Would you like to learn ways to release stress & tension?
Do you spend hours sitting or standing at your job?
Do you often feel overwhelmed or exhausted?
Do you suffer from chronic pain?
Would you like to learn a simple way to feel lighter and more fluid, experience more effortless movement, be present, and to enjoy a more grounded and balanced life?
Join us for new series with Deane Juhan, internationally renowned Trager Practitioner and trainer and author of “Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork”.
Designed for all students as well as a movement training program for bodyworkers of all kinds; yoga teachers and students, pilates, yoga and movement instructors.
We have been living through one of the most stressful years of our lifetime. Fear and anxiety have engulfed everyone. Seldom has there been a time when the need for alleviating mental and physical stress has been more acute. Much of the mind’s stress and disarray is reflected in the body, and the body’s stress continually reinforces that in the mind. This series will provide a method for profound relaxation of the body, and through the freedom of the body’s movements an equally profound de-stressing of the mind.
The purpose of these classes to achieve a deep state of calm feeling and reflection, creative self-development and self-healing. There will be extensive live instruction in somatic integration, a movement practice designed by renowned Dr Milton Trager
Benefits
• Heightened and expanded sensory awareness
• Immersion into the perpetual “now” of the body’s sensory states
• Active release of tension, discomforts and habitual limitations
• Freer, more spontaneous and fluid movement
Course Curriculum
Details
Each class will focus upon a different area of the body, beginning with those that are more peripheral and accessible and progressing to broader and deeper structures, all the way to the core and the skeleton itself. In addition to movement instruction and relevant anatomy for each progressing class, Deane will be addressing how the movements are affecting the various systems of the body: the nervous system, the connective tissue matrix, the skeleton and its joints, balance, breath, fluidity and free circulation in all fluids in the body.
Hands and Arms
• Addressing issues in the wrists, elbows and shoulder sockets
• How to seek our novel movements and the novel sensations they produce
• Feeling the liquid bounce and shimmer of the tissues, their fluidity
• Feeling the active elongation of muscle fibers and the relaxation of restrictive patterns
Shoulder Girdle
• Lifting Their Burden on the Ribcage
• Exploring the entire “jacket” of muscles related to the shoulder that encases the ribcage and attaches to every vertebra.
• Using the weights and momentum of movement to expand and soften this “jacket”
• Using a variety of gravity’s vectors (hanging and swinging from different angles) to provide space for the underlying ribs and breath
• Beginning to address mobility of the thoracic spine
Feet and Legs
• Addressing issues in the feet, ankles, knees and hip sockets
• Beginning to open the lumbar spine
• Connecting to the soles of the feet and their key sensory role in balance
• Feeling weight in the joints and their sensory role in balance
• Development of physical and mental grounding
• Blending strong support (yang) with sensitivity (yin)
Pelvic Girdle
• Establishing the pelvis as the central skeletal-muscular structure of our bodies
• Exploring the extensiveness of the musculature related to the pelvis, from the sacrum up to every rib, from pelvis down to below the knees, the abdominal wall and the viscera
• Mobilizing he pelvis as “the bridge that walks”
• Freeing and stabilizing the pelvis and sacrum as the foundations of the spine and support of the upper body
Spine
• Movements to unify shoulder girdle, pelvic girdle, legs, feet and spine
• Adding the cervical column to the lumbar and thoracic columns
• Extensively reviewing and deepening practice of all the previous classes
• Moving the spinal core and its deepest muscles
• Freeing every vertebra for flexibility forward, backward, side-bending, rotation and axial lengthening
Putting It All Together
• Unify the organic wholeness of the body system
• The subtleties of heightened sensory awareness are never-ending.
• The body and its sensations are always in the present moment of “now”.
• The conscious mind tends to flicker between the past and the future. Attentiveness to the body’s “now” is a powerful way to ground consciousness in the “now”.
• The mind is far more than brain. The intimate intertwining of body and mind is co-extensive throughout our organism.
• This intertwining is the source of our life force, and a gateway to spiritual consciousness.
• By means of this self-development approach, we can become more comfortable in our skins, more effortless and fluid in our movements, and more peaceful in our minds.
• The opposite of stress is joy.
Deane Juhan
Originally trained in-residence at Esalen Institute from 1973 to 1990, Deane Juhan has been a professional bodyworker for 30 years. He is a Trager practitioner and instructor, with a private practice in the Berkeley area. The author of "Job's Body: A Handbook for bodywork," and "Touched by the Goddess: The Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Dimensions of Bodywork," he has long had a passion for understanding the relations between mind, body and spirit and the creative forces at work in all self-development, healing and artistic expression. His workshops have been presented all across the US, Canada, Europe and Japan. Their content is focused on both cutting edge research into many aspects of the body-mind and his years of experience as a practitioner.
The Nature of the Movements and their Intentions: The movements are never repetitive, but are continually self-exploratory, seeking novel sensations in tissues that have been caught in static holding patterns and have not been free to move and feel with fluidity and freedom. There is no repetitive “skill” that is being developed and habituated.
The intention is to move out of and beyond any habituated patterns of movement and to develop new and more adaptive ones as we meet our life’s challenges.
The movements do not involve “exercise” of the musculature. In fact, they are in many ways the opposite of “exercise” that is intended to strengthen muscles by increasing their bulk and yang power.
The movements are profoundly yin in nature, and seek to increase that contrasting power through developing better inherent coordination, ease and efficiency in movements. They are the embodiment of “less is more.” The aim is to use minimal effort to achieve maximum softening, lengthening and freeing up of restrictive patterns.
The initial stages of movement in any selected part of the body are small and very gentle. The purpose is to find the movement that most successfully results in a gentle bouncing and rippling of the inherent fluidity of the tissues and pleasant sensation. As the tissues bounce and shimmer more and more freely, the expansiveness of the movements is increased
As sensory awareness and pleasant feelings in the tissues and in the mind continue to heighten, they can become truly ecstatic in nature, carrying us far beyond any level of pleasure we had imagined our flesh and our consciousness could experience.