Reconnecting to You

In this class, we're going to explore how movement can affect and help us through the Times where we've experienced change in our lives. Maybe it's within our environments, maybe it's within our relationships or maybe it's even within our own bodies and it's this time where you look in the mirror and you're not entirely sure who is looking back at you. A time of disconnection that at one point or another I believe that we all face, sometimes it's more extreme and sometimes it's less extreme, but what helps me and others get through it is a concentrated practice of reconnecting to myself, remembering some aspect of my history with movements, my history with body that's joyful, that is inviting and that has a sense of ease to it. That might help me remember how to be in this shell and might give me some direction on what I want to do with it, with the time that I have in it. So we'll begin with some concentrated breathing.

I'd like you to place one hand over your low belly and one hand over your heart and you can feel free to close your eyes or just cast your gaze downward and just leave your eyes open about one 10th of the full opening potential. And we'll just begin to take a few deep breaths in and exhale. And as we breathes, I'd like you to just notice what's moving with your breath. How are your hands receiving the movement that happens in your belly and your chest? Is there an opportunity to bring a little more space, a little more ease, little less force? And can you allow other parts of your body on the back through your pelvis and hips?

Can you allow those spaces to receive breasts and respond to it when feeling disconnected? Deep breathing practices or concentrating, breathe concentrated breathing practices are some of my, my best tools to use to cultivate a sense of internal awareness so that I might be able to move a little more freely on the outside. So as we're breathing here, I'd like to clear your mind and open up the space to invite in some scene of movement in your life that has been full of joy, ease and freedom. For many of us, it will be going back to the time when we were younger, when movement was not a practice, but a daily way of being, and for some of us, maybe it goes into a time where we were involved in movement as a means of our recreation or even our vocation. I just notice for a moment as you watch this scene unfold, notice the elements that are present, the environment that you're in, the experience that you're having, the colors that you see. It's the sense of warmth or cool that surrounds the movement, the tempo, even the soundtrack, and notice the sensations that come up in your own body. When you think about this time, for me, there can be a sense of a bit of a spark of, Oh yeah, I really, really liked to move.

There's someone inside there that loves exploring what this body can do and just stay with this focus for a few moments more knowing that you can take a snapshot of it for your mind and use it as a reference point for a shift for the sort of energy that you might wish to be experiencing in your body right now that maybe seems elusive or far off. And we'll take one more breath. Just release your breasts all at once. Uh, let's do that one more time. Uh, and as you release, perhaps you can feel a sense of relief that you can let the barrier of what you think your body wants to do or is capable of in this moment.

Go and you can invite in a sense of curiosity for what you might discover through our movement sequence today. So from here, let's just take another deep breath in. And as you exhale, let's let the spine round. And as you exhale, I'll ask you to just blink your eyes open slightly. You can come back into this space. And then as you inhale, let's grow through the spine, sitting on the base of the pelvis and just see how high, how far, how lifted you can become. Yeah. And from here again, exhaling, rounding, almost allowing your breath to breathe, your body following the collapse in the rise, working with gravity instead of fighting against it, seeing what's available to you here. Okay.

On the next inhale, let's reach the arms open out to the side and just begin to embrace the space. And as we exhale, wrap back and give yourself a hug. Feel your arms, feel your center. Inhale open and reach and expand and be in the space. And exhale and give yourself a hug.

We'll do one more to each side. Breathing in, opening up, opening the eyes a bit wider and exhale and rounding is coming back into yourself, into center. Last time. Breathing in and then just exhale and lower the arms all the way down. So we're going to extend the legs out in front of us and we're just going to take a moment to create some touch with our hands against our thighs. And I just would like you to feel the sensation of touch and do the best you can to work through this with a nonjudgmental mind. So it doesn't matter what you feel or how you feel about what you feel, it just matters that you feel what is happening right now. What are, what is a welcome pressure level from your hands to your legs, what feels unwelcome? You have choices and how you are moving along your body and how you relate to your body. What will you choose in this moment.

And so we'll just do this one more time. Just allowing ourselves to wake up. Oftentimes when we disconnect and feel like we're not quite ourselves or we don't know who is in the mirror, we contend to disconnect from aspects of our body as well in the lower hemisphere tends to be one of those places that we disconnect from. So I'm going to make some circles now around my thighs and remember that they are indeed connected to the rest of me. There is more than just the brain and the stories that I'm telling myself. And then come all the way up.

And from here I'm gonna bring my knees in and just again explore this deep internal connection to a deep external experience. So I'm rounding, I'm feeling myself coming into center and then slowly I'm going to let myself roll down to the floor. And as I go down, I'm going to just extend and feel what it's like to take up space. And then from here I'm going to circle the arms around. I'm going to curl up, use the hands on the back of the knees as you need to and curl back in to your ball, right into yourself. Take a breath in and release and extend and do whatever feels like it's going to be a metaphor for pulling into yourself and then relating to your environment.

And one more time rounding all the way up. And this time we're going to extend the legs out. Rolling back again, rolling down. We're going to just pull your right knee into your chest and then reach it all the way back up. And so we're playing with a little bit of a balance point. We that's going to be different for all of us. Uh, but see what you can see here. So maybe I just want to go back off that tailbone, this pulling in, rounding the knee in and reaching.

And what's interesting here is my knee touches my nose and that's a relationship. I don't know that I have everyday. So isn't that curious? Isn't that interesting? And who knows? Maybe it'll show up again as something that's useful somewhere down down the line. But now I know that my knee can touch my nose and that is information that tells me I am in this body and it's relating to each other. From here, let's roll down. We're going to pull the knee into the chest and just start to sway at side to side. So we're doing a little excavation of the hip, we're discovering the hip socket.

How deep is it? What's available to me through movement [inaudible] and what do I want to do with this leg in the socket. So what I would like to do is to bring it over to the side and I'm going to invite you to move your arm out of the way to rollover and to help yourself press up. And we're just going to take a moment to stretch and we're going to come all the way down. And as we come across, you're just going to allow your light to cross the body. So we're looking for a bit of flow, finding a coordination for ourselves that allows us to experience, give me a little hip stretch in both directions. It'd be a little spine movement. And for me it's always, you know, how can I allow this to have some ease without forcing it?

How can I pour my weight into my hand effortlessly and how can I use the connections in my body to help? So the goal is to make it so easy that it's kind of um, expected. Okay, let's do one more and we'll press up and maybe we want to stay here for another moment. Just kind of exploring that little deep hip stretch. Maybe reaching back through your extended leg, maybe rounding down, seeing how that feels, and for now that's enough. So in there, her each myself back down onto the floor and bend the knee in and then we'll roll up to the top and extend. It's take a moment to consider the experience of both legs. How is one responding to the rest of your body versus the other, again, without judgment.

And then we're going to once again roll all the way down and we'll just kind of wag that leg back and forth. That thighbone we spend a lot of time in flection and we spend a lot of time talking about strengthening and supporting and it's really nice to remind ourselves that we are able to move as well with all of the support and strength we need. So coming onto the other side, I'm going to pull the knee in, I'm going to begin to roll and use that hand to support. Just explore what it's like to be up and then to be back down and to be twisting. Once again, checking in with getting up and checking in with coming down [inaudible] when I'm working on the floor, I love using the metaphor of the floor being covered with paint and at the end of my exploration the expectation is is that I will be covered also. And so getting in touch with that Shell, this body that we're in in a more definite way through transference weight and just feeling that proprioception, we can really gain a deeper understanding of how to be in our bodies. Let's come all the way up and just explore. What do you want here?

Is it a pointer of flex? Do you want to come down? Maybe it's a wiggle, who knows? Whatever you need in this moment. And then we'll come all the way back down and we'll bring the knee into the chest and once again, roll all the way back up. So from here I'm going to face you and we'll bring the legs just a little bit farther beyond so that you can sweep, swivel your hips from side to side because we'll be turning into a, a turn around the back essentially. So our feet are just a little bit wider than hips with, and you can use your hands for support. And we're going to let the knees just drop to the side and then pull them back up and again, drop to the side and pull them back up so easily and without a lot of maybe even management. At this point, you just let gravity determine which direction your knees are falling.

Good. One more, each side, nice and easy. And we're going to start to explore a weight shift with the arms. So as we drop the knees to one side, you're gonna release the opposite arm and bring it across to your shoulder. You're going to swing it back and come to center, drop the knees and release and swing it back and come to center and twist and center and twist and center, uh, twist. And as you're twisting, just begin to notice something.

If you're in a beautiful environment, pick an object that feels like it might be really interesting to you. Maybe it's all the way back behind you. Maybe it's something you've never noticed before. We'll do just a couple more. And on the last one. Let's pause for a moment.

So you've got your hand on your shoulder and you're looking over, and I'd like you to ask your eyes to land on something definite. And from here you're going to use your arm to pull the shoulder back. And as you pull the shoulder back, we'll sit into your hip and then we're going to take the body around again and look at something and then pull it back. And maybe as you go around you might be able to look a little bit farther than maybe you originally did. So just no forcing. You don't want a metal for looking at something that's farther than you did a moment ago. Just see what's interesting, what might be meaningful to you. What is it you want to look at?

Pressing and coming back. We're going to go one more time around and let's pause here for a moment. So land your gaze on an object and then take your head over for me. It's my left for you. It might be your right over your shoulder. And then take it back to that object and take it over your shoulder and take it back. Take it over the shoulder and just looking into directions, turning from your neck, focusing with your eyes one more time and back, and then look over your shoulder and pull yourself back and pause. Okay.

Turn around your back again and now see what's possible in terms of your rotation. Perhaps it got a little easier. Perhaps it got a little bigger in it's range of motion will come around again and we're going to turn one more time. Find your object. Maybe it's a new one and this time just take your eyes over your shoulder, just your eyeballs. So you're looking and looking and looking and looking and looking and confusing the system and going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And then blinking it out a little bit. And once again, turn back around and maybe you might have opened a little bit more rotation.

Maybe you can see something different. Let's try one more time. We, there's a lot behind me that I wasn't aware of a few minutes ago. And then come back to center. And just notice between your two eyes, which one is more open? Which one is more alive? Which one is staring with more intention or are they both only a question. There is no right answer. So let's go to the other side was swing the legs, reach the hand onto the shoulder, and then again we're going to just pull ourselves back and then turn around finding an object and pull back and turn and look at something can pull back and turn. So we're just waking up our hips a little bit more, waking up that rotation in the spine. A lot of times where we think we have to stop.

It's not the entire truth of what our movement has available to us. So this is an exploration in that. Let's turn around and stay this time. Turn your head back over the shoulder and look. And each time you turn, find something to see. Focus, turn and focus and turn and focus and one more turn and focus and come all the way back to center. Good. And then just test it. What's back there? We, it's always nice to find that freedom in that rotation. Let's go one more time. Going back.

This time your chin stays over the back shoulder and you turn your eyes to the side, to the side, to the side. Just look right and left, right and left, right and left. Confuse it. Shake up the system. What is happening? Everything that I knew before about rotation is about to change and come all the way back. Good. Blink it out, and then go all the way around. Woo. Look what's over there. And I promise you, I wish I were able to fake that, but I'm not. It's actually opening up for me and I hope it's doing the same for you. And that ability to receive some freedom in our rotation and some freedom through what we're focusing on can oftentimes open up the perspective of what's actually happening in front of us. And also what's actually happening here.

So if I'm zoomed in on one particular story or thing that I'm thinking about, then sometimes moving metaphorically to open my visual field can also open up my mental fields. And there we have it. So lets a sweep around and we're going to again take it down onto your back [inaudible] and from here we're going to start getting a little bit more personal with our movement, meaning that we'll personalize that. So bring your heels into your sits bones and then we're going to bring ourselves up into a bridge or a pelvic press. Nice and easy. I'm gonna have my hands a little lower pressing into those foundations and standing into our shoulders and our heels and then we're just going explore that figure eight shape. Just rotating down and up and rotating down and up and rotating down and up and rotating. Got Enough. So we're kind of strapping one hip and scooping, dropping and scooping, dropping and scooping, letting it be what it is and just exploring again the rotation that's available to us. Good. One more. Lifting and lengthening, opening up the throat, rolling down slowly all the way down.

Take a moment, feel the impression that your body's making against the mat or the floor. And let's go once again, curling under to press to transfer the weight into the upper and lower parts of the feet and the shoulders. And let's drop and press drop and press drop and press drop and press and four, three, two and one and press up and roll down all the way. All right, so we've warmed up that little motion of the pelvis while it's up in the year. And this time what we're going to do is pretend there's a very long stylus on the tip of our tailbone and we're going to actually write your name.

I will write mine, you write yours in the air three times to make our way down to the mat. Let's check it out. So we roll up slowly, we come to the top and you begin. I'm going to do my j and cursive is profitable so you can kind of keep some level of flow and you can do your just your first name is fine. And then I'm going to do, and hopefully you have a four to five letter late name. Otherwise you'll be at it for a while, but movement is healthy and it'll all be good. And last one, a period and roll all the way down.

Let's try that again. Rolling up. And this time I'm going to try to do one really big names. I'm gonna see if I could write everything with my j, my e and, and, and a coming back to center and then rolling all the way down. And then from here, let's roll back up through the spine pressing. And once again, roll down and hopefully there's a little more ease and a little more impression.

And you've literally expressed yourself through the movement of your pelvis, expressed your identity and w isn't that kind of awesome? I think so. So from here, let's bring our arms down by your sides. And now we're just gonna bring the knees up towards a tabletop and extend them to 90 degrees. And you can always support yourself through the back of the hamstrings and we'll just flex the feet. And so as a metaphor for the experiences that we have in our life, I'd like you to just consider that your feel your feet are the support systems for the ceiling and that you have a choice to lower and control and let those experiences be very heavy and you also have a choice to overcome them and let them be quite light or at least manageable. Okay, so we're just considering and it is asking you to go to your imagination that I am like, okay, this is what's happening.

These are the changes that have been to through, these are how heavy they feel and now maybe I have the ability to really provide some stability, some grounding support so that I'm not overwhelmed by them so that I remember what I have available to me and it is not a matter of creating a ton of change, but rather learning how to work with the change. Okay, one more time. Bending, bending, bending, lowering down. Incidentally, also a really great exercise for your hip flexors and your hamstring flexibility in addition to the metaphor. And we'll bend our knees in and we're going to rock ourselves all the way up. Cut Back. So let's make our way onto our bellies and we'll just take the hands underneath your forehead and just take a moment to wiggle out your pelvis and feel your connections there.

And I'm going to invite you in the privacy of your own space to breathe into your belly and allow your belly to release and also explore what happens when you lift it so that you can make a choice that really works well for you in these next few explorations. Okay. As you inhale, just let that belly go and then as you exhale, lift the belly up and it's rough. We're going through that metaphor of breathing and connecting all of the surface of our body with the floor or the Mat, whatever surface we're on, this is an opportunity to feel some expansion in your breath and also some connection back into your center. So we're going to use our feet as paint brushes in this paint. And continued to work with the breath that serves you the most. If you feel like you need a little more support than have a little more support and if you'd like a little more released, go for that.

So from here we're going to just begin to brush the knuckles, the top of the knuckles of the foot along the floor, and then flip the toes over. Press through your heel, brush the toes out, lift and lower, and we'll hopefully coax a little bit of length in the front of our hips. So we'll pull the knuckles of the feet along the floor. Flip the toes over, press back and brush and lift and lower. And again, pulling along the front, flipping over for harassing back. Feel what lift is available to you and lower one more time.

Finding the tops of the feet, finding the underneath side of the toe, brushing through, finding the weight in the hip. Lengthen the leg, come all the way back. Bend your knees, Flex your feet. And now the paint brushes are on the inner edges of your feet. So you're going to allow your right foot to slide across the inner edge of your left calf, allowing your feet to go in one direction and then come all the way back up and then do the same. So it's almost the same sort of motion as if you were rubbing your hands together, but you are rubbing your inner edges of your feet along the interior edge of your calf and lower leg. And this can just even just feel reassuring, kind of Nice.

But of course we're going to see where we can go with it and see where a simple connection of proprioception like this can lead us. So breathing in and breathing out as it serves you in this moment. And this movement will actually begin to slide the hand. Yeah, open into a bit of a cactus position. And if the mood hits you, I'd like you to just explore what it feels like to let the legs bring you over onto one side of your body and then to bring yourself back onto your belly. And then the same thing onto the other side.

So that two very different sides here. One is very willing, one is a little less so. So it's just a choice, a judgment call. How am I going to work with these sides? Because the hope is that I'll be able to figure out a strategy that will allow me to come up to sitting. So we're gonna just try it. As I go over to the right, I'm going to go ahead and give myself a little push and see what happens. Coming up here, all of a sudden I'm in a very familiar piece of turning around.

Maybe I'll look at the same thing. Maybe it's something different. And then as it come back around, coming around, finding my belly and letting that cushion to come up to the other side, to just take in my surroundings. Where am I? What's what's in my environment? What can I learn about the placement of my body in this environment? These are questions that I find to be really serving as I go through just explorations of changes in my body.

So there we go. And as I go from side to side, I'm finding that there's less of a need to brush the feet. So that's cool. I Lu you used it for a little while and now I can let it go. I don't need it anymore. And that's what happens with our tools. We can use them for a bit and then when we don't need them anymore we can let them go. And as they come into more of a connection with the front of our Baki now, how does it feel to be supple?

You use a little bit more momentum and trust that we'll be able to catch ourselves. No where we have to land and know how to pick ourselves up. All about the metaphors. Do a couple more. It's hard to detail these things out. I think it's just a matter of being very present, very willing, very curious. Last one.

Let's come back to center and then come onto our hands and knees. All right, so let's recalibrate. Rounding the spine, the little cat back, extending the spine. Little Cow. One more time. Rounding. Okay. I'm stretching and lengthening and then I'm just going to transfer my weight into my front right hand over to my back, right knee into my left knee.

And then over to my left hand, I'm just gonna explore shifting the weight from one side of the body to the other. Not surprisingly, some of the restrictions that I felt some of the hesitations are also here. So I've got another chance to talk to myself. What do I need here? What do we want here? Good. Let's come back to center and let's reverse around and forward, forward and just feeling what it's like to move in this kind of spiral space. Last one, I'm good.

And then we're going to tuck the toes and just press ourselves up to that up. Stretch again and let the feet peddle out a bit and then come all the way back down onto hands and knees. And from here, keep your toes talked. And even before you lift, what, let's consider what, what do you need to become lighter? So we've spent all this time really relating to the floor to the surface we're on with gravity. How can we now relate to what exists above gravity? So if I were to consider that, I'd like my knees to lift off, I'd make my hands wider.

Press into my feet and I'd float. Just see what that's like for a moment. Not suffering through it. I'm just getting curious about it. Lower down. Let's try that one more time. So your hands are wide, your feet are wide, and just what is that moment that you need to find in order to find ease in your float? I always look for the point where my voice does not catch. How can I find ease in this shape then come all the way down.

And so from here I always love exploring. We've rolled all over the place and you know as as children we learned to get in contact with the floor and then we learned to move above the floor and then we learned to stand. And so this is a really fun way. You may or may not agree to just get back in contact with some of those patterns. So if you found that ease to your float, then what would it be like to explore? Maybe a little crawl and it doesn't have to be the perfect crawl. You got to find that rhythm for you.

How does it work for you through your body? What's the direct impression of your crawl? What's the shape? Where do your eyes want to go? And when you've had enough of that, we'll press back to our up stretch and walk our hands all the way in and then just bend your knees and roll up. So the point of the movement that we're doing today is to have this sense of exploration and not, not really overdo it, not bring ourselves into a space that's farther outside of the realm of recognition than we already are. So for the last exploration, we'll have our feet just about hip width distance apart.

And I'm going to ask you to place your hands directly on top of your head. And we're going to offer the crown of the head some pressure. So your hands are going to be an amplified relationship with gravity or provide an amplify relationship with gravity. Just feel what it's like to be pressed down. And imagine that compression, that restriction, that the weight of life change.

What have you can have within your system. And currently we have two points of connection to work from the soles of the feet and the crown of the head. If you have the opportunity to press and connect with the bottoms of your feet, how would that change the way that you're standing into your legs, into your hips? How would it change the shape of your lower body? And if you had that opportunity to reach up through your spine, through the skull, into the hands as they press down, how would that change the relationship with your spine, with your torso, with your shoulders, and how would it change the perception of what you believe your body shape feel is? So let's allow the hands to come back in and compress a little bit more.

And then let's also feel that oppositional movement between the two points, trying to extend the, trying to step into this new space of length and height and from here, slowly release the pressure in your head. But keep that sense of opposition. Keep that sense of reaching through the crown, releasing through the feet. Just stand for a moment and remember that energy that we visualized at the beginning of our movement series today. And I wonder if there's a space for recognition of something relatable that exists in your body right now.

Whether it's the freedom through using momentum to roll around, whether it's the noticing and expanding perspective, or whether it's just the sense that it's okay to reconnect with this shape, no matter what changes it may have gone through and its environment or in its in itself. And so the choice that I would offer for you to consider is what will you do next? What will you do with this shell, this beautiful gift of a body that you've been given and when you need to reconnect to that sense of depth and groundedness, come back, roll around, smile, breathe, and remember that this is what you have. And that is a beautiful thing.