Coming Home to Your Animal Body: A Live Online Workshop With Carl Rabke

When Mary Oliver writes that “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” that could be sufficient instruction for a life well-lived. Many of us, however, are disconnected from our animal bodies. Many of us modern people tend to move around, as Thich Nhat Hanh describes “lost in thought” disconnected from our bodily experience and the living, sensual world that surrounds us.

If you think about how much your attention, posture and movement have shifted just in the last 20 years, with the increase of screen use, and organizing ourselves around cell phones, let alone the changes over the last thousand or five thousand years. Though our daily behaviors and activities have changed significantly, our physiology, our nervous systems, our psyches have not, and the intelligence of our animal bodies is often right there under a thin surface level of forgetting, or, as the Zen saying goes “closer than our own skin.”

In this workshop, we will seek to return to the natural intelligence of our animal bodies- in how we move,  in how we sense ourselves, and in how we are in relation to the living world around us.

“We are born, wrote psychiatrist R.D. Laing, as Stone Age children. Our entire psychic, physical, emotional and spiritual makeup was shaped in the long evolutionary sweep of our species. Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what we expected.”
-Francis Weller

 

 

Some of the things we will explore include:

  • Deepening your direct, somatic relationship with the Earth
  • Growing attentional flexibility, and learning to receive the intelligence that shines through each of our senses.
  • Deepening interoception, the capacity to sense ourselves directly from inside, without needing to be interpreted by thinking mind
  • Exploring embryological, and developmental movement patterns, from this life, along with movements from our much older swimming, creeping, and crawling ancestral line.
  • Having access to the intelligence of the head, heart and guts simultaneously
  • Integrating the head in movement without being stuck in it. Are there any other animals you know who move with head out of alignment and disconnected from the rest of the body?
  • A quality of lightness and sensitivity in how we move.
  • A reduction of unnecessary tension.
  • Moving in a way that is in intimate relationship with the living world around you.
  • Growing greater sensitivity and respect for the beings around us, and the spaces we move through
  • A quality of grace and elegance in our aging
  • A reduction of human hegemony
  • A sense of belonging in an animate world

 

 

“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

Details:

For the workshop, we will weave through a blend of Feldenkrais lessons, guided natural movement explorations, somatic meditations along with soulful poetry, and time for questions and reflections.

You are welcome at any age, in any size, in any shape. I’ll provide options if any of the movements are not available to you for whatever reason.

The workshop will be recorded, and all registrants will receive the recording (whether or not you can attend live)

Saturday, July 30th 12-3:30 Mountain Time.

Cost: $50

 

Also, please read our cancellation policy here.

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

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