[spacer height=”20px”]A vital, healthy 2015 to the adventurers and seekers of the Force & Flow family!
I sent this email out to my mailing list yesterday, and I’m sharing it on the blog for those of you who don’t get me in your inbox (it’s easy to remedy! just look up at the top left widget and you’ll see a simple sign up form).
Never mind “happy” for the coming year, I’m aiming right for JOY and wishing you the same. And pleasure and ease, too, even as you scale the heights of your greatest challenges and descend to the dark roots of your dreams and dilemmas.
Here’s another wish much greater than happiness that I have for you – that you find the generosity and compassion towards yourself to pause in the discomfort. That’s where the riches are and where the root to every transformation lies.
As much as I love toned muscles, they’re only a flimsy metaphor for the far more vital and powerful strength that comes from being present to the life that flows within you – even and especially through the discomfort.
And you might not hear it frequently enough, so I want to say Thank You.
Because for every discomfort that you’ve been willing to face instead of push aside, for every painful pattern that you’ve been willing to make the time and effort to begin unraveling, you’ve made a substantial contribution to paving a new path, not just for yourself, but for everyone who’s life you touch. If you take a moment to acknowledge this, chances are you’ll find the strength to do a lot more of it in the coming year/s.
A new way of being begins inside of you, and nowhere else. [spacer height=”20px”]
Presence, Strength & Vitality
with Joy, Ease & Pleasure
and the Courage and Compassion
to pause in the discomfort…
so you can harvest the hidden
treasures that lie within,
and discover a sustainable,
never-ending supply of energy
for growth and transformation.
[spacer height=”20px”]This is my wish for you, and for all of us on this path to reaching our highest potential and experiencing a world which reflects our highest nature.
It’s also what I’m here to help you do, because we all need support and it may just be that my way of dropping down and becoming more fully present to the experience of your body is part of your way out of your pain and into your power.
If you want to talk about how I can serve and support you in the New Year, click here, fill out the form and we’ll connect!
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With love and gratitude,
Ophra
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*That beautiful pic above? It’s by Jacki Dickert, one of my favorite photographers these days, taken of me on one of my favorite days of 2014, dancing in the woods with some amazing colleagues.
[spacer height=”20px”] If the end of summer is inspiring thoughts in you of “straightening up” and getting your act together, these tips are here to lighten the load and make the process more relaxed and easefull…
photo by AlexaRazma.com
[spacer height=”20px”]More than two-thirds of the folks who come to see me about chronic back pain share these two characteristics:
They claim to have bad posture, and therefore
They try to straighten themselves up throughout the day
The straightening up doesn’t seem to improve their alignment in the long run, and it certainly doesn’t do much for easing their pain. And yet it also doesn’t always occur to them that trying to “fix” their posture by “straightening up” is actually contributing to the discomfort and making it a “fixture” of their lives.
Here are five good reasons NOT to straighten your spine, especially if you’re looking to improve your alignment and find more ease and release in your body.
1. Your Spine is Curved to Begin With
Your spine is curved, not straight, and that’s a very good thing. The four curves of your spine – sacral, lumbar, thoracic and cervical – are precisely what makes it so strong and able to support your weight in an upright position.
If you’ve ever been to any kind of fitness class, chances are the teacher has used an image at some point to help you visualize the movement you’re going for. That’s because your body responds well to images, especially when they’re relevant and tangible to its experience.
But since the image of a straight spine has nothing to do with the reality of your structure and isn’t a tangible or even desirable goal by any stretch, you’re better off without it.
Your time and effort are much better spent getting to know the particular curves of your spine. This means cultivating mindfulness of your own body, and accessing imagery that is true to your experience in the moment. This kind of imagery is much more effective when it comes to helping you sense the placement and possibilities of your alignment.
And if you’re looking for realistic solutions, keep this in mind:
Alignment and support aren’t actually about position – they’re about relationship.
This is as true for your body as it is for your heart. And mind.
When it comes to your spine, as you begin to literally “see” your curves, you also begin to learn how to adjust the relationship of one curve to another so that your weight is better supported.
2. Straighten Up? What about Down?
Our Western culture has a fixation with reaching up – we don’t even realize the extent to which this spiritual concept ends up infiltrating the way we move and carry ourselves throughout the day.
But anyone with any understanding of physics – scientists, building contractors and dancers alike – will assure you that there is no such thing as “up” without “down”.
You can reach up all you want, but getting more length in your spine requires grounding.
Unfortunately, when we command ourselves to straighten up we tend to completely forget about reaching down. And so the musculature of your upper body – i.e. your neck and shoulders – ends up having to carry much more mass over long periods of time than it’s really built for.
No wonder your neck and shoulders are sore – they’ve literally been “weight lifting” all day!
Next time you feel the urge to straighten up, just take a quick moment to see if there’s space for your hips to relax down and if you can feel the weight of your body dropping through your feet. Taking that extra weight and sending it down with gravity where it belongs will do at least half the work of releasing your spine and giving it more space to lengthen.
3. You Move in Circles and Spirals, Not Lines
Here’s another misleading image that’s constantly being thrown at you.
As with trying to “straighten” your spine, you’re told reach your arms out and extend your legs as if they were linear masses on linear tracks, and the more you force the alignment, the more aware you become of how tight you are.
When in fact your movement relies on round joints! And the way to release your joints, especially the joints of your spine, is NOT to lock them in a straight line, but to make sure they have plenty of space for round, juicy movement.
What’s more is that there isn’t a single bone in your body that resembles straight. In fact, if you look at the bony structure of both your lower arms and lower legs, you’ll notice that the bones – radius and ulna in your arms and tibia and fibula in your legs – have a spiral-like movement around each other.
The way you walk is also a spiral action, a double helix resembling the very structure of your DNA. Notice when you’re walking that as your right leg strides forward it’s your left arm that’s swinging forward – this is one simple way to tune in to the spiral movement that your spine conducts throughout the day.
Yoga, Qi Gong and other ancient movement modalities have a lot to say on this subject, but it’s enough to observe your walking to begin to sense it for yourself.
4. Fixating Leads to Pain
Another great reason NOT to fix your alignment by straightening up is that alignment is never fixed. You live in a moving universe, on a moving planet, in a body that’s made up of trillions of moving particles. Good luck fixing anything into place, ever.
Fixing and fixating (on posture or anything else for that matter) are bound to lead to pain because they involve holding, which requires an immense amount of energy.
The joints of your spine are built for an incredible amount of movement. We’ve already talked about up and down, but sliding your right arm down your right leg will quickly reveal your capacity for movement from side to side, craning to look up or leaning forward to pick something from the floor will give you a taste of forward and back, and turning to look at someone behind you is a great way to experience movement around your central axis.
The way to less pain and more ease in your spine is more movement.
Instead of trying to hold yourself upright or in any other position, be greedy for movement. If you feel yourself slouching or getting tight, get up and walk around. Follow stretches and exercises you’ve learned or invent movements yourself which open up your awareness to all the possibilities of movement you haven’t been exploring while sitting at a desk and walking down straight, narrow hallways.
If you’re not sure what stretches and exercises to do and don’t feel like inventing them on your own, consider coming to work with someone like me. I help people create personalized toolkits to serve both their everyday and long-term needs, and my upcomingSemi-Private Group Session – RELAXED Strength & POWERFUL Alignment –is all about learning how to strengthen, lengthen and release your spine.
5. Your Breath – Not Your Muscles or Your Mind – is What Holds You Aloft
Your breathing is the underlying movement that keeps you going: it’s happening all the time (though maybe not as fully and elastically as it could be if you’ve been in front of a screen or sitting at a table for hours) and giving it a little bit of attention is likely to give you a lot more reach and relief than sucking-in in order to straighten up.
Since we’ve already established that more movement is more better and that your breath is at the root of your movement, it naturally follows that more breath is best of all.
Unfortunately we spend large parts of our day breathing very little. And being out of practice, we’re surprised (and maybe even put upon) at the suggestion that this is a part of our lives that requires diligent focus and intention. It’s not until we’re exasperated with pain and forced to do nothing but breathe that we begin to truly appreciate the importance of constant practice and awareness.
For a technical understanding of why open and plentiful breath is so important to your back, consider that your primary muscle of inhalation – the diaphragm – is located right in the middle of your torso, spanning your upper lumbar vertebrae to your mid-thoracic. If your diaphragm isn’t doing a lot of moving, neither is your spine and pain is likely to follow.
With the movement of the diaphragm and the filling and emptying of your lungs come changes of pressure in your torso in general and spine in particular. It’s these changes in pressure that are keeping you aloft.
As pressure builds on an inhale, you expand and create a lightening of the load. And every exhale presents an opportunity to release pent up pressure as well as weight, and experience the amazing support of gravity and the ground below you.
If the movement of your vertebrae and muscles are the mechanics of alignment, the breath is the energetics behind it. Which is why if you want an alignment that supports plentiful and vital energy tuning into your breath is the key.
Interested in learning more about the mechanics and energetics of a strong and supple spine?
Then make sure to check out the upcoming 90-Day Semi-Private Group Session:
You’ll spend 13 consecutive weeks in a small, intimate group of five or less learning how to access more strength and alignment by understanding how you mobilize, stabilize and release the spine.
There are only 2 spots remaining, so act quickly!
If you prefer to create your own personal toolkit of exercises, make sure to schedule a complimentary consultation. I only have space for 3 of these a week, so book now.
Use the form below to contact me ASAP!
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Do you want to use this article on your ezine/blog/site? You’re welcome to share this article, as long as you include this complete blurb with it:
“This is an article from Ophra Wolf, Embodied Wellness Coach and owner of Force & Flow Integrated Bodywork, where she helps high-performers and brilliant visionaries making significant shifts and contributions to their personal, professional and global environments to align with their highest potential. You can subscribe to her fr.ee newsletter and learn more about her unique approach at www.forceandflow.com”
I sent this (love) letter to my mailing list the other day and I’m sharing it with my blog readers now – I haven’t been doing much blogging lately and this will reveal a little of the “why”. The tide is turning and there are lots of blog posts coming up, but if you want to get the best of my insights and tips, make sure sure to subscribe to the newsletter – use the form above or to your left!
Coming out of the closet is much harder than I imagined…
Performing with Evan Hugh Worldwind & Kevin Nathaniel (AKA The Peace Department) at The Healing Arts Garden Event in Philly, 8/23/14
When I was a little girl living in Israel, I used to wake up early in the morning and hide in the closet and play make-believe for hours on end. In the dark closet, while my brother and parents were sleeping, I could be anyone and do anything I dreamed. I was powerful and beautiful, gracious and brilliant – all at once!
I’ve held on to so many of my dreams – my business and art are my testament. But I’ve often lived my life as if my powers and passions were safer in the closet. Fear of being seen has frequently terrorized me, which is strange considering the extraordinary lengths I’ve gone to embody my potential and uncover the brilliance within.
Strange but not unusual.
What is unusual is how much freedom and privilege I’ve had to follow my dreams and give voice to my truth. Especially unusual considering that I’m a woman. A Jewish woman. Israeli born. Of North African descent.
And a dancer, a woman dancer who’s chosen to live fully in her body in a world that still behaves as if intelligence belongs solely in the cognitive functions of the brain and treats the body as territory to be conquered. And an improviser at that, who’s chosen participation in the mysteries of the moment over the stature of recognized knowledge and forms.
A healer, too.
Believe it or not, naming that is the scariest part of coming out of the closet!
See, I grew up with a scientist for a father and scientific materialism as the reigning ideology of my times. My mother was a self-identified modern woman, who’d worked hard to distance herself from the “primitive” past of her Moroccan family, once well known and respected in Fez precisely because my great-grandmother was a powerful healer in service of the king. The gifts and talents that make me a healer weren’t always ones I knew how to appreciate.
It’s true that people – maybe even you – have increasingly referred to me as a healer for years now, but I’ve rarely called myself one for fear of…
It doesn’t matter. What I mean is, Enough With The Fear!!!
This summer took me to the Sierra Contact Festival, where I taught a workshop and spent a week in the beautiful nature of the high Sierra’s with amazing colleagues.
It’s killing us and blinding us from the immense healing powers of empathy and love. One look at the part of the world I hail from will suffice to prove my point. Which isn’t to say our fears – personal, cultural and global – are unfounded, or that our experience of them isn’t intensely real, but true courage and novel solutions are born of empathy and love.
Empathy for myself hasn’t always been easy to come by, and lack of it has kept me in the closet far longer than I intended. The love in my life – from my friends, family, clients and especially from my main man Marcel – has increasingly given me the courage to make my way out into the world.
It’s time for me to start giving and participating more fully.
And that’s what this new newsletter is all about. It’s my way of sharing my expertise, insights and offerings with you, friends.
Which is why I’d love to hear from you about what topics in the world of holistic health and embodied wellness are important to you to learn more about? Consider me a resource, at your service and gratefully so!
And make sure to check out the opportunity to get one of the last spots for the Fall RELAXED Strength & POWERFUL Alignment 90-Day Semi-Private Session – we start the week of September 15 and if you’re looking to integrate a sustainable and consistent approach to health for your body, mind and spirit, you don’t want to miss out on this.
90-Day Semi-Private Group Session
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Dynamic Core Strength and Fluid Breath Connection
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Spring is here and your body wants to come out of hibernation mode and bloom into it’s full potential for pleasure and productivity – what better time to commit to your wellbeing and transform your pain and discomfort into renewed strength and energy?![spacer height=”10px”]
Are you working hard at living a healthy, mindful life, but not seeing and feeling the results you’re spending so much energy on?
Are you aching to get strong but find yourself tied up dealing with fatigue and aches that only get exacerbated when you try to “work out”?
Do overcrowded and under-informed yoga, pilates and movement classes leave you feeling more tense and brittle than supple and centered?
Are you ready for the kind of detailed information and personalized attention that can catapult you to the next level of comfort, energy, flexibility and strength?
Do you love to learn and are you committed to opening your awareness, aligning with your highest potential and moving consciously through life?
Then this is your invitation to join a small group of brilliant, creative, and perceptive folks like yourself to experience the Force and Flow approach to holistic mind-body movement.
Our focus this session will be on finding the strength and flexibility that come from a dynamic and mindful connection to your core – there’s nothing as frustrating as watching your hard work make things even harder, but that’s often what happens when we “work out” without understanding the underlying connections of our body. CONNECTING TO CORE is about experiencing strength and alignment with ease and efficiency by learning how to connect and move from your center.
I’ve gathered a number of incredibly potent exercises from the worlds of Pilates, Yoga, Qi Gong and beyond, and cohered them in a systematic flow focused on helping you cultivate a connection to your core which will serve you in every single thing you do, from sitting in a chair to climbing personal, professional and natural mountains.
Take a moment to imagine what it would mean to you to have the energy, strength, flexibility and awareness to get the most out of the opportunities in your life? Who would you be if you could let go of held postures and tense positions and instead find ease in movement and organic strength? What kind of energy and awareness could you bring to the things you love?
Regardless of your background in movement, whether it be on a mat, in the gym, on the grass or even if it’s none at all, this upcoming session at Force and Flow is an incredible opportunity to develop the awareness and acquire potent tools for stepping into a healthier, stronger, more vibrant body. And with a maximum of five people in a group, you’re sure to get the personal attention that is so indispensable to your development and without which you’re likely spend a lot more time repeating the same mistakes and fighting off or giving into burn out.
Here are just a few of the benefits that you are sure to gain when you show up for yourself through this 90-Day CONNECTING TO CORE session:
Learn to attune to your movement, avoid injury and cultivate pleasure and ease in your body.
Have powerfully effective and simple tools for strengthening, centering, balancing, energizing and releasing tension.
Have improved breath awareness and breath capacity, as well as the improved focus, presence and resiliency that follows.
Experience dynamic alignment and tangible improvements in your posture, both in your body and in life.
Feel more connected to your intuitive, reflexive mind and experience greater ease and confidence with others as you come to know it in your own body.
Embody more strength, flexibility and agility as you navigate the challenges and opportunities in your life.
And most importantly, cultivate a healthy, strong and sustainable long-term relationship with your body.
Here is what the thoughtfully crafted FALLING INTO BALANCE package includes:
10-weekly 75-minute semi-private sessions which encourage a steady, incremental development of your strength, flexibility and awareness.
April 14 – June 22 Choose a group
Tuesdays 6:45PM, Wednesdays 7:15PM, Sundays 11:00AM
A private 60-minute session in which we will hone in on your specific questions and accelerate your development.
An invitation to one of three Sound Baths, our acclaimed sonic meditation series.
A 3-hour Walking Workshop in late June and/or early July
PLUS: a gift for a friend to join you at the workshop for free!
30% discount and priority booking on additional private or bodywork sessions throughout the 90-days
Personalized tips and assignments to keep you engaged in a sustainable, pleasurable way throughout the week
Audio recordings of all group sessions
The cost for all this is only $840 or $280 a month! And according to my long time students, the benefits are priceless. A payment plan is available to break up the cost, and spots are extremely limited at this point – if you think you are a good fit for this program, fill out the application form below and we’ll get back to you ASAP with registration information.
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He’s rock solid, this figure carved into the stone of Petra. He couldn’t flee when earthquakes destroyed the city and his upper half, he’ll never climb the steps or explore this amazing place that he graces…
[spacer height=”10px”]Nearing the end of a long, arduous Winter and with intense longing for the Spring, my people have been coming in to my studio and inbox and telling me:
[blockquote]I need to get stronger.[/blockquote]
And I can help, but it’s rarely by throwing all kinds of strenuous exercises and activities at you. In fact, strenuous exercise when your body’s not ready for it and your mind doesn’t know how to engage in it is more likely to deplete your strength than build it. Especially if you already have a pattern of chronic pain that’s probably stopping you from being as active as you like in the first place…
How many of you have felt the “I need to do something NOW” panic ring through your body and taken action by going for that run, jumping into that crazy yoga class or lifting some insane weights, only to find yourself in pain, exhausted and not feeling like doing much of anything for the next couple of days or weeks? Or even worse, (re)injured and convinced that you need to forget the venture altogether because you’re likely to end up in even more pain?
Here are three questions worth taking the time to meditate on – not only can they help you avoid that whole circus, they may show you the way towards the kind of strength that you can cultivate and maintain easily and with pleasure. Yes, strength, easily and with pleasure.
[blockquote]1. What do you need strength for?[/blockquote]
Start here. You think about your work and your relationships with great subtlety and nuance, but when it comes to your own body – i.e. the most intimate relationship you have and the vehicle that makes all your other work possible – maybe you’re still thinking in cliches: no pain, no gain; hard muscles = strong body; and so on… Yet I can assure you that pumping your muscles isn’t necessarily going to keep you strong on your feet or comfortable in your chair for hours at a time, and insisting on working through the pain can ending up costing you more hours of relaxed productivity than any other approach.
But knowing that you need the strength to be able to carry your baby and your groceries, for example, gives you a much better sense of the quality and quantity of strength that you’re looking for.
It also helps you hone your intention on something practical and meaningful: “I need the strength to _____” is going to get you a lot farther than “I need to get strong”. Your reflexive mind (i.e. body mind) isn’t stupid, it’s actually a much smarter, faster processor than your conscious mind – just imagine if you had to keep your heart beating, lungs pumping and weight balanced with your conscious mind for even five minutes and you’ll understand what I mean.
When the two minds work together, you get alchemy. If your conscious mind can communicate a clear direction in relationship to the realistic demands that your body faces on a daily basis, your body will respond. Communicate clearly often enough and watch your body increasingly respond quickly, effectively, even effortlessly.
[blockquote]2. How are you measuring your strength?[/blockquote]
Tight muscles are often the most vulnerable to injury, and building your muscles to hold and accentuate an imbalanced skeletal alignment is a great way to set yourself up for chronic pain. So I hope you’re not measuring strength by poking at yourself to see how rigid your abs or biceps feel.
Having a clear intention for how you want to use your strength gives you a much better set of parameters to measure your progress. If you need the strength to make it through a strenuous period of time at work or at home, you can measure the extent to which your current activities are helping you to cultivate the stamina and mindset you need in order to stay healthy, focused and agile. Then you can adjust accordingly.
For example, if you’re needing to spend extra hours sitting at your desk but the pain in your back is destroying your efforts at creativity and focus, then it’s time to connect to your core and strengthen an alignment that will give you more support. And if being relaxed in the face of demanding clients and colleagues is key to your success right now, then meditative techniques like Qi Gong and restorative Yoga ARE a form of strength training.
The key is for the parameters you set and against which you measure your strength to be ones that:
Arise from the reality of your needs
Consider your current state (i.e. start from where you are), and
Are linked to an intention that your body, mind and heart can all get behind.
If you insist on measuring yourself against some kind of ideal body or state that has nothing to do with where you are and with what you actually need right now, you can expect slow and emotionally taxing progress.
[blockquote]3. Are you crafting your engagement?[/blockquote]
That’s right, engaging with your body is a creative venture, and that means that there’s constant change in the process and endless discovery to be had. Crafting your engagement means making active and mindful choices not only about what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it, because how you engage in strengthening your own organism has everything to do with how you end up engaging your strength in your social and natural environments.
If you plan to get strong by working up a sweat on a treadmill while watching a sitcom, then you can expect to strengthen your capacity for mindless exertion of energy and force. If you’re pumping weights without any awareness of alignment and breath, then you can expect to develop misaligned, unsupported strength. If you’re forcing yourself to go to yoga class even though it’s making your hip scream in pain, then you’re cultivating your powers of intimidation and unsustainable strength. Get the gist?
There’s really no lack of intimidating, misaligned, unsupported and unsustainable strength in the world. And we’re destroying the planet with our insistence on mindless exertion of energy. In our minds we know how wrong it is, in our hearts we’re aching to change these patterns, but in our bodies we continue to strengthen them without realizing what we’re doing.
So for strength training that goes beyond muscle strength to give you the strength to reach your highest potential and help make the changes you want to see in the world happen, mindfulness is key. And engaging in whatever tiny (i.e. climbing subway stairs) or huge (i.e. training for a marathon) strengthening activity with a flexible, balanced, curious and analytical mindset will likely to lead you to quick and effective progress.
That’s my mission here at Force & Flow, folks, not just to help you get strong, but to help you discover and connect to the kind of strength that will support you in using your unique and magical talents for making this world a better place.
If you know you’re ready to get smart about how you get strong and want to learn how to consistently navigate towards your body’s own ideal sweet spot, check out the upcoming semi-private group session, Connecting to Core. This award-winning 90-day package is geared to your individual needs and promises to give you a wealth of tools to find dynamic core strength and fluid breath connection to support you in every aspect of your life. There are only a few spots left, so if you feel like this kind of supremely crafted engagement can help you to cultivate the strength and energy you need to not only experience less pain, but more pleasurable and effective use of your efforts, make sure to reserve your spot ASAP.
If you want to start off with a focused conversation on your specific needs, sign up below for a complimentary consultation. I do a limited number of these every month, so go on and fill the form out sooner rather than later.
[spacer height=”20px”] [one_half][/one_half] [one_half_last] [blockquote style=”large”]The Art of Healing Touch[/blockquote] [spacer height=”25px”]
Saturday, February 15 from 6 – 8 PM
Sunday, February 16 from 4 – 6 PM
$200 per couple ($175 Early Bird rate before 2/10)
**Limited to 4 Couples per Session**
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of all the things you give each other, nothing is as deep or meaningful as tender, healing touch.
To celebrate this Valentine’s day, come spend a couple of intimate hours at the beautiful Force and Flow oasis learning how to use your hands to help each other relax, release, rejuvenate and rejoice in the pleasure of your personal connection.
Learn to listen with your hands and cultivate a gift you can give each other for years to come.
Ophra Wolf, your guide, has been studying the art of healing touch for over a decade and is highly regarded as a teacher and practitioner of bodywork. She invites just four couples per session to experience the pleasure of learning together on a journey of deep listening and intimate communication.
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[alert color=”white” background=”#FF7E00″ border_color=”#FF7E00″]To pay using a credit card or paypal account, fill out the form to your left and press submit. You will be led to a PayPal payment page (no PayPal account required).[/alert]
[alert color=”white” background=”#3A1A45″ border_color=”#3A1A45″]To pay by check or cash, submit the form to your left and leave a note in the message field indicating your payment option, then mail your payment to Force and Flow, 1102 Dean St. #4, Brooklyn 11216.[/alert]
[alert color=”white” background=”#7E9254″ border_color=”#7E9254″]POLICIES
Your spot in the workshop is not guaranteed until we’ve received your payment.
We will issue a full refund minus a $10 processing fee for all cancellations made within 7 days of the workshop.
We will issue a 50% refund for all cancellations made 2-6 days prior to the workshop.
Cancellations made 48 hours or less prior to the workshop are non-refundable.
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[alert color=”white” background=”#7E9245″ border_color=”#7E9245″]WHAT TO BRING
Comfortable clothes to move in.
A bottle of water.
Someone you love.
Optional: a notebook, drawing pad, camera… some kind of mneumonic aid.
I’ve been getting this question regularly enough in my inbox recently that I figured it’s time to air it out on the blog.
The answer is, YES! In fact, I’d reckon I’m a more effective and effulgent bodyworker than ever these days.
The caveat is that I’m not so available for drop-in bodywork anymore. You see, I’m increasingly reserving the lion’s share of my time for folks who are invested in developing their understanding of their patterns of movement so that they can become connoisseurs of artful self-awareness and agents of transformation for their various pains and chronic ailments.
So I’m offering fewer “one-offs” and the reasons are definitely selfish – that healthy kind of selfish that allows me to keep doing my thing with skillful pleasure. The fact is that I’m personally energized when I know my time is going to good use, and while I don’t underestimate for a moment the goodness of offering you relief from acute pain or a little TLC to help release the sticky stress and dense fatigue that overtakes us all sometimes, I know that for all your gratitude and joy at the sense of instant transformation, an hour or two of hands on work is rarely enough to keep the pain and discomfort from coming back once you swing back into your habitual modus operandi.
In fact, I don’t even have one-off bodywork sessions listed on this website right now, but I’ve built myself a name as a blissful bodyworker and when people write or call to ask, I like to say yes, time and energy permitting. Rates are different than the packages listed on the Individuals page because the nature of the session and of my investment is also different – unlike the premium packages where I’m dedicated to giving you the tools and attention to experience true and lasting transformation, in a bodywork session we just get down to the business of hands-on adjustments.
If you decide that you want to go further and deeper with the work, I’m here. Sometimes we need a little hands-on relief to remember that we want to feel better more often and that we’re willing to invest in getting ourselves to that place!
If you’ve never been for a bodywork session with me before, I always recommend 90 minutes to begin with, but I won’t turn you away if you feel like 60 minutes is all that you’re up for. For the time being, when they are available, first sessions are $150 for 60 minutes or $200 for 90 minutes. After that it goes down to $125/$180 respectively. (P.S. this doesn’t pertain to abdominal massage, which is a different beast for a different blog post…) Some of these precious spots are reserved for sliding-scale clients, you know who you are.
Oh, and I’m still in Thailand with my Medical Qi Gong teacher, but I’m already taking appointments for when I’m back on Feb 4, so go ahead and use the form below to write me.
A mere moment before completing a full decade of teaching Pilates, some sweet recognition arrives.
Yup, Force and Flow was recently chosen for the 2013 Best of Brooklyn Awards for Pilates and I’m pleased as punch about it. There’s a rather dry press release that you’re welcome to read, but you may find the page about Pilates in the Community section of this site a lot more revealing.
One of the main things that characterizes the Force and Flow approach is that I’ve moved beyond mechanics, which ultimately offer a limited perspective to dealing with a wide range of bodies and needs, to acknowledge and cultivate the energetics of the form – that is, the quality and intention with which we approach any given movement. This is the reason that I can help people at all levels – from professional dancers to senior citizens and those with various degrees of pain and injury – to experience very tangible improvement in their balance, strength and alignment.
Monday night I was on the A train around 8:30PM, coming back from rehearsal with Antititled, when a young man pulled his girlfriend near where I was sitting.
I mean pulled forcefully.
He was standing right in front of me now, shifting nervously and mumbling about what he needed to smoke to calm down, she was hardly breathing, holding back tears. When the two seats next to me cleared out, he grabbed her wrist and practically threw her into the seat. When she tried to get up, he blocked her and then sat in the seat between us and made sure she didn’t move. She sat still, the tears came to her eyes.
I thought for a moment about what to do and decided to stand up.
Being on the Grand Jury earlier this year brought home for me the extent to which the simple physical actions of raising our hand and standing up for something, or not raising our hand and not standing up for something, can have a very real and tangible effect on people’s lives. For those of you who know me well, it will come as no surprise that this was a moment in which I felt called to stand up.
As soon as I did, a young woman from across the way motioned to me – did I see what was going on?! We have to tell someone! What should we do? She was whispering anxiously, terrified by premonitions of what awaited the captive woman.
The subway car was full mind you, plenty of others were seeing what was happening, but in our typical worn-out and violence-weary New York way, we were working hard not to see. As if blindness could excuse us from making an effort. I do this all the time. This time I didn’t, maybe because it was so close to me and maybe because I felt that I actually had the energy to make an effort. After all, cultivating energy is what my work at Force and Flow is about, and using that energy well is my highest prerogative.
I don’t know what to do, I confessed to the concerned woman, who I later found out was a young grad student from Ethiopia, recently arrived to NYC via Kansas. But I’m going to stand close to them so I can keep an eye, and if they leave the train I may follow and get some help.
I’ll come with you when you get off, she said, and we reached our hands out and held them for a moment, two strangers sealing a pact.
Here’s where knowing how to stand comes in handy, because other than standing I really didn’t know what to do. The bench where the couple sat happened to be at the end of the car, and the woman was pinched right into the corner. I stood against the back door, feet grounded, weight centered, body relaxed and at a slightly open angle to them. There was nothing threatening in my posture, but there was no doubt that I was there with them, aware and present to the situation. When the young woman leaned over to cover her eyes and start crying again, her head practically fell into my hand and I instinctively touched it lightly and asked her if she was ok?
She looked at me through heavily made up eyes and said, Oh, um, I’m just having allergies. I kept eye contact with her, didn’t say a word, just shook my head very slightly: no, that’s not it. Almost immediately, the man grabbed her again and pulled her out of the seat and away from me, muttering something or other. I touched the woman’s arm lightly as it flew past me and asked her again, are you ok?
When the man turned to me and started barking that’s she’s fine and to mind my own f-ing business, I admit my heart started racing. But I know how to stand, so I stood. This is what I train my body for these days – not just for muscular strength, but for the strength to stay soft, focused and grounded in an emergency. For the ability to calm my breath and my heart down, and for the power that comes from feeling my feet on the ground.
I do this because I’m under the impression that in the big picture, we’re in an emergency and this is the kind of strength we need in order to take it on: calm, focused, loving. But Monday night brought an emergency into the small picture of my day, and when my heart started racing I knew how to stay relaxed and say to the young man with my body language, I’m not here to attack you, but I won’t be averting my gaze.
When the train stopped at Nostrand a few seconds later, the young man said let’s go and grabbed the woman by the wrist to exit. I followed, because this was my stop and because frankly I was afraid for the woman and what would happen to her when no one was looking. I wanted to keep looking as long as possible.
The grad student from across the way also came out, and we made eye contact and checked to see where the couple was going and if there was someone to turn to for help. They were moving awkwardly and as the train was about to leave he grabbed the young woman and pulled her into the next car just as the doors were closing, leaving us in the station with no attendant or police officer in sight. My new friend started bawling. I wrapped my arm around her and we walked up to the street, looking for a cop: none in sight.
We have to call 911, she said through the tears, we have to call 911!!! So I did.
911 picked up right away, in less than one ring, and for this I am incredibly grateful. For someone who has spent most of their lives outside of “the system”, it was a reminder of how lucky I am to live in a time and place where there is someone to call when I see a potentially dangerous situation, where the phone is answered right away, where the police arrive almost immediately to help: not every city in the world has their act together to this extent, you know? And there are plenty of places in the world where what we saw happening is not only commonplace, but culturally condoned, so that the fact that the police were ready to stop a whole train of people in order to intervene is, as far as I’m concerned, on the scale of miracle.
Please forgive me if you were on that train, I would have been cursing too if it were me stuck in the station at the end of a long, cold day. But as a woman, I’d be contributing to a much bigger and older curse if I pretended that I didn’t see what was going on and at least try to do something about it.
Because I’d been able to stay calm and grounded, I had the wherewithal to get the train number as it was pulling out. I gave it to the 911 operator right away and she was able to get the train stopped as it arrived at its next station. Between my new friend and I, we were able to provide a slew of identifying details, including which car the couple went into, what they were wearing and how they were moving. Two officers met us on the corner of Nostrand and Fulton almost as soon as I got off the call, checking to see if we were OK and asking for any other details. When they left I helped my friend figure out how to get back to the Pratt housing – she was farther into Brooklyn than she’d ever been and still terrorized by thoughts of ‘what if’. Then I walked home the same way I always do.
I don’t know if there’s a happy ending. Even if the police were able to intervene and help the woman go her own way that night, I can’t stop her from going back to that or any other abusive man. And there are plenty of other women in similar or worse situations. But I admit that I went to sleep feeling good and incredibly grateful that night – for my new friend who reached out and helped me stand up for what I believe in, for the NYPD and the system that brought them to my assistance so quickly, and for the practices I have that help me cultivate and apply my energy to the things I believe in, no matter how unknown or threatening they may seem.
PARTY & TOAST @ 8:00 PM
Homemade Moroccan Treats &
Plenty of floor to lounge and dance on!
RSVP not needed, but appreciated
Come celebrate the new Force & Flow website and the many other gifts this year has already brought.
Katie Down is bringing her magic along, and we’re going all out for this shindig, with a very special tea ceremony by Dea to open the Sound Bath and catered Moroccan delicacies by Ayat to celebrate in style after.
This Sound Bath will be focused on the power of our voices as we celebrate our own internal drone and vibration. We’ll use the sruti box and incorporate Biosonic tuning forks as well. Come and raise your voices together in resplendent harmony! Read more about Sound Baths. Dea will open up the evening with a hot cup of medicinal mushroom tea to start tapping into our higher frequency vibrations – it’s organic, metal free, star 5 kosher!
Luscious food and plenty of floor to dance or lounge on after the bath.
Monday night I was on the A train around 8:30PM, coming back from rehearsal with 