Coming Home to Your Animal Body

Block 4th
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A note from Carl:
Greeting friends,
Tomorrow I begin a 6-week live, online course on Coming Home to Your Animal Body.
When I use the term animal body, I am not referring to anything exotic or esoteric, but rather our own ordinary humanness when we are not lost in thought, disconnected from our bodies, and holding ourselves as separate from, and superior to all other forms of life on this Earth.
There is so much intelligence and knowledge in the soft animals of our bodies. I am looking forward to deepening our strength, softness, coordination and skill in movement, while growing our sensitivity to the inner-world as well as the living world around us.
Recordings of class are provided if you cannot join live or to revisit and deepen the learning.
Here is what previous students have shared about the class:
“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
“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
I’ll leave you with a poem from Mary Oliver, who so beautifully embodied what it means to move through a living world with respect and wonder and praise.
With love,
Carl
When I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
Mary Oliver
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Erin

By training and profession, I am a somatic educator. Over the past 25+ years I have trained in and taught modern dance, tai chi, Indian and Tibetan yoga, yoga therapy (specializing in back pain). I completed a 4-year professional Feldenkrais training in 2007 and a 3-year Embodied Life training in 2014. I also study and work with somatic meditation and the profound practice of embodied inner listening known as Focusing.