Lavinia Plonka – The Movement Alchemy With the Feldenkrais Method 2024

During this health-enhancing course, you’ll:

• Learn how to move with greater ease and efficiency, reducing strain and tension in your body
• Explore strategies for fall prevention and recovery
• Experience a movement lesson that will free your neck and shoulder area
• Understand your movement choices so you can reduce back pain and tension
• Cultivate greater awareness of your movement patterns and habits, and learn how to release those that no longer serve you
• Discover how to use your breath to increase emotional fluency and reduce stress and anxiety
• Improve your posture and balance, reducing pain and enhancing your overall health and wellbeing
• Develop a deeper connection to your inner wisdom, increasing your confidence and sense of agency in your life
• Tap into your inner resources of resilience, creativity, and joy for a more positive outlook on life
• And much more…

We don’t think of our backs as emotional. No one says, “My back is anxious” or “My back feels abandoned.” Yet, even our common phrases intuit this emotional part of our anatomy. We say things like, “She has no backbone,” “I feel like he doesn’t have my back,” “It was like a stab in the back,” “Back me up, here,” or “I’ve got my back against the wall, and I can’t get out of it!”

Anxiety, grief, and insecurity can influence the muscles of your back. Combine that with sitting too much or poor postural choices, and you’ve got a recipe for discomfort. If you add fear of pain to the mix, you’re literally stuck in a holding pattern — holding yourself together or holding on for dear life.

Discover the stories held in your back, and learn potent strategies for regaining suppleness and support, so you can move with ease and pleasure.

In this session, you’ll:

• Gain a deeper understanding of the anatomy of your back
• Discover the connection between feeling unsupported and back pain
• Experience a movement lesson for relaxing the back
• Uncover how fear impacts your back and hips
• Learn a strategy for lengthening and strengthening your back while improving your posture

If you’re alive and reading this, you’re breathing! Breath is fundamental to our existence, and “proper” breathing is discussed a lot lately, but how can it support all of your functions?

There’s a powerful chemical (and alchemical) process that takes place with every breath you take. Developing a better understanding of your habitual breath patterns can calm your nervous system, reduce the tension in your muscles, and help you sleep. Learn how to employ an awareness of your breath to engage in a deeper study of yourself and experience deep tranquility.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn a movement meditation that takes you deep into your lungs
• Understand how your breath is connected to your emotions
• Unpack the chemistry of breathing
• Take a historical look at the use of breath across traditions
• Develop strategies for using your breath to counter anxiety

Feeling fragile or unsafe can make you even more prone to injury because it throws you off balance. Tension can make your muscles hard and affect your ability to be spontaneous during times of challenge. Tightening in this way limits your options for recovery, but the good news is that becoming more flexible can reverse this.

Flexibility has more than just physical benefits, however. Softening and recovering a sense of safety also helps you become more mentally flexible and emotionally resilient.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover a movement for improving mobility and resilience
• Experience a meditation guiding you toward feeling safe and flexible
• Learn strategies for fall prevention and recovery
• Gain a new understanding of how modern research is connecting resilience to wellbeing

Our lives are made of habits, from how we get out of bed to how we make decisions. These habits are essential for living our lives, but sometimes we can become prisoners of the very habits we developed in order to survive. We end up being governed by physical, mental, and emotional patterns that take away our ability to choose how we want to behave.

Shoulder and neck tension are common afflictions that impact our ability to move — whether we’re attempting to turn around, hold our heads high, or swing a tennis racket with accuracy and power.

By freeing your shoulders and neck, you’ll find new freedom and learn to exercise yourown agency, instead of being at the mercy of your habitual limitations.

In this session, you’ll:

• Uncover the connection between your shoulders and your emotions
• Learn how your shoulders and neck communicate to your brain and each other
• Experience a movement lesson that will free your neck and shoulder area
• Gain a deeper understanding of shoulder anatomy
• Discover strategies for relieving shoulder tension while sitting

Your pelvic region is not only the geographical center of your body, it’s also your primal energy center in many ancient healing traditions. It’s the home of your root and sacral chakras in Ayurvedic medicine, the location of your hara in Japanese medicine, and the residence of your abdominal dantian in Chinese medicine.

All of these traditions emphasize the importance of liberating and harnessing the power of your pelvis because engaging your power center improves your self-confidence and posture, helping you move through life with a clarity of intention.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover the secret behind power posing
• Experience a movement lesson that frees the pelvis
• Learn a meditation on the movement of energy
• Take part in a visualization exercise for healing pelvic trauma
• Gain an understanding of the connection between your core and your hip joints

In Module 5, you learned how to cultivate energy in your power center to energize your whole self. When you remember that you’re 70% water, you can also learn to flow like an ocean wave, a sinuous serpent, or flowing seaweed. You can begin to undulate and revel in your own fluidity and grace because the ability to bend, lean, twist, arch, and stretch are your birthright.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn how to differentiate your vertebrae for fluid movement
• Receive a deeper understanding of how serpentine movement has influenced sacred and ordinary dance throughout history
• Experience your body’s undulatory capacity to unlock hidden tensions
• Take part in a movement lesson that invites the movement of the ocean into your skeleton

Alchemy is defined as “a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination.” What do you want to transform, create, or combine for a rewarding and joyful life?

In this final module, you’ll weave together the threads of the first six modules into a beautiful tapestry of a new self-image that you can take with you into the world. Through this alchemical process of transformation, you’ll experience how your new conception of yourself is reflected back to you in your outer circumstances — from your family to your job to your environment… as above, so below.

In this session, you’ll:

• Experience an exercise to weave together the experiences of the past few modules into your own talisman for the future
• Take part in a movement lesson to celebrate your own magical formula for transformation
• Explore alchemical postures throughout history that are connected with movement
• Gain an understanding of “where attention goes, energy flows”