Balancing & Integrating our Mental - Emotional - Physical Intelligence
Michael & Carol see rich benefits in people who attend their 6-Day Retreats. Posture improves, mental agility increases, and emotional balance & the joy of learning are rediscovered.
Our Retreats offer the opportunity to experience an in-depth approach to what is called Learning How To Learn Through Movement.
Psychophysical Models for Optimal Learning
Through decades of teaching we have learned how Psychophysical Learning integrates our mind, emotional, and physical intelligence allowing for a more balanced way of functioning.
So often our current system of education, especially High School through University, primarily educates our mental intelligence, the downloading of information, and ignores physical and emotional intelligence.
By consciously balancing our attention in all three centers we gain an awareness that is more than simply the sum of its parts. Creating a higher functioning that allows new freedom in the way we move, feel, and think.
These 7 Key Principles are Inherent within the Alexander Technique,
Feldenkrais Method, and Yoga
Principles
#1. Use and Functioning:
What we are doing in our daily life will affect everything we do. Metaphorically speaking, "If your guitar is out of tune, then the music you play will be out of tune...no matter how skilled you are at guitar playing”. The way you "use yourself" dictates, "you’re functioning.
#2. The Whole Person:
We function as one total unit with a 'central nervous system' ... change can only occur when we approach the human being from "the whole to the part" ... not the other way around.
#3. Primary Coordination:
The coordination of the Head, Neck, Back relationship in movement.
#4. Unreliable Sensory Appreciation:
Our sensory perception is conditioned by our "habits of movement.” Sometimes a new approach to learning might not ‘feel’ right in the beginning.
#5. Inhibition:
The biological definition of this word is our ability to say 'No' to a stimulus...creating a space between the stimulus and our response...i.e. stopping at a curb to "stop, look and listen" before crossing the road.
#6. Direction:
A process of coming back into "postural balance" through the process of saying 'No' or inhibiting the patterns that are preventing the balance from occurring. This can be applied to any movement activity...athletics, walking, sitting and standing, working at the computer, or performance of any kind.
#7. Ends and Means:
You gain your end result by an 'unfolding of the moment to moment process' within this present moment. However, when you primarily focus on the end result by using unnecessary force and pushing, this is called End Gaining and ultimately leads to failure. Everything is a ‘process’ creating a Means-Whereby leading to the end result. In sports, this is what is meant by playing in The Zone. This process calls on us to understand and be present within the process, and each intermediary step, required to achieve an aim. To put it most succinctly, “to conquer a problem, you don’t work on the problem, you work on yourself as you face the problem”.
Psychophysical Learning
Embodying the Present Moment
Like a beautiful Lotus flower, we can open up to all possibilities when we take time to invest in ourselves, mentally, physically, and spiritually.
What the Alexander Technique, Yoga, and the Feldenkrais Method teach us, along with the principles of Ayurveda is how to embody and live in the Present Moment. When we live in the Now, we become more authentic in everything we do...
