Oct 24, 2014 - Elders Updates

Meeting with Lindsey, Mirae, Karen

Karen hands out two packages of paper about the principles of Vijnana Yoga and the Tensegrity breakdown of sitting.

She places them in our hands as she begins to voice some concerns about spending the majority of the Elders workshop in the chair. It is much easier to feel entire body integration when standing rather than sitting, but it is even easier to slump in your chair and lose the plum line.

We discuss the idea of stretching, and how it lacks the integration of using the lines of connection to move further.

Mirae suggests a movement sequence where one partner stands and moves side to side, while the other partner has hand lightly resting on their shoulder blades. This is great for spreading the upper back onto the spine and relaxing the shoulders.

She also suggests we end with tapping to wind down in place of stretching. Tapping grounds and relaxes the body and mind: top of head, brow line, cheek bones, clavical, sternum.

We speak about how to work more efficiently with the translation process. We want to try having Jan interpret to the whole room, while we do the movements with everyone, so as to keep everyone together and not singling the interpretation out. Cultural sharing is important to this project, and with the translation shared with everyone we have more opportunity to learn from one another.

The possibility of using mirroring to lead into the energy body practice, as an introduction, is discussed.

We begin to rearrange how we co-facilitate. This is also starting to happen more in the Carnegie Troupe workshops too.

For the Elder workshop, we have a soft opening and soft closing. We have light music playing, something lively. We welcome the participants and speak with them about the workshops and tell them about the refreshments and how we will have a break half way through. Karen introduces methods to move around on a chair that then transfer to standing. The energy body and tensegrity lines are explored. Then, whoever else is co facilitating takes us through hand dances and improvisations, warming up the feet, moving in space with spiral walk and or seasons dance and a variety of other ways to get into the creative body. There is a fluid facilitation back and forth between facilitators and explorations.

For Carnegie, Karen facilitates the first half of the workshop with energy body practice, tensegrity review, and animal movement based on these lines of connection. The second half of the workshop is led by two mentees, going further into improvisations we have been building, and offerings that participants have shared from their movement practices

...next blog: we have an open studio on Sunday, November 2nd at 4pm-4:45pm