“Movement is life, life is a process. Improve the quality of the process, and you improve the quality of life itself.”-Moshe Feldenkrais

Friend, would like to join me in returning to your naturally intelligent movement? Often, it is not that far away. We all have the capacity to learn through our movement and continue to refine our movement and organization as long as we are alive. Many of us have forgotten that capacity because we sit too much, or spend much of our time and attention in front of screens, or we live in our heads and have learned to objectify our bodies or crank on ourselves in movement practice. There are many reasons we get disconnected, but the important thing is that we can always reconnect to our inherent movement intelligence in ways that are natural, empowering, respectful, and lots of fun. Movement is life. When we learn how to learn through our movement,  we learn how to learn through life.

While it is helpful and necessary to add dynamic movement possibilities we have forgotten to our sedentary modern lifestyle, what can make a significant difference to our movement is our quality of approach. When we are dynamically inhabiting our animal bodies in relation to a living world, rather than objectifying ourselves from our heads, skillful organization, strength and mobility can arise spontaneously through the movements and interactions of everyday life- as it does for children, all other animals, and our human ancestors for 99.9 % of our time on this planet.

In this course, we will be exploring how bringing more play and curiosity into our movement can support life-long learning and joy in how we move, deepening our strength and mobility, while attuning us to the world within and around us. We will also explore how bringing a quality of play to our movement deepens our learning and can be revitalizing in so many ways. As Thinley Norbu Rinpoche writes: Serious mind is always exhausted, play mind always has energy. Drawing on principles and practices from Feldenkrais, Structural Integration, Fighting Monkey, animist sensitivities, martial arts and more, this class is for all ages and body types.

The explorations and principles we will be exploring can deepen any existing movement practice like yoga or martial arts, but also will help to integrate our embodied presence and sensitivity as we move through our day-to-day lives.

 

“I loved Carl’s Animal Body and Strength and Mobility courses. For me, both were a movement laboratory in which I became aware of my habits, discovered new ways to move, and always experienced myself as a more efficient, elegant, and spontaneous mover. Now, I’m a way “over the hill” being and movement lover, so am thrilled that I continue to add to rather than subtract movements from my repertoire. I have been studying for many years with Carl and Erin and wholeheartedly attribute my body’s vitality and love of learning to their teachings, humor, and kindness. Bottom line, go ahead, give it a try, you might just discover something new and delightful about you. ” – Kristen Paul

 

 

If you think about how much your attention, posture and movement have shifted just in the last 20 years, with the increase of screen use, and organizing ourselves around cell phones, and how often we sit, let alone the changes over the last thousand or five thousand years. Though our daily behaviors and activities have changed significantly, our physiology, our nervous systems, our psyches have not, and the intelligence of our animal bodies is often right there under a thin surface level of forgetting, or, as the Zen saying goes “closer than our own skin.”

In this course, we will seek to return to our natural intelligence – in how we move,  in how we sense ourselves, and in how we are in relation to the living world around us.

“We are born, wrote psychiatrist R.D. Laing, as Stone Age children. Our entire psychic, physical, emotional and spiritual makeup was shaped in the long evolutionary sweep of our species. Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what we expected.”
-Francis Weller

“Carl creates a friendly and sacred space where the functional, playful, natural, and sublime intersect.
He shares various potent yet accessible somatic practices with an animist lens, inviting you to study and awaken the terrain of your own body while also taking your rightful place in relationship with an alive world.
Carl’s classes assert our (as humans) innate blueprint for ease in movement. He offers a way back to this ease that’s fun, functionally responsible, stress-relieving, and community building. He then helps us remember what’s most important by addressing our embodied humanness in entirety, weaving in beautiful readings and teachings on longing, emotion, lineage, and our relationships with the wild and each other.
Carl teaches with humor, confidence, respect, and love. His mastery of many movement and spiritual traditions is evident, and yet he seems to be continually learning along with his students, curious about our findings.”
—Ruthie Fraser, Somatic Educator & Founder of Body Rewilding

Some of the things we will explore include:

  • Deepening your direct, somatic relationship with the Earth
  • Growing attentional flexibility, and learning to receive the intelligence that shines through each of our senses.
  • Deepening interoception, the capacity to sense ourselves directly from inside, without needing to be interpreted by thinking mind
  • Exploring embryological, and developmental movement patterns, from this life, along with movements from our much older swimming, creeping, and crawling ancestral line.
  • Having access to the intelligence of the head, heart and guts simultaneously
  • A quality of lightness and sensitivity in how we move.
  • A reduction of unnecessary tension.
  • A deepening of self-organized, integrated strength
  • Growing our skill and lightness in our transitions.
  • Growing greater sensitivity and respect for the beings around us, and the spaces we move through
  • A quality of grace and elegance in our aging
  • A sense of reverence and care for the natural world
  • A sense of belonging in an animate world

 

 

Course Details:

In each of our 6 weeks together, we will explore Feldenkrais Lessons, standing Natural Movement explorations, occasional short somatic meditations, along with soulful poetry, and practices you can explore while out in the natural world, or waiting in an airport.  Each class will end class with a rumpus, a time to put on music and play and improvise with the themes we explored.

 

 

6 Weeks, beginning Monday, January 23rd-March 6th  10-11:30 Mountain Time on Zoom (no class on Feb 20th)

Cost $185 (includes recordings)

 

Also, please read our cancellation policy here.

(also, there are scholarship spots available if money is thin- just shoot me a note)

Don’t know me?  You can find out more here