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The Mindful Body



Gorge To Summit is teaching their first workshop! We want to help you feel more connected to your body and to your movement. We get stuck in our habitual movement patterns and this is what starts to give out us aches and pains. Yes, even when you do yoga everyday or have a mix of a leg arm, and cardio in your workouts. We have to play with movement and give our body novel input to create balance in our bodies and decrease pain.


We use mindfulness, mind-body connection, calming the nervous system, stabilization, coordination, and play to teach you this balance. The workshop will be a combination of education and movement. Each week we will look at one of the principles of finding a mindful body and provide context, education, and practice so you can start integrating them into your everyday life. 



Mindfulness is our week one topic. We want you to understand how to talk to your central nervous system and calm it down, register how different emotions feel in your body, and observe your movement without judgment. This week is about knowing where you stand so by the end of six weeks you can check in again and see how your body feels different. 


The Mind Body connection is our week two topic. It’s so important you can connect to your body and feel what is happening in it so you can manipulate it. This includes both recruitment of muscles and relaxation of muscles. When we aren’t aware of what our body is and we have instability someplace, our body likes to help create stability by recruiting a little bit of everything. This is not how we are built to move. We have to relax the muscles not intended for a certain movement in order to accurately recruit the ones that are.




Once you can sense your body and have a bit more knowledge about how it feels in certain situations, we can give it a conscious input and pay attention to how we change and feel. Week three we talk about stability. Stability must come before mobility. The most important stability comes from our pelvis and our ankles. Our ankles are connected to our feet and our feet are what contact the ground when we walk. This makes them one of the most important places to start working on stability. In our workshop we will provide you tools to work on your balance strategies in order to improve stability for walking, running, climbing stairs, or your yoga practice. The pelvis is an equally important stabilizing structure. It’s right in the middle of our body and connects the upper half of the body to the lower half of the body. Whatever is happening in the pelvis influences the back, shoulders, neck, knees, and feet. You will learn how to find your pelvis in space in all functional and playful positions in order to bring balance to your body. 


After stability comes motor control and coordination in week four. Timing is important and, just like in algebra, the order of operations matters. We will help you find motor control and timing in your stabilizers in order to move more freely. You will also learn about fascia and it’s integral roll in how we move.  When you can stabilize proximally, think shoulders and hips, it frees up more degrees of movement distally, think arms and legs. We will return to recruitment and relaxation this week to help you feel the timing and order of recruitment. 


Week five is about balance. We will use the lessons from stability to challenge balance. We have three balance systems in our body; vision, vestibular, and proprioception. Each one plays a role in our ability to organize against gravity and move against gravity. This week we will play with movement, we call it Functional Play. How can we make movement more fun and stimulating for our central nervous system? Can we provide novel movement input to our bodies to not only challenge our balance systems, but also create balance in our bodies? Let’s play and see! 


Our last week we will ask you for input. We will check back in with your mindfulness, can you feel more things change in your body when you move? Can you move without judgment and feel new things?  We also want to make sure the principles we are teaching you can be applied to the actual things you do. Are you a yogi? A kite boarder? A runner? A cyclist? Do you walk a lot at work or for exercise? Do you have small children to pick up? We want you to understand how you move throughout your day and make sure you walk away from our workshop feeling empowered to move with skill throughout your day. We will address all your activities with a Mindful Body and Functional Play skill set, so let’s learn, grow, and play!! 


Register on our website and reach out to us with questions. 


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