Building Balance In Your Body & Life

This session features an introduction to the course on building balance in your body and your life. The lesson introduces each of the four course sections: Finding Foundation, The Wonder of Walking, Practical Practice, and Flirting with Failure. It also includes a balance check-in practice.

The first lesson in the Finding Foundation section creates more flexibility and relaxation in your feet, ankles, and lower legs with self-massage.

Finding Foundation continues with self-observation about your shoes, your sitting, and walking habits. Using a prop of a rolled yoga mat or towel, a yoga block, or half foam roller, we'll also do a lower leg lengthening practice.

This Finding Foundation lesson builds strength in your feet. The movements of toe splaying, picking up stuff with your toes, toe lifts, heel lifts, and strong toe yoga all energize the more than 100 muscles in your feet. For this practice, you'll need a prop: a sock, a small towel or t-shirt.

This lesson – the fourth in the Finding Foundation section – focuses on foot mobility. You'll learn the movements of Skiiing, Circling, Toes In and Out, Top of the Foot Stretch and Mobile Toe Yoga to create more movement inside your feet. You'll also practice mobilizing your feet with the use of a tennis ball or any small, preferably soft ball.

In this lesson, we’ll explore finding foundation by focusing on leg strength.

In this lesson, we’ll review and integrate all the Finding Foundation practices we’ve done together.

In this last lesson of Finding Foundation, we’ll focus on two important and often overlooked aspects of the practice: intentional rest and expanding our awareness beyond the body.

This lesson begins with the Wonder of Walking section, which explores walking and stepping as an integral part of balance. In particular, Lesson 9 expands your awareness of walking and the balance every step requires.

This lesson continues the exploration of walking – this time in directions other than forward.

This lesson explores the dynamic experience of walking on naturally uneven surfaces.

The Chaos Walk builds both the physical strength and range of motion needed for balance and also builds the range of movement options and possibilities.

Lesson 13 explores the combination of strength and balance that it takes to step over, up, and down steps and obstacles.

In this lesson, we’ll review all the Wonder of Walking practices with the intention of integrating them into your daily movement.

This final lesson of the Wonder of Walking focuses on intentional rest and expanding our awareness beyond the body.

Lesson 16 is the first in the Practical Practice section. This lesson introduces using what I call Movement Snacks to focus on movement rather than exercise. The lesson also looks at the basics of balancing on one foot.

In this lesson, we’ll learn the Getting Up & Down From the Floor Movement Snack and play with the practical practice of putting on (and taking off!) pants.

In this lesson, we’ll learn a core and leg-strengthening Movement Snack, talk more about the power of small habits and do the practical practice of putting on socks.

Lesson 19 includes both a surprisingly powerful core-strengthening Movement Snack and the Practical Practice of putting on shoes.

In this lesson, we’ll learn more about habit change and continue Practical Practice by integrating balance into other things we do.

In this lesson, we’ll review and integrate all the Movement Snacks and the Practical Practices we’ve done together so they are fresh in your body and mind.

In this final lesson of Practical Practice, we’ll focus on intentional rest and expanding our awareness beyond the body. We begin with a restorative, sense-centered meditation to allow you to ground, relax and open your body and mind. After the meditation, I’ll offer six prompts for you to apply practical practice beyond the physical to other areas of your life.

This lesson begins the Flirting with “Failure” section in which we’ll practice movements that intentionally push the edges of our balance ability. We’ll also build on the Movement Snacks we did in Practical Practice and create Movement Snack Stacks!

This lesson explores the idea of Earthquake Architecture, introduces another movement snack stack and the flirting with "failure" practice of One Leg Swing Across The Body.

In this lesson, we do a Movement Snack Stack that moves from standing, to the floor and back again, learn more about proprioception, and practice with the impact of vision and head position on balancing.

In this lesson, we’ll do another movement snack stack that plays with three balances near the floor and we’ll flirt with failure with a one-leg balance engaging different qualities.

This lesson explores the Salutation to Balance Movement Snack Stack and we flirt with failure as we pick something up from balance.

In this lesson, we create our own Movement Snack Stack and review all the Flirting with "Failure" practices we’ve done together.

In this final lesson of Flirting with "Failure," we’ll do an intentional, restorative rest and take some time to expand our awareness beyond the body. As we talked about before, deep rest and an expanded vision of the practice are essential in order to embody our learning.

And now together, we’re balancing on the edge of what comes next. Now that you have the information, the practices, and the experience, the next step is to embody and integrate your balance practice into your life. Making a plan to integrate balance practice into your life.