Moving and Living From Your Core

“The inner, what is it: if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

 

What does it mean to live and move from your core? 

There are many ways that people use the word “core.” I can’t recall how many clients and students over the years have shared that “they need to work on their core” as though it were some endless self-improvement task. Often the approach we bring to our core can be mechanical, repetitive, dominating, or objectifying.

What if you didn’t need to work on your core, but could rather learn to inhabit your core? What would it be like to experience your core as an aspect of your embodiment that is intelligent, wild, animal body strong, soft and sensitive, filled with truth resonators, bullshit detectors, tuned to, and ready to respond to the living world and the currents of soul, eros, and the deepest aspects of your being?

Doesn’t that sound more fun than crunching your core into submission?

In this workshop, we will bring an approach of reverence to our core as a deep-innermost element of our embodiment. Central, sacred physiology, filled with intelligence and the potential for great animal body strength, sensitivity and power like that of a cat or a snake. Our cores are a deep-time ancestral inheritance going back hundreds of millions of years, even way before beings came slithering out of the ocean onto dry land, and these fish-like undulating spinal patterns still exist in us now. 

 

This area of our body, our middle, our belly, diaphragm, heart, neck and head is also where we tend to feel life. Our gut sense, our heart-knowing, this area of our core is filled with truth resonators and bullshit detectors-awe, wonder, intuition and grief are felt in our core, yet we will not feel much if we are either too bound in that area, or if our presence and vitality is absent. In this workshop, we will seek to grow an organic strength that is also soft, like a child or an animal, capable to move with power in any direction, yet relaxed enough to be permeable and sensitive to the world around us, allowing each wave of breath to move through, unrestricted, massaging our internal organs and tissues. 

When we inhabit and move from our core, we live and move from wholeness, not parts of ourselves. When we reach for something, when we stand for something, when we speak for something, we can do so from a place of integration and wholeness. 

 

Some of the things we will explore:

  • Experiential anatomy of the spine,  ribs, pelvis, hip joints, psoas, and all of the musculature around the spine and pelvis. Growing our brain’s maps of these areas, so they function with greater skill and awareness.
  • Connecting the movements and functions of our legs and feet, hands and arms, and head to our core, to our center.
  • Deepening our animal body soft, strong, sensitive strength,
  • Learning to inhabit and abide in direct sensations in the belly, chest and head, and having access to the intelligence that shines through the head, heart and guts and pelvis simultaneously. 
  • Exploring embryological, and developmental movement patterns, from this life, along with movements from our much older swimming, creeping, and crawling ancestral line.
  • Deepening your direct, somatic relationship with the Earth
  • A quality of grace and elegance in our aging
  • A quality of lightness and sensitivity in how we move.
  • Learning a self-care toolkit for back health and vibrant function.
  • Deepening our range of movement and function in the spine
  • Growing intimacy with the central channel, or the midline axis of length that moves through and connects the subtle body centers
  • Growing an integrated strength that is non-dominating, and deepens intimacy with the living world within and around you.

The workshop will have standing and floor-based natural movement practices along with Feldenkrais lessons and guided somatic meditations. 

Recordings will be provided to all registrants if you are not able to join live. You are welcome in this class at any age, in any body size or type. 

“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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday, June 18th 1-4:30 PM  Online Recordings provided

Cost: $60

 


 

Also, please read our cancellation policy here.

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

 

“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

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