Integrating the Feet, Torso, Head, and Breath: Connecting to the Earth (44 min, Patrons)
Back-lying, framed by standing. Refine your connection with the ground and use it to improve your posture, breathing, and action. Lengthen your feet and heels, differentiate your toes and ankles, and integrate your feet with your hips, diaphragm, spine, ribs, shoulders, head, and eyes. This lesson points at powerful primitive biological organizations of flexion, extension, and uprightness.
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Got a question for Nick, or a thought about this lesson?
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After this lesson was recorded live, I received a series of three emails from one of the students, who gave me permission to share these excerpts and her name. I love this lesson and I find Gertrude’s reflections inspiring!
In my opinion with ‘Integrating the Feet, Torso, Head, and Breath: Connecting to the Earth’ you created an outstanding masterpiece and I do love the title!
I went through this lesson again and it makes me feel like I found my frame and my limbs can move so easily.
You once gave me an advise for another subject: ‘..keep playing with the lesson and that unfamiliar state at the end. Aspects will become more familiar, more “you”, with time!’
So I’m looking forward becoming more “me” by playing around with this one.
Wow 🤩 s all I can say. I feel bigger. Fuller. A nagging tension in my neck is eased. I Feel like doing a walking meditation —in an incredibly new and rich way. This touched everything and I plan on doing it many times. Thank you
Question : my feet turning out are giving me a very diagonal reaction. Shall I try to keep feet more parallel or shall I stay with my natural turn out ?
Thank you Nick, loved the lesson.
Good question – I will be playing with this question myself! I think another journey or two through the lesson would be useful for us both. The natural turn out is probably the best way for most folks to start. But if you can comfortably position your legs a little more parallel, closer to how you’d stand but without effort, that will give new information. It also creates a clearer connection with the ground through the heels, which is useful for the lesson.
What a beautiful lesson. I am experiencing a warmth and sense of heart opening from this lesson in relationship with the feet sensing the ground beneath me. My low back pain also has disappeared. Will revisit this lesson again. Deep gratitude for your work Nick.
Loved the difference between lifting my head at the start and then floating it at the end … just by playing with my feet.
Thanks, Nick, for a fascinating, interesting and fun lesson!
My nerves were dancing inside me in the end:)
I also wondered if to stay with my natural turn out of my feet, which is very asymmetrical.
Will try what you advised above.
Niva
Thanks to your and Ileana’s comments I’ve added a Clarifications tab above. After doing the lesson again myself I do think it’s worth it to explore your options.
That was an amazing lesson.
This time my Austrian heels are kissing American ground, greetings from Ft Lauderdale;-)
I am so much more aware of my feet as having variation, much like my back – with curves and softer parts – instead of the feeling that my feet are two uniform rectangles, as they felt before this lesson. And I am physically understanding (hah: ‘under standing’) much better your frequent cue to feel the energy of the floor. Wonderful!
Can’t do this often enough
A note for fans of this lesson: I taught another version of it with different variations in my Self Empowerment workshop. I’ve added it to the Related Lessons tab above.
Outstanding!