Expand Your World
Through Embodied Dialogue
The quality of your life depends on the quality of your relationships.
So wouldn't it make sense to get more clarity about what your body & mind are really doing when you're relating to other people?
Join a unique community practice designed to develop your capacity for creating meaningful human connection so you can:
- Deepen your closest personal relationships
- Feel comfortable in your own skin in different environments and in the company of different types of people
- Resolve long-term behavioral patterns that contribute to social anxiety, loneliness, and isolation
- Expand your world by building new friendships and embracing new experiences
How it works:
Each 2-hour class moves through 3 stages to develop warm human connection between the participants - kindling, sparks & flame.
Class begins and ends with an exchange of ideas about how we relate.
We afford equal reverence to the unfolding sensations in our bodies as we do to the meaning of the words we speak, in a collective exploration of the felt sense of relationship.
The two conversational encounters are bridged by an exploratory movement process designed to refresh your nervous system through the engagement of novel patterns of action and non-habitual use of the attention.
Then, with a newly drawn map of mind, body, and self, the group returns to reengage in fresh dialogue and even deeper felt connection.
*includes recordings of all 4 dates
October theme: Sensitivity Is A Superpower
(scroll down for complete description of the class series)
NEXT CLASS - October 27:
Explore Embodied Dialogue on the theme of
The Art of Asking Questions
Being human means asking the questions of one's own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one's own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers. - PAUL TILLICH
To learn we need time, attention, and discrimination; to discriminate we must sense. This means that in order to learn we must sharpen our powers of sensing, and if we try to do most things by sheer force we shall achieve precisely the opposite of what we need. - MOSHE FELDENKRAIS
October class series: Sensitivity Is A Superpower
*recordings of all classes included, even if you join after the first class
October 6: The Difference That Makes A Difference
There’s a certain relationship which we have to have with our inner functioning. That of respect and that of wonder. When we are quiet enough and positive enough that we can follow these fine indications inside which lead us to more functioning, we will find out what precious abilities we have which we usually don’t use. - CHARLOTTE SELVER
Perception operates only upon difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference, and all perception of difference is limited by threshold. Differences that are too slight or too slowly presented are not perceivable. They are not food for perception. - GREGORY BATESON
October 13: Inhibition & Excitation
When you start to listen somatically, you may indeed hear more of yourself than you are used to. As it becomes clearer that it is you you are hearing, you can go in and out of this mystery by shifting your attention. - DAVID KAETZ
For every thought supported by feeling, there is a muscle change. Primary muscle patterns being the biological heritage of man, man's whole body records his emotional thinking. - MABEL TODD
October 20: A Fascination With Boredom
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” ― JOHN CAGE
Do it slowly, slowly, so slowly that it will be boring. When you begin to become bored you will find that it really is not so boring.
- MOSHE FELDENKRAIS
October 27: The Art of Asking Questions
Being human means asking the questions of one's own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one's own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers. - PAUL TILLICH
To learn we need time, attention, and discrimination; to discriminate we must sense. This means that in order to learn we must sharpen our powers of sensing, and if we try to do most things by sheer force we shall achieve precisely the opposite of what we need. - MOSHE FELDENKRAIS
HOW THE CLASS WORKS
Every Expand Your World class is two hours long. Movement practice and embodied dialogue combine to create a group process that fosters deeper human connection. Its three-part structure roughly maps onto the process of building a campfire. It begins with kindling, continues with sparks, and then moves into flame.
KINDLING:
Class begins with “kindling” - these are words I’ve chosen that point us towards some universal aspect of human experience we are all capable of feeling, recognizing and contemplating together.
We will investigate this aspect of being human together over the course of the entire class, through our movement, the use of our attention, and our capacity to connect our nervous systems through the magic of language, or embodied dialogue.
The initial “kindling” for each class are always posted ahead of time (see above). Participants are invited to bring their own complementary “kindling” to class to expand the dimensions of our collective practice.
At the beginning of the class, these words will be read aloud. Every participant will have the opportunity to read.
We read to dive deeper than the surface meaning of the words and into the sensory and somatic experience of how they shape our lips, teeth and tongue, and resonate the voice in our throats. We sense how their vibrations are captured by our ears, digested into images by our brains, and watch how they flower into sensations throughout our bodies.
While we speak to each other we also attend to our collective vibrational experience as we build connection through the voluntary sharing of space for the exchange of ideas.
(For those familiar with it, one might think of our process as something like an ensemble experience of the contemplative practice of Lectio Divina.)
SPARK:
We begin by facing each other in order to tune into our felt sense of relationship. Then we enter into the exploratory process of Awareness Through Movement, a form of somatic inquiry that combines the use of novel movements and non-habitual use of attention to refresh the nervous system.
The intention of the practice is to redraw our internal maps of mind, body, and self in order to awaken more graceful and comfortable movement and clearer perception. Each class includes a new sensory journey that fits both the monthly theme of the class and the words that have just been read aloud.
FLAME:
After exploring inside, we expand our attention outside of ourselves once again to bring each other back into our field of awareness. We endeavor to do this while remaining connected to our own insides.
With new eyes, ears, and mouths, we revisit the words that birthed our inquiry, inviting them burn even brighter.
Then we gradually remove formalities, speaking more freely from within the unfolding sensations of our shared experience. We of make further discoveries together through our exchange that none of us could discover on our own.