ART OF THE GONG · PHASE TWO
Mixed Movement Arts Immersion
Where the body becomes the instrument.
Phase Two of the Art of the Gong is where your training moves off the mat and into your muscles. Over seven immersion weekends with Nelson Leon, you'll build the strength, mobility, coordination, and presence to hold the gong, and hold space, with your whole body to support you.
An Education in the Body of a Facilitator
The Mixed Movement Arts Immersion is a progressive, seven-weekend movement education program built specifically to guide Phase Two of the Art of the Gong. It's not a fitness class bolted onto your sound training, it's a full curriculum, developed by Nelson Leon, that brings Yoga, Calisthenics, Mobility, Animal Movement, Striking, and Flow together into one integrated practice.
Rather than treating these disciplines as separate boxes to check, the immersion explores how they inform each other, how strength influences mobility, how mobility influences the way you move through space, how coordination shapes the way sound moves through you. The objective is simple to say and takes a year to live: to become a stronger, more mobile, more coordinated, more adaptable, and more embodied human being, someone who can bring real physical awareness and presence into the room every time they pick up a mallet.
Strength · Mobility · Coordination · Locomotion · Awareness · Expression · Flow
7 weekends · 70 hours · 6 disciplines · 2 flows
The Mixed Movement Arts Approach
Every discipline in this training was chosen because of what it teaches the one after it. Strength influences mobility. Mobility influences locomotion. Locomotion influences coordination. Coordination influences striking. Breath influences everything. That's the order the immersion moves in, and it's not arbitrary, it's a built progression, each weekend laying the groundwork for the next.
YOGA → CALISTHENICS → MOBILITY → ANIMAL → STRIKING → FLOW
01. Yoga
"I become aware."
Structure, breath, and awareness
02. Calisthenics
"I develop strength and control."
Strength, control, and physical integrity.
03. Mobility
"I develop range and adaptability."
Range, articulation, and adaptability
04. Animal Movement
"I learn to travel."
Locomotion, coordination, and spatial intelligence
05. Striking
"I develop intention and expression."
Intention, rhythm, power, and expression
06. Flow
"I integrate everything."
Integration, continuity, and embodiment
The Physical Dimension
of the Gong Master
Holding space through sound asks something of the whole person, not just the ear. The Gong Master develops the ability to facilitate transformative experiences through sound, and the Mixed Movement Arts Immersion exists to develop the other half of that capacity, the physical and embodied dimension of the practitioner.
This training builds body awareness, physical confidence, mobility, strength, coordination, spatial awareness, breath awareness, adaptability, presence, and embodied leadership. The intention isn't to make you a better athlete. It's to help you become more capable of inhabiting your own body while holding space for others, because the steadiness a facilitator carries in their body is felt by everyone in the room before a single note is played.
A strong body. A mobile body. An adaptable body. An aware mind. An embodied presence.
The Journey Ahead
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Seven Weekends, One Progression
MODULE 1
BUDOKON YOGA PRIMARY SERIES
Breath, Structure & Awareness
The opening immersion establishes the foundation of the whole system through the Budokon Yoga Primary Series. You'll explore yoga as a dynamic movement practice, where breath, posture, strength, and transition stay continuously connected, working through standing positions, ground positions, spinal and hip movement, shoulder organization, core integration, and balance. By the end of the weekend, you'll have the foundation for conscious movement and real familiarity with the Primary Series itself.
MODULE 2
CALISTHENICS FUNDAMENTALS
Strength Through Control
Calisthenics introduces your own body as its training instrument. You'll build structural integrity, core control, scapular organization, and joint stability, then put it into practice through push, pull, squat, and lunge patterns, core work, support positions, hanging, and ground-based strength. You'll leave with real foundational strength and the control to move safely through different positions.
MODULE 3
MOBILITY, FLOOR PATTERNS
Move Through the Ground
The floor stops being a place to stretch and becomes a movement environment in its own right. You'll work through active versus passive range, joint articulation, ground connection, weight transfer, and level changes, then apply it through squatting, hip switches, the shin box, sit-throughs, back steps, and floor-based mobility sequences. You'll come out of this weekend with more confidence moving through and around the ground.
MODULE 4
ANIMAL MOVEMENT PATTERNS
Locomotion & Adaptability
Here the training shifts from exploring positions to moving dynamically through space. Quadrupedal movement, contralateral coordination, weight shifting, and spatial awareness build into beast, ape, bear, and crab patterns, crawling patterns, and traveling variations. You'll leave with real coordination, adaptability, and spatial intelligence, built through movement that's as old as the body itself.
MODULE 5
STRIKING FUNDAMENTALS
Intention, Power & Expression
Striking introduces a new quality to the training entirely: directed intention. Stance, balance, footwork, and rotation build into punches, kicks, defensive movement, and evasion. You'll finish this weekend experiencing movement as an expression of intention, coordinating your whole body, ground through legs, hips, spine, shoulder, and arm, to generate and redirect force.
MODULE 6
INTEGRATED MOVEMENT FLOWS
Everything Becomes One
The first Flow immersion begins weaving together every movement language you've built so far. Continuity, rhythm, tempo, breath, direction, and level changes become one continuous movement vocabulary. You'll leave this weekend beginning to understand how different movement disciplines can become a single, continuous language.
MODULE 7
INTEGRATED MOVEMENT FLOWS II
Integration & Embodiment
The final immersion introduces your second complete movement flow and serves as the culmination of the entire program. Every discipline returns here, yoga, calisthenics, mobility, animal movement, striking, and flow, and this time the goal isn't to memorize a sequence, it's to understand the movement principles underneath it. This is where the training becomes fully yours.
More Than Movement
This isn't fitness content dressed up as training. It's the physical education every serious sound facilitator eventually needs, whether they know it yet or not. A Gong Master who can only sit still and play is only half-prepared for the demands of holding a real ceremony: the stamina, the presence, the nervous system regulation, the ability to stay grounded while a room moves through something big.
The Mixed Movement Arts Immersion builds that other half, deliberately, over a full year, so that by the time you complete Phase Two, your body is as prepared to hold space as your ear is.
Your Guide Through This Training
Nelson Leon is the co-founder of SimiusLife and the architect of the Mixed Movement Arts Immersion. His own path runs through Budokon Yoga, calisthenics, and martial arts, he's a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu blue belt with IBJJF titles to his name, and before any of that, he was a state and national champion in the 400m and 800m. That's not a resume line, it's the reason his teaching feels the way it does: Nelson has spent his life understanding movement from the inside, as an athlete, as a martial artist, and now as an educator.
At NAMO, Nelson has spent years guiding movement classes that weave together exactly the disciplines this immersion is built from, teaching students how the body develops through motion and how stillness of mind comes from strength within. Phase Two is the full expression of that teaching, brought together into one complete, progressive curriculum for the Gong Masters coming up through NAMO Sanctuary.
Is this your next step?
This training is for Gong Masters already on the Art of the Gong path, and for anyone who's completed Phase One and is ready to bring the same devotion to their body that they've already brought to their ear. It's for the practitioner who wants to facilitate from a place of real physical presence, not just technical skill. It's for the mover who already knows their body has more to teach them. And it's for anyone ready to spend a year building the strength, mobility, and embodied confidence that holding space for others actually requires.
Previous movement experience isn't required, calisthenics, martial arts, and animal locomotion backgrounds aren't prerequisites here. What's required is Phase One, and a genuine willingness to show up, every month, for the version of yourself this training is building.
The Shape of the Journey
Phase Two runs as 7 immersion weekends, once a month, always the last weekend of the month, held in person at NAMO Sanctuary in Wynwood. Each weekend follows the same rhythm:
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Friday, 6 to 8pm | arrival, orientation, philosophy, theory, and preparation for the weekend ahead.
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Saturday, 2 to 6pm | the movement laboratory: technical development, functional anatomy, partner exploration, and progressive practice.
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Sunday, 10am to 2pm | integration: locomotion, transitions, flow, application, and reflection.
That's 10 hours of hands-on training per weekend, 70 hours across the full program. Between weekends, your practice continues at home through personal movement work, video demonstrations, movement homework, reflection, partner practice, and flow memorization, the training doesn't pause just because the weekend ends.
Weekend | Month | Module |
|---|---|---|
1 | September 2026 | Budokon Yoga Primary Series |
2 | October 2026 | Calisthenics Fundamentals |
3 | November 2026 | Mobility, Floor Patterns |
— | December | Break, independent practice |
4 | January 2027 | Animal Movement Patterns |
5 | February 2027 | Striking Fundamentals |
6 | March 2027 | Integrated Movement Flows I |
7 | April 2027 | Integrated Movement Flows II |
— | May 2027 | Reserved for final integration |
Questions Before You Begin
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Do I need movement experience to start? No. Phase Two is designed to build you up from wherever your body is right now.
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What if I miss a weekend? Reach out directly, consistency matters for this training, and Nelson can talk through what makeup work looks like for your situation.
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Is this available online? Phase Two is held in person at NAMO Sanctuary in Wynwood, this training is built around hands-on, in-studio movement work.
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What do I get at the end? A Certificate of Completion issued by Nelson Leon and SimiusLife, along with a full year of embodied training you'll carry into every session you facilitate.
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How is Phase Two different from Phase One? Phase One builds your relationship with the gong itself, the sound, the technique, the inner journey. Phase Two builds the physical instrument that carries all of it, your own body.
