Embody Integration with Carl Rabke begins Monday, May 12th
10 Sessions, 10-11:15 am Mountain Time
Cost $295
Dear friends, I invite you to join me for Embody Integration: The Foundations of Natural Movement.
This is a course on movement and how we can learn to deepen our grace, strength, coordination, and sensitivity in how we move at any age.
This is a course on attention and how the quality of attention we bring to our movement shapes our experience and enlivens our participation in the world.
This is a course on learning and how we can learn how to learn through our movement. We can continue to refine and ripen our movement skills even as we age in these impermanent bodies.
This is a course on naturalness and recovering the natural, self-organizing, movement intelligence that babies and animals inhabit. We will explore learning how to move as your most natural, authentic, uncontrived self.
This is a course on freedom. We will learn to move with freedom, grace and power while liberating ourselves from limiting habits and an over-reliance on instructions from others. As Moshe Feldenkrais said, “A mature human being is one who has removed outer authority from one’s inner experience.”
In each of our 10 weeks together, we will explore movement lessons based on Feldenkrais and Fighting Monkey, along with other Natural Movement explorations and guided somatic meditations, all interwoven with soulful poetry, selected readings, and group sharing.
Each class will have guided standing practices, Feldenkrais lessons on the floor, explorations in sitting, and movement glimpses: short practices that can refresh alignment, reduce tension, and renew our embodied presence throughout the day. As is it said in the Tibetan tradition, skill unfolds through “short glimpses, repeated many times.” Often, our embodied presence and alignment are not so far away, we just need reminders to look away from the screen and remember to tune to them.
This course will lay the groundwork for you to grow or deepen your own natural movement practice, including ways of moving in standing, on the ground, in sitting, and in transitions. These movement explorations support grounded embodied presence, strength and mobility, and the capacity to rest in stillness. We will be growing what one of my teachers, Ruthy Alon, called “a grammar of spontaneity” in how we move in the world.
Some of the things we will explore include:
Deepening our direct, somatic relationship with the Earth
Accessing power and strength without domination or forcing
Learning to sense ourselves more intimately as we move through life
Growing attentional flexibility and learning to receive the intelligence that shines through our senses.
Deepening interoception, the capacity to sense ourselves directly from inside, without it needing to be interpreted by thinking mind
Having access to the intelligence of the head, heart, and guts simultaneously
A quality of lightness and sensitivity in how we move
Natural alignment that is uncontrived
A deepening of presence, care, and kindness in our movement
A reduction of unnecessary tension
Deepening an innate sense of rhythm
A deepening of self-organized, soft, integrated, animal body strength
Freedom and mobility in our spines
Less effort and more ease in the neck
Growing lightness in walking and in our transitions
Moving in a way that is intimately connected to the living world around us.
A quality of grace and elegance in our aging
Course Details:
10 Weeks. beginning Monday, May 12th-Aug 4th 10-11:15 Mountain Time on Zoom
** Please note that there will be no class on 6/16. 7/7 and 7/14 **
All classes will be recorded. Each registrant receives the recordings.
You are welcome to participate even if you are not able to make all of the sessions live.
Carl Rabke is a Somatic Naturalist, Embodiment teacher, and a tender of soul and living culture. For the last 25 years, he has practiced and taught where the streams of somatics, soul-work, and a deep love of this living Earth meet. He is a Feldenkrais Practitioner and Rolfer, and loves to support people in returning to, and remembering our natural, inherent intelligence in movement, meditation, ritual, song, rhythm and community. Carl has studied at Bobby McFerrin’s Circlesongs School and is a Musica do Circulo practitioner. He has mentored with Jozef Frucek of Fighting Monkey, and has mentored with and taught alongside Francis Weller, and he also hosts the Embodiment Matters Podcast with his beloved wife, Erin. You can find out more about him here.
