whole system, you begin to notice patterns you’ve developed over time—many of which have supported you, and some of which may no longer serve you.
Make different choices in the moments that matter. As you get to know your patterns and practice choosing in real time, you become more able to respond instead of react — not only in everyday situations, but also when the pressure is rising and you need to be at your best: confident, decisive, connected and loving.
Ways to work with us
“Embodiment brings us back to the place where we can choose again—where we remember what we’re capable of and how we want to live our lives.”
– Kimberly Woodland
Your guides
We are both occupational therapists, experienced embodiment teachers, and long-time Aikido practitioners with over 30 years of training. We’ve spent years in high‑pressure healthcare environments and in dedicated practice spaces, learning what it takes to stay present and responsive when a lot is on the line.
Through Body Comes to Mind, we have weaved together all our experiences, creating a space where the whole of you can be part of the process.
We’re not here to sell quick fixes or performance hacks. We’re here to offer an open, curious, connected, and inspired space you can keep coming back to — a space that helps you remember what feels most true in you.
Co‑founder, Embodiment Expert,
Coach, Trainer & Author
Karin works at the intersection of embodiment, awareness development and leadership, helping professionals and leaders build inner strength, access a deeper level of consciousness, and navigate high‑pressure environments without losing themselves in the process. She designs and leads programs that support people, teams and organizations in moving from reaction to response, sensing opportunities in complex systems.
Read Karin's full bio
Karin’s path into this work began on the Aikido mat. Years ago, she struggled to train with one particular partner. And the harder she tried to fix it, the worse it got. Then one day, facing him, she saw fear in his eyes. That moment stopped her.
It made her look honestly at her own patterns of connection, with herself and with others. She realized Aikido was mirroring exactly what wasn’t working, while also handing her the tools to change it. Slowly, as she applied those tools on the mat, the relationship shifted. The man who had felt like an opponent became one of her most important teachers. Whenever their practice faltered, she instantly knew she’d stepped back into an old pattern.
What surprised her most was that the shift didn’t stay on the mat. She began noticing different responses from people around her at work and in everyday interactions. As an occupational therapist, that was impossible to ignore. It sent her deep into study: the philosophy of Aikido, the neuroscience of the brain-body connection, behavioral change, leadership. Anything that could help explain why something so physical could change so much else.
For more than three decades since, Karin has designed and led programs for individuals, teams, and organizations across Europe and beyond, as founder of Ki to Change. Her work integrates systemic coaching, Aikido, and somatic practice with a grounded understanding of how stress and nervous system patterns shape everyday behavior. Rather than offering strategies that live only in the head, she invites people into experiments they can feel in their bodies. She supports people to move in ways that are more aligned, more intelligent and more impactful.
Karin’s collaboration with Kimberly Woodland led to the early roots of Body Comes to Mind. Together, they developed an online course for medical students at Erasmus Medical University, offering practical tools for stress regulation and burnout prevention that could be applied right inside busy clinical training. That work continues to shape the Embodied Exploration® method and the way BCM courses and labs are built: experiential, accessible, and woven into daily life rather than added on top.
In her sessions and group programs, Karin creates spaces where people can slow down enough to notice what’s actually happening in them — physically, emotionally, relationally — without judgment. From there, she helps them explore how to respond instead of react, sense what truly matters, and stay oriented to their own center even when things are moving quickly. Her approach is clear and spacious: no fixing, no performance — just a steady invitation to come back to what feels most true, and let that guide the next step.
Karin lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands, where she now trains and teaches at her own aikido dojo – the same practice that started it all. When you get on the mat with her you’ll notice how she integrates what she learned herself: she slows things down, asks you to feel before you fix, and treats every stumble as information rather than failure.
She loves getting out in nature to hike and bike. In the spare time that is left she works in her yard, socializes with friends and loves going to the art house movie theaters in town.
In everything she does she is modeling the same gentle persistence she invites in others.
Co‑founder, Embodiment Expert,
Occupational Therapist & Facilitator
Kimberly is a seasoned healthcare provider and facilitator who specializes in burnout prevention, wellness, and resilience, with a focus on how nervous system awareness can support sustainable ways of working and living. Drawing on three-plus decades of Aikido practice and extended experience in high‑acuity settings, she develops and guides curricula that help individuals and teams tap into their innate strengths and reconnect with their bodies in everyday life.
Read Kimberly's full bio
Kimberly entered the healthcare system later in life, after decades on the Aikido mat and years of embodiment study with her teacher, Wendy Palmer. And when she did, she noticed something that surprised her: In an environment where the pressure to perform wore many thin, she found herself less rattled by the pace, more able to stay connected to the people in front of her, and quicker to recover after high-stakes moments. It wasn’t luck or temperament. She could trace it directly back to years on the mat and the embodiment training that came with it. That recognition became a kind of calling: if staying connected to herself made this much difference, it could make a difference for others too.
As an occupational therapist, facilitator, and embodiment practitioner, she worked alongside clinicians, patients, and families in moments when a great deal was at stake. Those years only confirmed what she’d first noticed in herself: sustainable well-being requires more than good intentions and information. It calls for a tangible connection to the body as a source of guidance, steadiness, and choice.
In 2018, Kimberly founded The Body Comes to Mind Foundation with the mission of promoting resilience and embodied awareness. Together with Karin Karis, she co-developed an online course for medical students at Erasmus Medical University focused on wellness and burnout prevention. This collaboration became one of the seeds of the current Body Comes to Mind offerings, anchoring them in both lived experience and evidence-informed practice.
Kimberly’s teaching and facilitation style is calm, invitational, and grounded in real life. She creates learning spaces that give room for people to arrive as they are, yet structured enough to support gentle experimentation with new patterns — whether that means shifting attention from head to center, noticing breath on a busy day, or exploring how it feels to say “no” from a more centered place. Rather than asking people to add more to their to-do lists, she helps them weave simple practices into the flow of their existing days.
Alongside her work with Body Comes to Mind, Kimberly continues to work as an occupational therapist, develop curricula, consult on course content, and participate in research exploring embodied awareness and the Embodied Exploration® method as pathways to sustainable well-being.
Kimberly recently stepped away from the script and now lives a nomad life in her 19′ Airstream, Mili, pulled by her Chevy Silverado companion, Ashe. Choosing a lifestyle rooted in attention and connection to the natural world, she finds creativity and joy in the smaller shifts. Her ongoing practice, time in the middle of beautiful nowhere, and commitment to the health of her own nervous system, all inform the steadiness and practicality she brings to her work with others.
Follow Kimberly’s journey’s on Substack
Connect with her in LinkedIn
Together, they’re committed to creating spaces where you can slow down, notice what’s happening in you, and practice new ways of being—without performance, fixing, or pressure to “get it right.”
An invitation to begin with this simple practice
If you’re ready to connect with yourself so you can keep showing up far what – and who – matters, you don’t have to make a big leap. You can start with a single simple practice and notice what shifts from there.
