Somatic Resilience

As people age, core strength often seems to diminish. This is due to becoming more and more sedentary. Rather than doing a wide range of things, most people tend to do a smaller range of activities. Yet, repetition is actually more tiring than doing a variety of things because overuse makes things wear out faster. By contrast, in this course, discover the pleasant enjoyment of developmental phases babies progress through as they acquire skills most of us take for granted: rolling over, sitting up and crawling. Return to your core, release excessive muscular effort.

Stretching: A Sisyphus Proposition. When to Stretch and When Not to Stretch - What is the Alternative? How to use awareness to improve your range of motion without challenging pain.

Eyes #1: Discover how to rest the eyes to relieve visual strain and muscular tension. Using mindful movement and visualization that stimulates neural connections, learn to rewire the brain to relinquish unconscious habits of tension. Improve peripheral vision, feel lighter and experience a new level of calm presence. If you happen to have trouble sleeping, the series of ATM lessons on the Eyes is a perfect way to release insomnia.

Starting position: on back. If you cannot do any of the movements, visualize them. Studies show imagining a movement makes the synapses fire and "synapse that fire together, wire together."

As with all ATM lessons, make sure you have a warm space and a comfortable mat, or even a quilted moving blanket to use as a mat. Lie down, make yourself ready to start with a body scan while the opening context is set. See if you can follow the sequence - think of it as a puzzle - for it's in figuring it out that you change the way your brain is wired and make new connections that lengthen the resting length of your muscles for greater ease and relief from the compression and effort that most people live with without even realizing it.

We are hard-wired, neurologically to move in the direction we are looking. So, if you want to experience more comfort, more enjoyment in your life, you have to start turning towards what pleases you, what interests you. This lesson in the Feldenkrais Method® of Awareness Through Movement® (ATM) is a somatic seqence that provides very tangible, concrete ways to notice when we are headed in a direction that opposes what we actually want to be feeling. Learn to lengthen muscles you have no ability to consciouosly control.

Starting position: on back. If you cannot do any of the movements, visualize them. Studies show imagining a movement makes the synapses fire and "synapse that fire together, wire together."

As with all ATM lessons, make sure you have a warm space and a comfortable mat, or even a quilted moving blanket to use as a mat. Lie down, make yourself ready to start with a body scan while the opening context is set. See if you can follow the sequence - think of it as a puzzle - for it's in figuring it out that you change the way your brain is wired and make new connections that lengthen the resting length of your muscles for greater ease and relief from the compression and effort that most people live with without even realizing it.