My daughter is in remote school right now, so she has a lot of Zoom meetings all week. It’s hard for her to stay focused on her work sometimes (eh-hem … a lot of the time…) because there are always toys to play with, squirrels to watch outside, and wiggles to get out. A couple days ago, she said “I can’t help it when my brain gets distracted. I can pay attention a little, and then my brain will go somewhere else, and I can’t help that” Ah HA!! “That happens to everyone!” I said. We talked about it for a while – I told her that she does have some control over that, but her brain will always wander off looking for other cool stuff (or worries). The key is to notice the wandering, and then give yourself the chance to choose to come back (or not!). Each wandering is a chance to re-focus.

There are SO many things to distract us – not only outside, but from the inside too. Tummies grumble, heads ache, muscles get sore, thoughts ruminate. Body pain is a huge distraction! Not to mention all the external distractions of social media, news, other people… phew, our brains have a LOT of opportunities to wander off. My daughter felt a little frustrated with herself that she kept getting distracted, but I assured her that it happens to everyone, and if she can notice it, she can do something about it. Even if the distraction (physical, emotional, external…) can’t or won’t go away, there is power in that little moment of pause to notice it. Hold that moment, feel it in your breath, your muscles, your brain. The distractions will always come back, but so do the pauses.

I was planning to do 4 week series this fall, but I realized there is a 5th Thursday in October, so we’re going to do an extra Walking with Ease lesson, along with some nice breathing coordination. Join for some good ole wringing out pandiculations with full breathing.

 Here is the link for this week’s class: Walking with Ease & Fuller Breathing – tomorrow, Thursday at 12pm noon eastern time. Register here for class.
 
Classes run 35-45 minutes. Make sure you have a yoga mat sized space for the practice. Your video and audio will be off when you first get in the “room”, you have the option to turn both on. I’d love to *see* you, but feel free to remain off if you’re more comfortable that way 🙂

Hello hello Dear Soma. I am at a loss for inspiration to write about this week – other than acknowledging the obvious that we are still walking through a weird time, and I hope you are being good to yourself and yours. Our practices to keep our nervous systems in a nice, even place are consistently pushed. The edges of our nervous system comfort levels are tested, and if we remain aware of those edges, without judgment, we gain the capacity to experience our world more fully. I’m continuing to maintain some normalcy with class this week – we will be in the 4^th week of the walking series. We’re going to explore more shoulder-to-hip connection: that diagonal/cross connection when you walk (a.k.a. opposite arm swings to the leg stepping forward). If there’s time, we’ll review a little of all that we’ve done so far, to tie it all up nicely into a short walking routine that you can turn to anytime you need tweaking.

As Michael Franti puts it (I’ll add to the beginning, “With a regulated nervous system…”:

We can love deeper,

Fly higher,

See clearer,

Burn brighter,

Feel more than we ever did before

Yeah we can swim oceans,

Climb mountains,

Dance like nobody’s watching,

Live life like we never did before,

And through the highs and lows,

Baby I got you, and you got me.

Here is the link for this week’s class: Walking with Ease, Lesson 4 – tomorrow, Thursday at 12pm noon eastern time. Register here for class.
 
Classes run 35-45 minutes. Make sure you have a yoga mat sized space for the practice. Your video and audio will be off when you first get in the “room”, you have the option to turn both on. I’d love to *see* you, but feel free to remain off if you’re more comfortable that way 🙂

Here’s an assignment for the week (it’s fun, don’t worry) how many different kinds of surfaces do you walk on during the week? With shoes? Without shoes? Do you ever notice how those different surfaces affect the bottoms of your feet? Our feet are AMAZING – we usually don’t give enough credit to how sensitive our feet are. We have a similar number of nerves to & from our feet that we do in our hands! Think of that! If we practiced tuning into that sensitivity, we could do so much more with our feet. Our feet are the part of us that contacts the Earth more than any other part – they really set up the rest of the body to be an upright human. Your feet hold a LOT of information for the rest of you and just taking a little time to sense into them can offer great insight on how you line everything else up. So give your feet some love this week – rub your toes in between blades of grass, gently tickle the sole of your foot on a pile of moss, sink them into some mud, wrap your toes around a rock. See what information you can glean from your magical feet!

Last week, we explored the horizontal aspect of walking. So this week we’ll play with the vertical aspect of walking. These two directions can inform your hips to move smoothly through space as you walk in gravity. Combine that with a renewed sense of your feet, and you’ve got some smoother easy walking.

Here is the link for this week’s class: Walking with Ease, Lesson 2 – tomorrow, Thursday at 12pm noon eastern time. Register here for class.
 
Classes run 35-45 minutes. Make sure you have a yoga mat sized space for the practice. Your video and audio will be off when you first get in the “room”, you have the option to turn both on. I’d love to *see* you, but feel free to remain off if you’re more comfortable that way 🙂

Workshops this Fall!

We had a GREAT conversation a few days ago in Somatics & Empathy: Self-Care, Self-Regard, and How to Change the World. Thank you to everyone who participated! It was a huge topic, and this is just the beginning. I hope to step up with this growing movement of people becoming more aware of their nervous systems to incite change in the themselves and the world. I can’t wait for more J

Next month, we’ll gather again for ~

Fitting Somatics into Your Daily Life
Monday, November 16, 8-9:30 $35
Register here.

A Somatic movement practice doesn’t have to be something that you have to carve out of your busy daily schedule like a chore. You don’t always have time to roll out the yoga mat, make sure the kids and animals are out of the room, and tune everything out for an hour-long practice rolling on the floor. Somatics best serves you when you need it most – in those moments of stress and hectic-ness. So how does that work? In this 90-workshop, we’ll go over ways that you can fit in Somatic movement into your day – whether that’s sitting at a computer for hours, sitting behind the wheel of a car, or running around on your feet all day. A Somatic movement practice is just as much about mindset and daily movement as it is about making time to get on the floor to slow down those patterns.