Difficulty: Most Accessible
60m
Skillful Scapulas Make Graceful Arms and Hands (Patrons)
In this mostly back-lying lesson you'll discover lighter, more graceful arms and hands as you learn to support and counter-balance their movements by skillfully engaging your scapulas. Later you'll integrate your pelvis and legs. This lesson has surprising benefits for posture and confidence, and improves everyday activities like cooking, typing, and playing an instrument.
60m
Rotating, Interlacing, and Integrating the Hands, into Palms Lengthening Overhead (Patrons)
Reduce anxiety and organize your nervous system by refining simple, pleasurable actions of your hands, arms, and shoulders. Integrate them better with your head and eyes. Eventually expands into lengthening your whole self, with surprising effects on stability. Framed by brief explorations in standing.
63m
Arms in a Hoop, with Continuous Ground Support (Patrons)
Back-lying, feet standing. Explore turning and twisting movements of the shoulders, pelvis, head, and eyes with arms held in a loose hoop in front of you, and find a flowing sense of ground support through your feet and back. Framed by detailed experiments in standing which connect your mat learning to upright life.
60m
Breathing for Liftoff (35m + 25m, Patrons)
This pair of short lessons is designed to be completed together the first time, or with a short break between them.
- Lesson 1 - Reduce tension and anxiety and free your breath by sensing the details of how you hold and release it, then explore a new image of exchanging air with the environment.
- Lesson 2 (begin at 34:00) - Experiment with the elasticity of both the ground and your breathing apparatus, and directly experience what physicists call ground reaction forces.
60m
Lifting Like a Baby + Simultaneous Lifting (Patrons)
Discover how baby-like games of effortlessness can make you a more poised and potent adult. Starts with explorations of how you first lifted your head while lying on your belly in your crib. Then in back-lying you'll learn to quietly, precisely lift and lower parts of your body while studying details of ground support, muscle tone, and reversibility of movement, leading to a discovery of surprising "new" baby skills at the end. Begins with a three-minute talk about the perceptual paradoxes of "effortless" movement.
58m
As Light as a Finger: Games of Weightlessness (Patrons)
Back-lying, framed by brief standing experiments. Create a lighter sense of your body and mind in the field of gravity by using a playful neurological analogy. Explore how your hips, feet, and head can become as light as a finger when you learn to lift them with evenly distributed muscle tone throughout your body. Begins with a 3-minute talk about work, effort, "weightless" movement, and proportional tone.
44m
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.
54m
Free Your Torso for Better Posture, Walking, and Running
Mostly side-lying, framed by standing and walking explorations. Using your sternum as a reference point, free your shoulders, hips, chest, and back for better posture and upright movement. Experience how different organizations of your torso affect your ability to move with freedom and confidence. Ends with a 2-minute talk from the after class discussion.
60m
Hip and Shoulder Diagonals for Better Walking (Patrons)
Back-lying, framed by brief standing and walking explorations. Develop the diagonal connections across your torso and limbs through gentle movements and creative imagery. Expand the scope of your learning through references to the pelvic floor, breathing with length, and the freedom of your head.
35m
Differentiating the Pelvic Floor Part 1 (35m, Patrons)
Back-lying. Refine your pelvic floor sensitivity, awareness, and control by learning how distinct, gentle contractions of the front and back of the pelvic floor are neurologically connected to movements of the pelvis, spine, hands, and lips. A brief chair-seated beginning helps you identify the four skeletal landmarks of the diamond-shaped pelvic floor.