Position: back-lying
60m
Advanced Connecting Arms and Legs: Equal and Opposite (Patrons)
In this version, this classic side-lying lesson is framed by back-lying riddles designed to more explicitly connect your learning to gait and ground reaction forces. As you integrate various actions of your feet and legs with your pelvis, torso, and arms, you’ll rediscover the buoyancy and joy of walking with your whole self!
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
Spiraling into Circling the Arm Under (Patrons)
First we review the lesson called A Spiral of Length and Power, then we explore a riddle in the realm of “making the impossible, possible”: from lying on your back, one knee bent, foot engaged to turn you onto your side, how can you become supple enough to learn to circle the arm you’re lying on under your body? Adaptations, kindness, and patience are in the foreground, leading to wonderful new freedoms in your shoulders, ribs, spine, neck, posture, and day-to-day function. At the end, an exploration of simpler actions reinforces your learning – even if you couldn't “do” the whole lesson yet.
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.
59m
Joyful Lifted Rolling (Patrons)
Starts with an exploration of grounding in standing. Then very simple side-lying movements gradually expand toward rolling. You'll learn to extend and gather the limbs on one side of your body, then the other, as you coordinate larger rolls with increasingly skillful control of your flexors and extensors. All this creates a profoundly lighter sense of your body and mind. Starts with a two-minute talk reviewing the major principles of grounding for liftoff.
58m
The “Morning Prayer” Lesson (Patrons)
With the hands together like a child praying, learn to move them up and down in front of you first in lying down, then sitting, then kneeling, gradually expanding this gentle movement into a larger and larger action. Details of the scapulas, spine, atlas, tongue, eyes, and floor support are investigated. Framed by brief explorations in standing.
57m
Lifting Up and Through
Back-lying, mostly one knee bent, one foot standing. Develop an action of lifting your hip forward in a grounded and distributed way as you learn to draw clear support from the earth up and through you. Great for stability, strength, and confidence in walking, and all upright movement. Framed by experiments in standing and walking.