Friends, we are thrilled to share an invitation for you to join us in the Embodiment Lab!
For the past 15 years we've been teaching this incredible work in a beautiful studio in Salt Lake City, Utah.
We usually teach to two dozen people (at the most) at a time. While we love the intimacy of that size for a live gathering, and while we utterly cherish our local live community, we've realized that the room has become too small. Many more than two dozen people at a time really need this work.
So we've created an online learning lab where you can join us in this life-giving learning from anywhere in the world - and all at your own convenience.
Join us!
Your ribs are not a cage. Truly. They are not.
Though many of us unknowingly function as though they are a cage. As it turns out, the words and images we use have surprising power.
Your ribs need not be experienced as a hard, immovable bony structure in the center of your torso.
The rib bones themselves can be flexible. Each rib itself has joints where it joins the vertebrae in the spine. All but two of the ribs join the sternum in front via flexible cartilaginous joints. They can move! Do you allow them to?
We function according to our self-image.
When our ribs are experienced as a cage, the metaphor can restrict us in so many ways.
Our heart is in a cage. Our lungs and our breathing are in a cage.
What is locked out? What is caged in?
Our ribs are actually soft, strong, supple, and very much alive!
They are 24 bones with over 6o movable and responsive articulations. They can bend and change shape to accommodate our actions, and can offer buoyant support to our shoulders and head, allowing integrated freedom through the spine and hips, and facilitating easier breathing too. Ahhhh!
Freeing the ribs from their cage has so many positive impacts on our experience of being embodied - both our movement possibilities and the felt-sense of our inner life.
When we learn to inhabit and allow dynamic responsiveness to return our ribs, things can change on so many levels!
From the quality and organization of our movement to the sense of intimacy with our heart’s knowing - so much becomes possible.
Some of the benefits of freeing your ribs are:
- Opening your capacity for breathing with greater ease, which also decreases tension on your heart.
- Easing the demand on your lower back and neck. (These places must work harder when your ribs don’t move.)
- Greater ease in your middle and upper back - places many of us hold a great deal of tension.
- An improved upright posture with far less effort.
- Increasing the capacity to feel the wisdom of your feeling life more fully, including greater accessibility to your heart’s knowing.
- Connecting the strength of your pelvis and your core to the function and freedom of your head, neck and arms.
- Freeing the vitality of your spine as a whole. The saying goes “you are only as old as your spine” - and the freedom of your ribs has a huge impact on the health of your spine as a whole.
- Greater ease in your hips. It’s truly surprising to most people how impactful the way your habits of movement (or stiffness) around your ribs impacts your hips! This area of learning can make such a huge difference in your experience of your body as a well-coordinated whole rather than a collection of disparate parts.
- Growing a greater sense of freedom and possibility in your movement repertoire. In so many ways! The ribs are like the hidden key to easier movement in countless ways.
Details
By enrolling in this course, you’ll enjoy:
- Four unique 30(ish) minute-long instructional course videos plus an audio-only version of the lesson. Each lesson will contain a talk, a guided practice, and invitations to work/play/explore on your own. The first lesson is released around the 1st of the month, then weekly thereafter. You can access them at any time - they are prerecorded just for you and accessible for as long as we're in business. (We hope it's a very long time.)
- Four unique and accessible Embodied Movement Lessons provided as downloadable or streamable audio recordings.
- Two live 60-minute group conferences via Zoom with Erin & Carl. (Recordings will be available if you miss the live calls, and you’re most welcome to send your questions in via email.) Calculate your time zone here.Our first call is on Sunday, December 15th at 9am Mountain time. Our second video call will be on Sunday, December 29th at 7 pm Mountain Time.
- A wealth of additional resources including:
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- movement quickies,
- amazing articles,
- inspirations,
- gorgeous poetry,
- guided meditations,
- bonus somatic practices,
- bonus short videos,
- experiential anatomy teachings,
- embodied mindfulness practices,
- and potent embodied inquiries.
- Oh, it's going to be so rrrrrich.
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- Optional opportunities to engage with other learners in the private Embodiment Lab online conversations. One of our great blessings is the incredible community that gathers around this work. You will meet some incredible, wise, kind, real and authentic people who share so much wisdom.
- Invitations and reflections to help you step off the self-improvement treadmill. As Zen teacher Cheri Huber says, "Self-hatred uses self-improvement as self-maintenance." Potent learning and possibilities emerge when we exit that paradigm. Sense how your own embodied learning can help not just you, but this world. When we contextualize our learning beyond just ourselves, we find so much meaning, energy, and inspiration. As Paul Hawken says, "You are brilliant and Earth is hiring!"
- You'll have ongoing access to all the course materials via our easy to use online platform on Ruzuku. You may also download all the lessons to your own devices.
- Each month centers around a unique theme. We can hardly wait! Read more about upcoming themes here.
- For us, it's a given, but we'll make it explicit: We promise to treat you with the utmost respect and kindness. We'll never be bossy or shaming. You're a grown-ass adult after all, so how you use the practices is up to you. We're honored to share potent, gentle, invitational guidance to support you as you reclaim your birthright: your own incarnation, your full embodiment, and your own organic learning process. We do our best to make it as down to earth, fun, engaging, and beauty-filled as possible.
Cost is only $50 USD for each month of the Embodiment Lab!
While the price will change in the future, you will have access to as many future months as you like at the monthly price at which you first signed up for the Lab. So if you join us now, your cost will continue to be just $50 a month to participate in the monthly courses. We're starting with the price super low to encourage you to jump in and join us because it's going to be sooooooo excellent and we really hope to see you there!
You can stay with us in the lab over months or years or you can also opt to cancel at any time. We're creating this vibrant learning space so we can share so much of what we love about embodied learning and practices and perspectives that we wish everyone had access to. We've got at least 5 years worth of materials at the ready. So let's get started!!!!
We also have 3 scholarship spots we'll be donating per month:
Please contact us if you’re interested in the work yet unable to afford the $50 cost without hardship. Once you contact us, we’ll add you to the list of potential scholarship recipients for that month. Please include in your email how you think this course will be of benefit in your life and anything you'd like to say about why the cost is a hardship at this time. We’ll be delighted to choose 3 recipients each month to join us for that edition of the Embodiment Lab at a pay-what-you-can rate.
If you would like to assist us in keeping this work accessible or if you have been gifted financial assistance previously and now wish to extend this generosity to others, please contact us to make a donation to our scholarship fund.
You may also contact us if you’d like to gift membership to the Embodiment Lab to someone you love. You may gift any number of months you’d like!
Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
Friends.
Hafiz translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Is there some old voice, some movement or postural habit holding you back from your more free, more true, more authentic, more free life?
Might it be nice to be free of that old shit?
I mean, RIGHT??!!
We work with this at such a profound, deep level when we include movement, embodiment, somatic habits and our physical way of being ourselves and doing our life, and not just our thoughts and concepts. It's deep. It's potent. And it's so worth doing.
A powerful pointing from Moshe Feldenkrais is this:
“The mature human being is one who has re-appropriated inner authority.”
In fact, a central intention of the Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons is to support people in doing just that – removing outer authority from our inner lives. This is deep and infinitely rewarding work. And the improvement of aches and pains happens to be a wonderful side effect.
It can be so easy to simply accept the perspective of someone deemed an authority: a doctor, a teacher, an internet article, a self-proclaimed expert on ___, or fill in your own blank. We often take this at face value and honor it over and above the truth of our own direct, bodily experience, our own unique way of looking at and feeling our lives.
So when we go about uncaging our ribs - it's not about doing it right and it's not about force. It's about taking the time to feel yourself from the inside. To sense connections. To choose for yourself more pleasurable ways of moving and being embodied.
Let's explore uncaging your beautiful ribs, shall we?!
We hope you'll consider joining us in December in the Embodiment Lab!
Wishing you embodied freedom, less effort, and much more pleasure,
Carl & Erin
