Not like

A lone beautiful bird

These poems now rise in great white flocks

Against my mind’s vast hills

Startled by God

Breaking a branch

When His foot

Touches

Earth

Near

Me.

“Startled by God”

-Hafiz

What a whirlwind of ups & downs this winter weather has been showcasing for us! t's almost like the outside world is mirroring the internal state of affairs for many of us. Here's where our daily practices come in to offer grounding and support. I hope you have one (or maybe more) to center you when the energy of life starts to pull you too far off your path.

I've been getting back on my literal path...walking with the snow, slush, woods, grass, creatures, universe... I have some space after recently finishing the very intensive group meetups for the training I've been in since last September. My colleagues and I presented our final group project last week, and although there's more work to be done to complete the full training, I was blessed with some free time over the weekend that felt like a true luxury. And in some of that free time, I've been cooking up some more clinics and fine-tuning the ones I'm offering currently...

There will be a Thursday and Friday shoulder clinic in March, as well as a morning and afternoon hip clinic on Saturdays. Join us if you want to learn more about these parts of your body and how they connect to other parts (hint, hint...it's all connected). We'll start the first workshop of the series with a little chat on some anatomy landmarks and a map of where we'll plan to go in the series. You can bring questions if you have them, or we'll discover them as we go. We'll practice some somatic lessons from the Feldenkrais system, which can be great for reconnecting the dots if there are places in our body-mind that have gotten fuzzy over time. We'll "talk to our tissues" by putting tension on them (stretching them!) in multiple ways: isometrics (which have been documented to be helpful in pain relief), eccentrics (helpful for coordination), and some nice passive stretches to settle into rest.

The main focus of all these workshops? In the words of Greg Lehman, "movement optimism"! Our brains were made for movement, and in our current world, we just don't get enough of it. These clinics will carve out a space for learning, movement optimism, and rest.

These workshops may have a single part of the body in the title, but they are really about learning to notice how everything is connected. When I was learning about pain science from Greg Lehman this year, he reminded us that we are not machines. We are ecosystems. We're dynamic, affected by internal and external factors; formed through these interactions, but also capable of change through different interactions. It can be a helpful frame of mind to imagine ourselves as dynamic systems, rather than as static, stuck machines, wearing out over time.