Disciplines of Somatic Learning

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The Yoga of Somatic Learning

This is a yoga of awakening. Learn to expand your awareness and differentiate subtle levels of sensations within the body. As you sense the movement of your bones, diaphragms, fluids and organs you will come to know yourself anew ---- enjoying the endless flow of movements within movements.

 

Surf the waves of breath, effortlessly allowing gravity to free you of habitual tensions. Instead of stretching surface skeletal muscles, extend the space between all the vertebrae, setting your bones afloat in a sea of soft tissue that effortlessly lengthens.

 

This creative awareness enables you to ride the crest of human evolution, participating consciously with the self-organizing intelligence that heals and renews.

Somatic Meditations

No matter what your health issue, there is something powerful and healing that you and only you can do about it. Similar to isolating specific muscle groups when exercising, you can significantly improve your health by 'isolating' the specific organs and tissue groups involved in your injury or disease and 'exercising' them.

 

First, you must get underneath and begin to sense your body's 'live' experience. The organs and tissues of your body are constantly sending signals to one another and your health problems are being continuously described and formed by them. Through carefully initiated subtle movements you can learn to 'listen' in on and participate in these 'organismic dialogues'.

 

As you learn to sense these impulses - learn to feel the meaning of your body's inner vocabulary - your somatic intelligence begins to inform your breathing and movements and align them into the service of your healing. You begin to dialogue with your inner self. Somatic Learning  is the inside-out discipline of learning to differentiate and exercise.

Dialogue & Co-Presence

Dialogue: The roots of our personal and collective dilemmas lie deep in the transpersonal structure of "thought." Sharing in this understanding, many distinguished scientists, psychologists and theologians pioneered dialogues-group processes through which people could access and exercise these structures.

 

Driven into modern practice by the work of David Bohm, Carl Rogers, Patrick DeMari and Martin Buber and William Isaacs, dialogue is employed today by many organizations and communities around the world. From developing "learning organizations" in business to resolving racial and cultural conflicts in communities, dialogue unleashes and connects the intelligence of individuals and groups.

 

As in any important endeavor many authentic and distinctive disciples are emerging to facilitate dialogue. Some are unique in the particular "methods" and "tools" they encourage, others, in how dialogue is conceptualized. In the work of Dr. Risa Kaparo, people learn to engage in dialogue from a significantly different inner awareness. In Dr. Kaparo's approach, dialogue reaches beneath the verbal surface of our minds and engages the somatic intelligence to inform our whole being.

 

Co-Presence: Dialogue as a social meditation can awaken presence- or a non-dual state of consciousness by dispelling mis-identification with “image/object level awareness” as the ground of reality.  The practice develops a deep ecology of affect, allowing us to ride our waves of joy and interest, without tensing toward accomplishment or being compelled by our conditioning and judgment.

 

Practiced in social or professional contexts or as a “dialogue with oneself” this yoga of dialogue engenders a compassionate, engaged and creative participation with “what is.” When utilized in a psychotherapeutic context, the process transforms pain, stress and trauma.

 

This Yoga of Dialogue engages our somatic intelligence, which is self-sensing, self-organizing and self-renewing.  Just as we can sense a change in temperature, light or the weight of something we're carrying, we can learn to sense fluctuations in the flow of meaning. Meaning moves from something verbal, abstract or located "out there", to being experienced as fluctuations in the stream of "here/now" - fluctuations most fully understood when our understanding is rooted in our somatic intelligence. Developing the inner disciplines from which the "co-presence" of dialogue occurs, we extend our capacity to perceive subtleties of meaning and contribute to dialogue more authentically.

Creative Writing

Somatic Learning  offers a variety of experiments to loosen the hold of habits in thought and to encourage play with language, thus freeing up creativity. In conjunction with Somatic Meditations, the act of writing turns into a channel for expressive movement, performance art, self-exploration and renewal.

 

When we accept what is and bear witness to it, speaking from our truth, from the depths of our feeling, sensing, knowing, something powerful happens, not only in ourselves, but in the world at large.

 

When we read what someone has written, and the truth resonates within, a deeper embodiment occurs in each of us. Nothing will ever be the same. We often identify with the stories we tell ourselves, but our uniqueness resides not so much in our stories as in that which is most deeply felt and, paradoxically, that which connects us to all that is.

 

Somatic Learning explores the process of writing as a method of self-exploration. Re-mythologizing the meaning we make from real life events and the resonance of their significance in the evolution of human experience as a whole. It is an exploration of what sustained us, through the trials of life, even when we lose or feel more than we think we can bear, beyond hope and hopelessness, when we can no longer rely on anyone, not even ourselves. As we learn to deepen this dialogue with oneself, the process of writing can sustain us, enriching our solitude by nourishing us from within.

 

We employ writing as a discipline for extending presence into new depths of meaning-- as a way of living into the unknown and renewing ourselves.

Luscious Movement & Dance

This practice guides you through a series of Somatic Meditations  to reveal your intimate somatic vocabulary. A whole new dance begins here, from the wellspring within, a poetry of unfolding meaning and form.

 

These luscious movements will awaken you to the richness of your silent experience. You will no longer settle for less than tasting the deliciousness of being wholly embodied and giving full expression to the flow of feeling. This is a performance art of transformative learning and change.

 

You will develop a repertoire of movement modalities ranging from the subtlest micro-movements to large movements in space. Learn how each mode of sensing and initiating movement has unique implications for healing and regeneration and how they can be used for your particular health condition.

SM

Somatic Learning invites you to rediscover the sacred, spacious intelligence of your bodymind, source of transformative healing and the deep ecology

of embodied mindfulness.

 

Email: drrisa@somaticlearning.com          Phone: 510-232-2357          Fax: 860-201-8008          Webmaster: andrew@somaticlearning.com

 

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