Force and Flow

Category: Pilates

  • Announcing the Spring Semi-Private Group Session!

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    Photo by Marielise Gouléne
    Photo by Marielise Gouléne

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    EXPERIENCE THE AWARD WINNING FORCE & FLOW APPROACH TO CORE STRENGTH

    Connecting to Core

    April 14 – July 13

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    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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  • Secrets of Strength Training

    The Strength of Solid Rock
    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:
    1. Arise from the reality of your needs
    2. Consider your current state (i.e. start from where you are), and
    3. 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.

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    Sign up for a Complimentary Consultation

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  • Force and Flow wins 2013 Best of Brooklyn for Pilates

    PilatesHolla!

    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.

    Read more about how the approach unfolded and leave a trail on the community page to let me know about your own experience…