THE Secret to Effortless Movement
Here’s a wonderful secret I want to share with you, because it shouldn’t be a secret.
Do you try to fix your body by doing more?
A beautiful secret to ease, balance, and fluidity begins when you stop and notice. In this video, I share a simple, powerful practice to undo old patterns, release tension, and move with ease.
You’ll learn:
The two questions to use to change how you move
How to recognize when your body is preparing instead of being
Why awareness — not effort — resets your body and your mind
If you’re a gentle-spirited dancer or mover ready to reconnect with artistry and comfort in your body, this is where to begin.
Please comment with anything you found useful, anything you didn't find useful or confusing, or something else you would like to see. I'll happily read those and make other content based off of those comments.
If you’d like to go deeper, I offer free consultations in which we can discuss what you need and how to apply this work to your body and your movement.
A transcript of the video is below if you’d prefer to read rather than watch and listen. Enjoy!
I want to share with you the way that I teach my clients to change their body patterns, to change their habits, to reset their mind and their movement patterns, to bring more ease and fluidity into their body, and to work with their body as it is now and as it changes as they age, with whatever comes up.
This is a way to understand how to use your whole body efficiently and well. This is it. This is the way. You’ll see it through my other videos. You'll see it being incorporated. I just want to put it out there plainly. This is what you do.
It is about two things:
what you're about to do and how your body is preparing to do that
coming back into where your body actually is and what it is currently doing
That's it.
Putting that into practice is a little different.
That's what this whole work is about: how to actually practice those two things, how to apply them to different activities, and how to bring that into your life.
The more you do it, the more benefit you get from it.
What are you about to do? And how is your body preparing to do that? Where is your body actually? Now come into that.
I’ll give an example. Here you are sitting. You’re about to stand up. Your body prepares to do it. It starts to tighten. You start to focus on your legs. You start to focus on actually standing. This is what your body is about to do. This is how it's preparing.
Now, what is your body really doing? Where is it really?
It's sitting. Your body is still sitting. Can you kinesthetically come into just sitting? When you do you’ve started to let go of the preparation of standing.
Your feet are on the floor. You don't have to make them be on the floor. They already are. I'm putting out some generalities. Let's use them for now because I don't know your specific body. I’m putting things out there that might be true. You have to find out what's true for you. Here's one I'm pretty confident about. You have a head.
Amazingly, even as dancers, when we start to move in our life we’re thinking about other things and we forget we even have a head. You might intellectually know it, but that's very different from kinesthetically understanding that you have a head. Okay, come back to your head. There's a top. There's a back.
“Oh, yeah. I have a head. I was preparing to stand up. I was thinking about my quads, my back. I was thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner. I forgot that I'm actually just sitting.”
And you have a head. Now, that's a short example. We can definitely get much more specific, get more in-depth for what is happening in your body, what you need. But really, if you just start there as a kinesthetic, highly sensitive person, you can get a lot. It takes practice.
What are you about to do? And how is your body preparing to do it? Let that go by coming back into just where your body already is and letting it be there. You have a pattern and you let yourself come out of that pattern by coming back into where you are, which is generally pretty nice.
That's the secret.
Take care.