Lavinia Plonka – The Feldenkrais Method to Reawaken Your Body 2022
Break free from tension, pain, and restriction with gentle movements to step back into the world with grace.
Did you know that when you’re “holding yourself together,” you’re literally gripping in different, often unnoticed, parts of your body like your hips or ankles?
You might feel stiffness or tension stuck in your joints or muscles… maybe in your legs, your belly, or perhaps your neck or shoulders.
Many of us have been feeling like we’re “just getting through this” — and coupled with spending more time hunched over our computers and phones, the stress is mounting in our hips, lower backs, upper bodies… bringing up new discomforts or aggravating existing conditions.
Our eyes are strained from too much screen time, and everywhere in our bodies, we’re holding tightness and worry about what our “new normal” is going to be.
What’s fascinating about the tensed-up positions we find ourselves in — and the way we move (or don’t move for long periods) — is that how you move is how you move through life.
The way you move reflects your health, your emotions, your ability to maintain balance in a challenging world…
So, what if you could move with greater ease, flexibility, balance, and agility — with surprising ways to soothe your nervous system and break free from tension, pain, and restriction?
How would that affect the way you lead your life?
And how might it light your way now that it looks like we’ll soon start rebuilding our world?
Harness the Power of the Feldenkrais Method® to Revitalize Your Body, Mind & Soul
Join us for a 12-module video course as Lavinia Plonka — celebrated body language expert and Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Teacher® — shows you how to adjust the way you move so you can find your way back home to a body you love that moves you through life with grace and comfort.
The Feldenkrais Method is a delightful, elegant, safe, and empowering practice that supports balance and resilience… by stimulating the intelligence you were born with.
This innate intelligence is the same brilliance that taught you how to walk as a baby, that allows you to drive your car without thinking about it.
Feldenkrais is known for its ability to relax your nervous system… improve your stress response… release tension and constriction… and open you up to a greater sense of well-being.
Crucially — especially now — it also helps you reorganize post-trauma without having to relive it… just release it.
In this restorative program with Lavinia, you’ll anchor in new habits to improve your posture and balance, sharpen your clarity of vision (both inner and outer), reduce pain, enhance the quality of your life, and step back into the world with calm.
You’ll reawaken a part of yourself that might have been feeling stuck in lockdown — from your eyes to your feet.
And in each session, you’ll:
- Experience a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson
- Receive a Daily Movement Practice to take your healing deeper
- Discover the connection between a part of your body and its emotional significance
- Explore each part’s relationship with a particular chakra
- Learn practical tools for bringing embodied practice into your daily life
You’ll receive movement lessons to relax your eyes… relieve back, shoulder, and neck discomfort… release the stress in your shoulder blades and hips… engage your core without strain… enjoy healthier walking, knees, and ankles…
… AND you’ll find out how to literally put your best foot forward as you open into a new world.
— Lavinia Plonka
The calming movements, breathing practices, self-care strategies, and softening processes Lavinia will share are accessible to all levels of movement, opening up the interstitial spaces between your organs, and equipping you with surprising, effective ways to soothe your nervous system.
You’ll find the process very organic because with Feldenkrais, you take time to integrate, to release tension in both your body and your thoughts.
If you’re already familiar with Feldenkrais or have benefitted from Lavinia’s teachings before, you’ll build on the movements you know and love.
If you’re new to Feldenkrais, Lavinia will open you to the gentle power of the method, showing you how to restore your body with simple yet profound movements that make your before-and-after feel like night and day.
By the end of this training, you’ll have Feldenkrais practices to take with you and easily incorporate into your daily life forever — and Lavinia will show you how.
Receive Guidance From a Celebrated Body Language Expert
Lavinia has helped people improve their movement, behavior, relationships, and careers for over 35 years. Her unique expertise connects the dots between posture, movement, emotions, and the mind.
Her training has included theater, dance, yoga, and the martial arts — and she’s the only teacher to offer Feldenkrais through the lens of myth and archetypes. (You’re likely to explore the Atlas in your shoulders or the Persephone in your re-emergence in the world!)
Lavinia’s students consistently report feeling a renewed sense of hope, self-awareness, re-engagement with their bodies, and one of the most profound benefits they experience is — to use one participant’s words — leaving “chronic pain in the dust.”
In this nourishing video training, you’ll:
- Receive movement lessons to relieve back, shoulder, and neck discomfort
- Relieve the stress that’s stuck between and under your shoulder blades
- Free your upper spine to turn further with greater ease and comfort
- Explore the direct link between your inner and outer worlds — and how the way you move your physical body mirrors your self-worth, creativity, and worldview
- Discover concrete strategies to relieve plantar fasciitis
- Learn the connection between eye tension and balance issues
- Receive a somatic practice for clarifying a vision for your future
- Deepen your understanding of how your eyes and brain work together
- Release neck tension and lengthen your spine for easier posture
- Understand how the 3 parts of the eye relate to the different functions of your body
- Receive a meditation on releasing toxic emotions that cause gripping in your hip flexors AND a movement for freeing up the muscles around your hips
- Improve your breathing by mobilizing your ribs
- Understand the link between the soft palate and the pelvic floor
- Relax your facial muscles for a “natural facelift ” (!)
- Relieve nasal congestion
- Find out why deep breaths are NOT nourishing when we’re stressed, and what is
- Use sound and vibration to relax
- Allow the Earth to support your bones on a brand-new path
Is This Course for Me?
If there are parts of you that want to be re-enlivened with simple, powerful movements for flexibility, balance, and calm, Lavinia designed this course for you. In her warm, compassionate style, she’ll integrate the principles and practices of the Feldenkrais Method in a timely way that’s unique for this training and these times, so you can break free from tension and emerge into a changing world with grace. She created this course both for those who already know and love Feldenkrais, and for those who are ready to experience its benefits for the first time.
What You’ll Discover in These 12 Modules
In this 12-part transformational intensive, Lavinia will guide you through the fundamental Feldenkrais movements and practices you’ll need to release tension and restriction for flexibility, balance, and a calmer nervous system.
This course will feature step-by-step teachings and experiential practices with Lavinia. Each session will build harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles you’ll need to reawaken your body for resilience and calm.
Module 1: Seeing Your Way Ahead Physically, Mentally & Emotionally
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up and start a new day?
Your eyes take in information and send it directly to your brain. They’re your information gatherers, the mental parts of your face, and they orient you in space.
When your eyes are stiff from focusing on screens, your peripheral vision suffers, and you can’t take in what’s around you — literally or figuratively. Not only that, because you need healthy eyes for balance, strained eyes signal to your body that you’re unbalanced, that you’re not safe… which increases your cortisol levels, placing you firmly on an anxiety loop.
In this opening session, Lavinia will guide you to see differently, feel more balanced, and have a new vision for when you go out into the world. You’ll explore your eyes’ connection to your sixth chakra, and:
- Improve your peripheral vision
- Understand how the 3 parts of the eye relate to the different functions of your body, telling your story to yourself and others
- Learn a movement practice to relieve head and neck tension by relaxing your eyes
- Expand your proprioceptive abilities to perceive yourself in your surroundings
- Learn the connection between eye tension and balance issues
- Enjoy a visualization process for improving your interoception (your perception of your internal state)
- Receive a somatic practice for clarifying a vision for your future
Module 2: Laying Down the Burdens You’re Shouldering
Are your shoulders tensed up near your ears? Maybe one of your shoulders is a bit curled in a protective gesture? Perhaps it feels like your shoulders are hunching forward, creating a rounded posture. This can communicate sadness and fatigue — and you might feel sadness and fatigue too.
In these challenging times, we sometimes feel as if our shoulders are like those of Atlas, holding up the whole world.
In this module, you’ll identify your burdens and explore the story in your shoulders. You’ll discover how your shoulders relate to your fourth chakra (your heart center), and you’ll:
- Understand how your shoulders carry locked, hidden, and unexpressed emotions
- Enjoy a movement lesson to relieve stress in your shoulders and neck
- Discover how your gestural choices impact your shoulders and vice versa
- Find the freedom to embody giving and receiving — the emotions of ecstacy and agape (the highest form of love), surrender, and delight
- Learn the connection between your shoulders and your spine (and any back pain you might be struggling with)
- Find beauty and grace in how you reach out to the world
Module 3: Loosening Your Shoulder Girdle to Liberate Your Heart
Your shoulder girdle literally hangs on top of your rib cage. It’s attached by muscles to your neck, your ribs, and your spine.
When these tighten — due to factors like stress, too much sitting, or fear — the entire girdle becomes less of a girdle and more like a vise. Your neck pulls forward, your head weighs a ton, and your ribs get stuck.
In this module, you’ll release the vise, expand your heart center, and:
- Receive a movement lesson to relieve back and shoulder discomfort
- Relieve the stress that’s stuck between and under your shoulder blades
- Free your upper spine to turn further with greater ease and comfort, emancipating your head and neck
- Deepen your understanding of how your eyes and brain work together
- Release neck tension and lengthen your spine for easier posture
- Unglue shoulder attachments (both physical and metaphorical!)
- Improve your breathing by mobilizing your ribs
Module 4: What’s Holding You Back? Releasing the Grip in Your Hips
We don’t think of our hips as being very emotional, yet they can hold stuck frustration and other emotions. In order to move ahead in life, you need to mobilize your hip joints and have a functional relationship with your hip flexors. In fact, your hip flexors are key in your fight/flight/freeze response.
Since you can’t beat up your irritating boss, or jump out of your car in traffic, you spend most of your time in freeze mode. This can create tension in your spine, which impacts your hip joints themselves. Add in cultural constraints that affect our sense of freedom and mobility in our lives, and you have a recipe for balance problems that can lead to falling, or to hip replacement surgery.
In this module, you’ll explore your hips’ connection to your second (sacral) chakra, and:
- Improve your posture by freeing your hips
- Understand why we grip in the hips when we’re “holding ourselves together”
- Receive a meditation on releasing toxic emotions that cause gripping in the hip flexors
- Enjoy a movement lesson for freeing up the muscles around the hip joints
- Get an “experiential anatomy” visualization tour of your hip joints
- Liberate your walk and put some swing in your step
Module 5: Relaxing Into Your Core Superpower
Stop holding yourself back and holding it in!
Your body’s powercenter lies right in the middle of you. Most of us hold this area in an iron grip, sucking in our bellies, gripping our abdominal muscles, squeezing our butts.
Yet in order to move freely, your ground force needs to flow like a ripple from your feet to your head. By tensing in the middle, that current is stopped, and so is your ability to step into your true power.
In this module, you’ll embolden your second chakra, and:
- Find your powercenter
- Identify your superpower — and your kryptonite
- Understand the myth of tight bellies and core strength
- Experience a lesson that allows you to engage your core without strain
- Find out how to sense the movement of the “kinetic chain” from your feet to your head
- Master a movement that enlivens your internal organs, activating the deep muscles that help breathing and aid the connection to your psoas and back
Module 6: Letting It All Out — Breath & Movement to Calm Your Nervous System
How many times during stressful situations have you been told, “just take a deep breath”?
Unfortunately, when we’re stressed, that deep breath is not nourishing in the way it should be, and could even make you more anxious.
Your breath patterns — whether relaxed, shallow, rapid, or held — communicate different messages to your nervous system about your safety and your environment. How you exhale can make a difference in your health.
In this module, you’ll explore your solar plexus/diaphragm/third-chakra area, and:
- Learn a relaxing breath meditation
- Develop, through a movement lesson, greater awareness of how you breathe in different situations
- Explore a surprising strategy for calming your anxiety while increasing your breath capacity
- Connect your respiration with your cellular structure
- Choose your response to a somatic challenge
- Understand your own breath so it can flow more fully
Module 7: Using Sound & Vibration to Tone Your Vagus Nerve
The physicist David Bohm once famously said that “the universe is frozen light.” In other words, everything is simply faster or slower vibrations — including you!
We know that sound can be very healing. It’s even more useful when you combine it with awareness of how you use a sound and where that sound travels through you.
In this module, you’ll explore your fifth chakra, and:
- Explore how toning, humming, and vibration support vagal tone, helping you feel better
- Discover the relationship between breath, movement, and sound to calm your nervous system
- Open your throat for a clearer voice
- Relieve nasal congestion
- Use sound and vibration to relax
- Increase your breath capacity
Module 8: Building Resilience to Recover From Shock & Stand Back Up
— Moshé Feldenkrais
There’s an old Irish drinking song (some of us remember Chumbawamba’s version in the 90s) that goes, “I get knocked down, and I get up again…”
Resilience is becoming a prized quality these days, for good reason. When you become physically resilient, you’ll find yourself emotionally resilient as well, and you’ll be more able to “roll with it” when life tries to knock you down.
In this module, you’ll explore health as the ability of your system to recover from shock, and:
- Experience a movement lesson that opens your hip joints and softens your back
- Delve into how infant developmental movements can improve your mobility
- Learn how to approach novel movement in an organic, safe way
- Develop greater freedom and more choice in the way you move
- Rediscover the joy of playing with movement
- Improve your agility and balance
Module 9: Moving Your Mouth to Clear Tension & Brighten Your Spirit
Who really thinks about the inside of their mouth? Unless you have a toothache or a blister, the inside of your mouth is just the place where food goes, right?
You’ll be surprised… the roof of your mouth can actually change its shape, your tongue has a life of its own, and everything inside your mouth — including your temporomandibular joint (TMJ) — is connected to all the other parts of you in myriad ways.
In this module, you’ll explore why the soft palate is like the connector between the fifth and sixth chakras, and:
- Discover how to create spaciousness in your mouth
- Learn to relax tension in your jaw and tongue
- Experience the relationship of your tongue to your soft palate
- Connect this space with your skull and abdomen through a guided visualization
- Understand the link between the soft palate and the pelvic floor
- Relax your facial muscles (for a “natural facelift”!)
- Understand how a smile can be your umbrella
Module 10: Releasing Constraint & Gaining Support for New Directions
Many times in life, what appears to be an obstacle can turn out to be just the thing we needed to let go of an old pattern, an old direction, a toxic habit.
Often, you can’t see what’s holding you until it releases — or, as is often said, “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
In this module, you’ll explore new sources of support connected with your sixth chakra, and:
- Learn how to use a rolled-up blanket in an elegant movement lesson to support and stabilize you
- Experience the profound relaxation of yielding your muscles to gravity
- Learn how to relieve neck and back tension with a simple prop
- Acquire a self-reflective tool for finding support for new directions while letting go of the unnecessary
- Effortlessly improve your alignment
Module 11: Putting Your Best Foot Forward as You Open Into a New World
Your feet follow your intention.
Or do they? Are you able to feel confident as you move ahead?
It’s amazing that nature has created us to balance our entire weight on those two tiny points on the ground. One slight shift in the direction of the foot and the entire skeleton is affected.
Could your sense of instability, your hesitation to move ahead, your fear of falling on your face, all be connected to where you put your feet?
In this module, you’ll explore the act of grounding in your first chakra, and:
- Discover the joys and challenges of being bipedal and how your feet bear weight
- Experience the differences and the relationship between dynamic stability and rigidity
- Enjoy a movement lesson that frees your ankles and improves balance
- Step into new movement options for better walking
- Learn concrete strategies to relieve plantar fasciitis
- Embody the connections from feet, ankles, knees, and hips
- Understand some of the emotions connected with knee pain
Module 12: Allowing the Earth to Support Your Bones on a Brand-New Path
Your bones are information conductors — communicating ground forces, gravity, and support.
When we don’t give information to our skeletons, our bones weaken because they like to be used!
This concluding module offers a whole new way to change your relationship to gravity… to let go, feel the vibe, and move to the beat of your own drum.
You’ll explore your sixth chakra’s guidance for the future, and:
- Experience a unique movement lesson to help you let go and allow the Earth to support you
- Coordinate your body parts in a unique, rhythmic way
- Wake up every part of yourself
- Expand your comfort zone
- Strengthen your bones, soften your muscles
- Understand why stomping and clamping can actually calm your nervous system
- Step confidently onto a new path to achieve your goals
What Graduates of Lavinia’s Courses Are Saying…
— Patricia Friedrichs: “Lavinia has really helped me gain a better understanding of my body”
— Hilary Chiz: “Lavinia Plonka is the best practitioner and teacher of Feldenkrais”
“… I’m leaving five years of chronic pain in the dust.”
Over the weeks of the course, through the sessions and my daily practice, my body began to soften and find new patterns, and my awareness of its patterns increased. I stopped using the Posture Medic I’d needed to use while seated. I stopped sleeping on a massage ball. I could tolerate sitting for longer periods. The chains of tightness and burning began to subside and shift. A few months later, I’m doing Feldenkrais once or twice a week. In combination with posture work and shoulder strengthening work, I’m leaving five years of chronic pain in the dust. Thank you, Lavinia, and thank you, Shift Network, for finding such a brilliant teacher to work with this population!
— Wanda Pierce
“… I don’t just like myself more, I’ve begun to love myself…”
Lavinia introduces the fun and depth of the Feldenkrais Method, which are equally important. I feel I don’t just like myself more, I’ve begun to love myself, which is one of the most precious achievements one can make in this world.
— Theresa Leung, Hong Kong
“… I’m able to effect change in a positive way, for both my physical being and my mental and spiritual one.”
Learning about Feldenkrais has taught me about my body and how it’s adapted to my life without my choosing! The more I learn, the more I’m able to effect change in a positive way, for both my physical being and my mental and spiritual one. Lavinia is a wonderful teacher and she makes these teachings easy to understand. Thank you very much and I look forward to more sessions!
— Tressa Guth, San Jose, California
“… I have felt things I’d never felt before.”
After being active my whole life and being a teacher of somatic-style yoga for 11 years, I have felt things I’d never felt before. I feel like I’m re-engaging with my body and I am grateful for this. I will continue to study the Feldenkrais Method and will eagerly await Lavinia’s next course.
— Anonymous
“… ability to rise above my perceptions regarding my sensations.”
Before this course, I felt overwhelmed, misunderstood, and in extreme fatigue with chronic pain. By Module 3, I felt a renewed sense of hope! By Module 7, I have the ability to rise above my perceptions regarding my sensations. I finally found a teacher and tools that have brought quality to my movement AND quality to my life! I am so looking forward to another course with you, Lavinia — you are awesome! Thank you over and over!
— Linds, Seffner, Florida
“… extremely effective…”
This course connected in a deep, yet simple way with my self-awareness of my movement and my emotional state in the present time. I found this to be extremely effective and it encouraged me to explore more.
— Yvonne, Perth, Australia
“… more empowered and more aware about my body and certain physical and emotional patterns…”
I feel more empowered and more aware about my body and certain physical and emotional patterns. I have an additional tool to work on them with.
— Antonia, Milan, Italy
“… Lavinia Plonka has taken me into a much deeper level of self-awareness.”
I’ve learnt so much about myself during the course. I’ve been going to Feldenkrais classes at home for a number of years and have integrated the ideas into the Pilates classes I teach. However, Lavinia Plonka has taken me into a much deeper level of self-awareness. Lavinia speaks so much wisdom, so eloquently and with so much knowledge of related topics.
— Anonymous
“I’ll be able to create a much better, more loving relationship with my body from now on.”
[Lavinia’s course] really heightened my awareness of myself and how I work and how it affects my body. I’ll be able to create a much better, more loving relationship with my body from now on.
— Anonymous
“… a renewed love, deep appreciation, and respect for my body…”
The biggest and most immediate benefit [from Lavinia’s course] is a renewed love, deep appreciation, and respect for my body, which right away seemed to indicate an unexpected willingness to “work with me.” It’s hard to describe in words, but something I strongly and gratefully felt in each and every class. Thanks also to Lavinia’s empathic presence and loving guidance.
— Anonymous
More Praise for Lavinia Plonka…
“… feeling taller, stronger, pain-free, and awakened…”
In practicing Feldenkrais, it looks and feels like you are doing next to nothing, yet the effects are profound. Taking Lavinia’s classes always leave me feeling taller, stronger, pain-free, and awakened to the potential of a better me. The power in the art of the subtle can’t be emphasized enough, and Livinia delivers it with fun, precision, and grace.
— Merina Ty-Kisera, LAc, DiplAc, Author of Acupressure with Essential Oils
“… free up our bodies, relax our minds, and open our hearts.”
Lavinia Plonka is one of the most engaging, brilliant, fun instructors I have ever experienced in any field. My students in the Florida Keys and I personally have benefited from Lavinia’s unique blend of somatic modalities that free up our bodies, relax our minds, and open our hearts. Lavinia’s profound understanding and easy-to-follow teaching of the Feldenkrais Method is refreshing, entertaining, and life-changing.
— Judy Greenman, Body Brain Freedom
“… unlocking the power of the Feldenkrais Method to free attention and create greater ease…”
Lavinia Plonka has an easy, understated teaching style that gracefully unwinds her vast formal and intuitive knowledge of the body and its metaphors, unlocking the power of the Feldenkrais Method to free attention and create greater ease — in our bodies and in our lives. If you have an opportunity to study with her, I recommend it.
— Mike Morrell, Co-founder of ReWilder and collaborating author with Richard Rohr of The Divine Dance
“Lavinia… helps you know your body in easy and accessible ways that lead to transformation.”
Lavinia is an engaging and expert movement teacher who helps you know your body in easy and accessible ways that lead to transformation. I’m consistently amazed at how small movements have huge effects.
— Leanne Cusumano Roque, President of Shine Like the Sun and author of the award-winning book Live Light: Simple Steps
“I feel more graceful, flexible, responsive, and creative in my movement.”
Lately I’ve been appreciating the body awareness I’ve found in Feldenkrais. I feel more graceful, flexible, responsive, and creative in my movement. A few weeks ago on a VERY windy day I was just outside the grocery story when a gust blew a heavy portable sign right at me. I curved my body in a big arch and the sign zinged by, narrowly missing me. One observer said, “Wow, that was martial arts!” I said, “THAT was Feldenkrais!” Thanks, Lavinia, my Feldenkrais guide!
— Yvette Odell, Musician
About Lavinia Plonka
Lavinia Plonka is a body language expert who has helped people improve their movement, behavior, relationships, and careers for over 35 years. Her unique expertise connects the dots between posture/movement, emotions, and the mind.
Lavinia’s training and professional career have included theater, dance, yoga, and the martial arts. She has taught the Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years and is also an Assistant Trainer. Lavinia is a level CL4 teacher of the Alba Method and an Emotional Body Instructor. She was an artist in residence for the Guggenheim Museum, and a movement consultant for theater and television companies around the world, from the Irish National Folk Theater to Nickelodeon.
From Esalen to the Council on Aging, from Beijing to Mexico, Lavinia’s popular workshops explore the intersection between movement, emotions, and the mind. She is currently the director of Asheville Movement Center in Asheville, North Carolina. Lavinia’s writing includes several books and audio programs.
Sale Page: https://theshiftnetwork.com/course/01FeldenkraisAdv01_20
Archive: https://archive.ph/wip/OAILq
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