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https://www.youtube.com/live/W_2DkWIKrt0?si=PYpNyW4EghFsFR6F Streamed live on May 2, 2022 Excellent. All right, we are in action. We're gonna do a class today, a Roll Play class, a somatic inquiry practice today, where we enter into our awareness, and then we allow flow. So, we allow our bodies to become more fluid. We could actually think of flow–it's very easy to think of flow with the water element–but we can also think of flow with fire, or flow with air, or even flow with earth. I think of things like "flow with fire" being like molten lava. And flow with earth; it also could be molten lava, fire, earth, and what? And fluidity. But also mud–like mud moving to have that flow. So that the flow doesn't have to be limited to just the water element. So, let's first enter into sensation in our own bodies. Feeling into what it feels like to be you in your body today. And all of this practice–you can do it lying down, you can do it standing up, you could do it doing the dishes, you could do it on a walk, you can do it lying in bed, or on a couch. However it feels good to you. And you could do very little, nothing movement, or very micro, tiny breath movement and not much else, or you can really go wild and move as much as you want. So make this work for you. I'm on a physioball. So, let's just come into our awareness and as we're coming into our sense of awareness–what is our sense of awareness? It's all of our senses, it's the looker, the person feeling the things, the person seeing the things; it's the awareness inside. Maybe it doesn't have a whole bunch of emotional content, but we are feeling into sensation. And we're going to invite that sensation to become a bodily experience. Our awareness will travel through our whole body. So, as I'm talking, I can already start to feel these sort of waves going out through my arms and my legs. I'm on this ball, so there's natural movement happening. Let's engage our awareness and then let's allow movement–so it's not like, I'm going to move my arm like this now; I'm moving my arms like this and then like that. It's more like I'm just letting them do whatever feels interesting. I'm allowing my body to unwind. Or it could even rev up, but I'm listening to the sensation, arriving in my body, and just allowing it to play out in any way that feels good, in any kind of free-form play. That is the best thing. I think when we're in play, we're not planning out every move specifically. So it's really about allowing and receiving the desire of your own body without you having to think about it. So it's not “I think my arms should do this and then they should do that.” It's more like, ahhhhhhh, hmmmmmm, listening, and allowing, and following the impulses that arrive. So this could happen in slow motion, it could happen quickly, and it's almost like you're just receiving yourself on this different level. So it's not receiving in the thought processes and what happened in the day, and it's not receiving in the already busy mind. It's receiving the sensations of the body and allowing them to mobilize in whatever big or small ways feel good. So it could be micro movement, and I like to say there's always micro movement underlying everything, but if we tune our awareness to that micro movement, it's easier to feel things when they're in motion. If I just have this little wave movement happening, I can be very aware of it, and then I can invite in this playful, free flow into my body where it gets to explore, and since I'm actually on this ball there's the extra element of like whoa what if I let myself really go? What can happen, right? I can fall off. I can have some freedom with the ball. I can see–I can roll myself around and see–what's gonna happen, giving myself a little more freedom, maybe coming onto my belly. One thing I like to offer is: imagine you are an alien that's just arrived in this human body and you have no idea what it can do. So you're in your human body, and you're just learning what's possible. Or you're in your human body with a physioball. What can happen here? What is possible? What are the options? It's very much an exploration and a somatic inquiry practice because we're not planning something. We're just going in to listen, to allow, and to find what's interesting in there. And sometimes you might find a place that feels particularly delicious, like this one I just found, ahhhhhh. So maybe you want to let yourself be there for a couple of breaths. So there's a thing that we do called predictive processing where your brain is taking in reality in accord with what it knows from the past. So maybe it says, “oh I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to do that, and then I'm going to do this,” but if we let go of that as soon as we notice that we have a plan, then we just go somewhere else. So as soon as I say, “oh, I'm going to do this thing now,” like “oh, I'm going to roll forward,” instead I just go “nope, I'm going to do something different.” So I'm giving my body this capacity to take over, as opposed to my mind planning what's going to happen. Hmmmmmmm. Kids in play, when they're really charging around in free flow play–does that happen anymore? There's not a whole lot of planning. It can be a little risky, right? “Oh, I could fall over.” So, I'm not asking you to fall over, to be unsafe in any way–unless you feel like you have the capacity to catch yourself–but inviting in this free flow. I'm going to get rid of the ball and take it down to the floor. Once I come into the floor, it's not as bouncy as the ball, obviously, but I can now start to pour my body around. And again, I felt myself make-up a plan, so I just changed it. Whenever you start to feel like you know the pattern; do something different. This is how we learn new things, by not doing the same pattern over and over, but trying something different. You can really slow down and let yourself settle, or you can speed up and amp up if that feels good. For me, right now, like just ooohhhhh, now that I've connected to the ground, it feels delicious to be here. Even feeling the hardness of the ground, it's like there's something very comforting for me connecting to the earth, connecting to this wood floor, and this oriental rug. And then these different flows emerge. I still feel very connected to my arms, and it's almost like I'm in the ocean and my arms are like sea grasses, or like octopus tentacles. Just feeling out the space around me. As I start to notice that, I become aware of my spine, and the fluidity possible within my spine; if I'm not holding and rigidly forcing anything to happen, I'm just allowing and listening. So when I tune into that fluidity of my spine, I can feel the density of the bony structures from my head to my tail, and my pelvis, my scapula. I can feel that earthy density, and I can also have this fluid movement in my guts, this fluid movement in the relationships of my parts. We are this system of biotensegrity, and it's alive, it's biomorphic, it can shift and change and do all sorts of things, adjusting and adapting in ways that just feel good or feel interesting. So, you're inviting yourself to dive into the I-don't-know-what, the exploration. And if you feel like you know it, then shift it, change it to something less concrete, less knowable. The invitation is to dive into your awareness without knowing what the flow has to offer, without having a plan ahead of it. Yeah, and my flow has become much more earthy and much more angular. In Laban (Laban Movement Analysis) one way that we define flow is that it's not stopping. So if I pause, that shifts the flow. I can pause and arrive again in my awareness and then just allow the flow–the movement to start happening again. Haaaaaaaaaa. And I'm really inviting in this ahhhhhh, ummmmm sound because it gives me more sensation. And if I listen in, and feel into the vibration of that sound in my head, it gives me other information about my movement; it frees up the pattern even more just by paying attention to it. Aaaaaahhhhhh, breathing into it. Making sound if that feels good. Yeah, so for some people it's very uncomfortable to make sound; it feels very judgmental and “oh my god, I can't do that.” If that's where you are, maybe start to let go of some of that judgment on yourself about what you can and can't do. Let your persona, your personality become more fluid so there's more space, and when you make sound, it's not about judging that you've become the perfect opera singer or you're suddenly Prince, right? Or Maria Callas. It's none of that. It's just, “ahhhhhhh, mmmmmmm, I can make sound, and I can take up space making sound. As I’m making sound, I'm vibrating the tissue in my body in different ways, so my awareness is going to shift. Yeah, I feel like for me now that I'm seated up again I'm feeling these different spirals, like whirlpools and eddies, coming up through my spine, or up through my torso, up through the tissue around my spine. So if we want to have freedom in our spine, we want to then free up the tissue around it. We also want to free up the space inside of it. So we've got the cerebrospinal fluid, which is nourishing our brain, and it's also bolstering our brain and our spinal cord, and it's clearing away waste. It's filtering through our system, bringing nutrition and oxygen, and taking away waste. So as I'm moving, I’m thinking about the fluidity of that cerebrospinal fluid in there, which is also the closest thing in our body to fresh water, right? It's not salty. Aaaaaaahhhh, so we have this flowing cerebrospinal fluid supporting our brain, supporting our nervous system, supporting our spinal cord. And it's filtering three or four times a day through there. Aaaaaahhhh, so what if you listen into that? What is the flow of that fluid? What is the density? The speed? Hmmmmmmm. When I really start to listen into that, it shifts my whole tempo. Allowing yourself to play with that idea. Hmmmmmm. Yeah, and when I make those odd mmmmm sounds, I have this image of some of those fascial sheaths in our brain that are separating the quadrants. So we've got that tentorium cerebelli, or is it cerebelli tentorium? It goes both ways; it is a sheath of connective tissue. It's like if we pull on our ears, it's like in here, in and up creating these tents between the upper and the lower half of our brain, along here. We can pull down on our ears to move it. So just feeling into that as a supportive diaphragm in our body, like the supportive diaphragm of our breath, under our lungs, supportive muscle and massive connective tissue going on there too. And then down into our pelvic floor, again, so we have these relationships of our head, our ribs, our pelvis. And we can think of the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet also having that kind of diaphragmatic shape, right? Right in here. What does that diaphragmatic shape in our bodies offer us? What kind of support do we have coming from there? Right? So for our feet it helps us with the rebound from the earth as we step down. In our hands it allows us to cup things and hold things in there, right? If this was just flat what would happen when you tried to hold something? This is also where the glabrous skin is and that is skin that helps us to regulate temperature. So if we're hot, cooling the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet and our forehead are ways of cooling down. We want to cool those down if we're starting to really overheat. Throwing your legs outside of the covers of your bed when you're too hot and letting your feet be free does so much for your body. And if you're at the opposite if you're hypo–hypothermia, hypothermia hyperthermia–the one where you're too cold, you want to warm up your hands and your feet, the extremities. So tuning into those areas and that they all sort of relate to each other, these diaphragms in our body. I can move my foot around and it's affecting my pelvic floor, as my pelvic floor is being moved by my foot; that's also coming up here and affecting my diaphragm, right? We're one whole connected body, this system of biotensegrity. Yeah, a lot of the models that we've been using in the fitness world are really not the best models for what's possible in human bodies, even the medical, like allopathic medicine. Sometimes it's great, sometimes we really need that, but there's so much more possibility and potential when we really integrate and relate with our bodies in different ways. Ahhhhhhh. Letting yourself shift and adjust and again bringing it back to: what am I noticing now? Where's my awareness now? What's happening now? Is there something I'm holding on to, and not softening or releasing? Is there something where I'm blocking my own flow? That is what most humans do. So how do I soften that gripping, or that forcing, or that tension? How do I let that go? Get into the wu wei of the Tao: do nothing, accomplish everything. That's really, in many ways, what it is when we get into these flows, and we're really letting it happen. It's not us doing it. It's the allowing. We might just be following it: “Oh, that feels good. Let me follow that some more. Well, that's interesting. Let me follow that. Oh, I feel something. I can relieve... I can let go of some of that tension because now that I've been feeling up here, I feel the strange tension somewhere else. It's come into my awareness. Now that I know it's there, I can let some of it go.” Breathing. You can also just imagine that you're dancing with the space around you, that you're being partnered by this three-dimensional space, this up-down, side-side, forward-backward. Or the air, and thinking of how the air has that–the air can just do whatever it wants. The air has this total freedom. Aaaaaahhhhhhh. It can come into my lungs and go out, going into the cat's lungs. He is over there on the chair out of your vision, wrapping around over there and then coming through over here. Hmmmmm. This thing that we live in and it sustains our life, and yet we have–what kind of relationship do we have with our air? What do I feel when I want to touch the air or let the air touch me? Hmmmmmmmmm. Can I be in a loving relationship with the air? Hmmmmmm. I have a new relationship; it's with the air. We love each other so much. Yeah, the air fills me up, and then it goes away, and then it comes back. Aaaaahhhh, but it always comes back. The air always comes back to me, and I don't have to do anything; it just comes back. Can I find the flow of energy between me and the air? Can I light that up with some awareness, with some aliveness? Hmmmmmm. Yeah, and this can happen, and you could be on the floor in a chair moving around in any way that feels good. You can dance with me. Aaaaaaahhhh. You can dance with the air, with the room, with your clothes, or you can just be still. Maybe you're in your bed. Maybe you can feel the sheets, and maybe you can imagine the sheets have consciousness. Hmmmmmm. What if I listen to the sheets? What if I listen to the walls of the room? What are they saying? Huh? What if I shift my awareness around to take in the whole house? It's like meta. What if I take in all the neighborhood? Neighbors and the neighborhood, and I'm dancing with the neighbors in the neighborhood? Or just moving in a tiny way. Maybe there's one neighbor over there calling me. They don't even know they're calling me, right? They don't even know I'm dancing with them. Hmmmmmm. Or that I'm dancing with the city. I'm dancing with Kingston. “What did you do today?” “I danced with the town.” I have two new relationships: the relationship with the air, and then the relationship with my town. Haaaaaaaaa. Actually, the town relationship and the air, they're not new ones, but we've bolstered things up, and I can feel the wonder of it. I can feel the gratitude for being here, for this space. And then when I start to think about the space and the awareness of the ancestors and the First Nations people that were here before, the stewards of the land. Ummmmmmmm. Can I be a steward of the land for what comes next? For what comes later, for the children, and the children's children, and the other plants, and animals, and creatures? Hmmmmmm. Bringing the awareness back to the awareness. Hmmmmm. Giving yourself permission to move, to make noise, to enjoy being in a human body in whatever way. It could be so tiny, just a little extra breath today. Sometimes the smallest little thing is the biggest gift, the smallest little change is the most delicious thing. Oooohhhhh. Yeah, the smallest little relief. Ooooooohhhh. Can I let go of that extra tension I was holding in my belly? Oooooooh. Can I notice it? Can I say, “Oh, hello there, I see what's going on.” Maybe I can soften a little bit of that. Maybe I can let go. Hmmmmmm. Yeah, so the micro movement can just be any kind of tiny little movement. It can underlie the big macro movement like the string section that's bolstering up the rest of the orchestra, right? Strings...maybe they could be the macro movement. It really depends. Let's say–who's the drone? Maybe the drone is the micro and the rest of the sound is the macro. Maybe the drone–and maybe it's the reverse. You can use whatever kind of metaphor works for you, but there are so many layers of things happening, and you can shift your awareness from one to another, right? We've taken in a dance with the whole neighborhood, but now I'm just dancing with my skin. What happens when I'm dancing with my skin? And my awareness is dancing with my skin? Sometimes we really think of the skin from the outside surface, but what's it like on the inside surface of my skin, inside my body? So, inside my body there's my skin, then underneath that is the superficial fascia. What's it feel like under there between those two layers? And maybe it's just my imagination that's sensing into those layers. Can I feel them in my whole body? Hmmmmmm. Alive and awake, awake inside, awake to myself, not necessarily awake to the outer world but awake to my inner experience, awake to my relationship with myself. It's interesting because I work with dancers, and I do a lot of moving meditation for dancers, because they've spent their whole life feeling into their body. So to become the body in this dynamic interrelated way is delicious and so much fun. It could be threatening if people haven't done it before. And if they've really objectified their body, if their body is something else, it might be a little threatening for a while. But for people who've spent their whole lifetime in there, and you start to bring your awareness in and feel these different things, it's very delicious. And then the other thing is to bring the embodiment to the meditating people. Like okay, you've learned how to go in, and you've learned how to be responsible. How can you go in and bring it to life? It's like you take the light inside and just shine it all around. What's moving? What's bubbling up? Yummy. I love that.
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MOVE YOUR BOD often! And Meditate!6/23/2016 Exercise and movement are not something to be measured in weekly minutes. We need to move often, it doesn't have to be a big workout, just bring mindful awareness into your body, stretch, walk around, circle your hips, your head, your ankles, your wrists- feel the internal connections of your body as a whole! 5 minutes of gentle body friendly movement every hour helps assuage some of the detriments of our sedentary lifestyles. You hydrate your fascia through movement, add some deep diaphragmatic breathing and you will also stimulate your lymphatic system and maybe even activate your parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system. It is in the parasympathetic spaces that we find real regeneration!
If you are sitting at your desk or on your couch for hours and hours every day then going to take a "Burn" or high intensity class might actually do more harm than good to the soft tissues in your body. More consistent movement, more often, in diverse environments can be game changing. The resilience of your soft tissues depends a lot on your age and how you take care of your animal body. We can choose to age wisely through nutrition (eat REAL food), sleep (I get 8 hours regularly), hydration (drink good water and move your body) and learning to dial down our nervous system. How do we dial down our nervous system? Softening the center, releasing stress, and tuning into deep levels of consciousness. This can be done through meditation, micro-movement, somatics, breath work etc. I depend on all of those A LOT. Diving into Focus through Luna Breath3/19/2016 Recently I have been tuning into two very powerful keys to deep concentration. One is painting. More specifically, painting geometric shapes with bright colors. The other is Emily Conrad’s Luna (or Lunar) breath from Continuum Movement with Mary Abrams. In this post I will talk about Luna breath. I’ll get into the geometry in a future post.
Lunar Breath (or Luna) works with the vagus nerve stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes healing through the rest and digest response. The vagus nerve helps to regulate the heartbeat and digestion. It seems to diffuse the electromagnetic field while modulating the diaphragm. Movements that go well with the Luna breath are orbits in ribs/lungs/pelvis or very simple non-judgmental cat cows where the focus is placed on feeling through the arch and curl without trying to make the most perfect shape. These can help slow us down while creating a spacious sense of resilience and fluidity. I find all of the internal orbiting motions really bring my energy and presence back to my Self. The inward focus feels like I am gathering back into myself. It tunes out the noise. To me the Luna breath is like a very diffused yogic ujjayi breath. Ujjayi dialed down from a 10 to a 1. A slight glottal hold on the exhalation gives it a very specific location both audibly and spatially. Additionally the slight glottal hold regulates the breath making it easy to tune into. It has more presence than regular breath. When Mary Abrams brought this breath into our classwork I had an immediate -AHA! THIS! - moment. Actually it was more like -aha…this - because it wasn’t loud. It was peaceful and curious, like a quiet invitation down the rabbit hole of wonderment. A trip inside my own being, the Luna breath was leading me through the sensation-full internal terrain of my feeling body --- a somatic delight. Most Tuesdays between 11:00 and 1:00 I can be found at Moving Body Resources taking a Continuum class with Mary Abrams, filling my own well through the self-discovery of breathing/sounding practices and spontaneous improvisational movement. I teach a lot of group fitness classes for Equinox. I run a dance company and I see clients privately. I need to partake in “soul nurture” activities as often as possible. Continuum Movement is a delicious, juicy way to dip into the pool of my own creative nature. In class with Mary Abrams she provides a basic map of the breaths and body focuses that we will work with and then we set off. We are in a room together but we take the class according to our own sense of time, depth and curiosity. The Luna breath is one of the myriad breathing/sounding practices that has come up in class. I think I felt such an immediate connection to it because of the almost paradoxical nature of it. It is both grounding and spacey. While it is very otherworldly it tunes me into myself in a profound way. More resources for Luna Breath Luna breath is “Benevolent breeze that flows harmoniously across the surface of a habitable moon” -Ateeka Yoga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErU5JbY0dU For classes in NYC with Mary Abrams - http://movingbodyresources.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIMe0aGsn2k&ebc=ANyPxKqUR7xu3NWMbEElbgm435DcutecgRgp0ZaFudjnw2SqL4EwgQqAifczxdl_HacwzHXDnmiB -Cherionna Menzam-Sills Laura V Ward
Laura engages with vitality through movement, dance, music, and art. Nurturing creativity is her passion through mindful joyous participation in existence. ArchivesCategories |
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