Grand Rising: Your Body's Weekly Invitation to What's Next

Some shows are meant to move your hips. Others move your calendar. This Grand Rising replay does both—Sheela Rahman holds down the weekly Humankind update solo, and what could be a straightforward event rundown becomes something warmer, more textured, more worth your Friday morning coffee and a stretch on the living room floor.

Grand Rising is Humankind's weekly Friday ritual: hosts Ryan Stober and Sheela Rahman gather the community threads—who's playing, what's shifting, where the energy's moving—and lay it all out in real time from Sedona. It's part calendar, part conversation, part energetic weather report. And when Sheela takes the helm alone, you get the full range: recap, preview, spontaneous bear footage, and a Venus retrograde reflection that lands less like astrology and more like permission.

What does a community update have to do with your body?

Everything, if you're paying attention. Sheela opens with a recap of the Tomorrow's Future event—a conversation with Matthew Bailey, Jace, Arcturus Ra, and Steven Sanchez on consciously integrating with AI. It's heady material, sure, but the way she frames it matters: not as something to intellectualize, but as something we're already dancing with, whether we know it or not. The future isn't out there; it's in the choices we make now, the tools we pick up, the rooms we show up in.

Then she shifts into the calendar: Frequency Friday, the On Humankind podcast gathering, Random Rab's two sound journeys, another Tomorrow's Future edition, Beyond the Veil Halloween ecstatic dance, Circo Bizarro, Little Fish with Govinda, and the new Tribalism percussion journey. It's a lot. But Sheela doesn't rush. She gives each offering space to breathe, inviting you to feel into what's calling—not what you should attend, but what your body actually wants.

Why does a bear-cam break matter on a dance floor?

Midway through, Sheela pauses for a live bear-cam look-in. It's spontaneous, a little goofy, deeply endearing. And it's a reminder that presence doesn't have to be precious. The best dance floors—and the best community spaces—hold room for the unplanned, the playful, the moment when you stop performing and just... are.

She follows it with a brief drum demo, pulling rhythm into the frame. It's not polished. It doesn't need to be. It's an invitation to feel percussion as conversation, as body language, as the thing that happens when you stop overthinking and let your hands remember what they know.

What does Venus retrograde want from your hips?

Sheela closes with reflections on Venus retrograde, offering journaling prompts around desire and purpose. It's not prescriptive astrology—it's an invitation to get curious. What do you actually want? Not what you think you should want, not what looks good on paper, but what makes your body say yes?

For dancers, this matters. We spend so much time in our heads—planning, analyzing, curating the perfect playlist. Venus retrograde asks us to drop below that, to let desire lead, to trust the body's intelligence. And if you're not sure what that looks like, this replay is a gentle place to start. Watch it while you stretch. Let Sheela's voice be the soundtrack to your morning movement. See what stirs.

Grand Rising isn't just about what's happening at Humankind. It's about what's happening in you—what wants to move, what wants to rest, what's ready to be danced into being. And sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is tune in, listen, and let your calendar become a love letter to your own aliveness.

▶ Watch the set on humankind →