By Lavinia | Published:
July 15, 2010
The morning of my birthday, I dreamt I worked in a Parisian parfumerie as a clerk. All the women were delicate, formerly lovely creatures who still dolled up every morning as if to meet a beau. There was a distinctive Umbrellas of Cherbourg vibe to their cheery, twittery chatter as they compared new kinds of [...]
Also posted in Thought, laughter | Tagged ALS, Birthday, breakthrough, chicken mushroom, emotional breakdown, failure, happiness, learning, manifest, meaning, prosperity, self image, success, wish |
By Lavinia | Published:
May 20, 2010
A frozen rib cage interferes with freedom of expression. After all, even an exhale is an “expression” of air! In theater there is a saying, “The chest does not lie.” This statement infers that your true emotional state is reflected in the carriage of your chest. Unconsciously, we are both communicating as well as reading others’ emotions in sometimes subtle, but sometimes large shifts in the chest. For the last 200 years, science and medicine insisted that the organs in the torso are merely mechanical devices; pumps and bellows that keep the human machine running. The idea that emotional life is somehow connected to these physiological functions was ridiculed. And yet, we would talk about someone walking around with his chest “puffed up.” Or having a “gut feeling.” Neurotransmitters have been found in the stomach indicating that a “gut feeling” may be a kind of intelligence that informs the thinking brain.
Also posted in Movement | Tagged attention, behavior theater, body language, breath, emotion, feldenkrais, learning, Movement, pain, posture, ribs, self image, senses |
By Lavinia | Published:
April 25, 2010
Moshe Feldenkrais defined health as the ability to recover from shock. Shock can come in many forms: injury, illness, war, physical trauma, losing a job. I recently got a phone call that my fifty year old brother had been found dead of a heart attack. Even now as I sit here writing this, waves of [...]
By Lavinia | Published:
December 16, 2009
We’re told that one of the reasons for all of our holiday rituals stems from early humanity’s anxiety that the sun would never return. The Solstice celebrated the relief at the return of the light. While we no longer worry about whether spring will indeed follow winter, human existence is still a dance with [...]
By Lavinia | Published:
November 25, 2009
Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you still have a computer, you’re not sitting out on the street, and more than likely, you will eat at least one meal today. Somehow, in spite of Bernard Madoff, Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual, AIG, all the doom and gloom, all the betrayals and disappointments, we’re still standing (and sitting, [...]
By Lavinia | Published:
October 26, 2009
Here is an interesting post by Bruce Zeines from the Brooklyn Free School on body language.
Posted in Brooklyn Free School by bzeines on October 23, 2009
We do not have a legitimate television in our home. That is not to say that media does not get to us here—it does. But it reaches us through Netflix or [...]
By Lavinia | Published:
October 7, 2009
For a month, I kept banging my head. Unintentionally, or so it seemed. Suddenly everywhere I turned, I encountered a barrier. Obstacles leapt in to connect with my forehead, my temple, the top of my skull.
Cursing, but pushing on, I walked into more doors. I hit my head on the car door frame more [...]
Also posted in Movement, Sensation, Thought, Uncategorized, laughter | Tagged change, choice, feldenkrais, happiness, happy, learning, mobility, Robert Pirsig |
By Lavinia | Published:
August 19, 2009
Enjoy this new article in WNC Woman.
http://wncwoman.com/august09/page8.html
By Lavinia | Published:
April 2, 2009
I wonder how the Obama’s Recession Garden is going. After the initial flurry of press and photo ops, the entire subject seems to have quietly gone away. Thousands of people had worked tirelessly on an energetic and passionate campaign that took up way too much time on Facebook and loaded all [...]
By Lavinia | Published:
December 30, 2008
It started out as a comment I made on Facebook in trying to summarize the myriad experiences of the last week; the call that my father was dying, the flight to Florida, his passing, our “party” for him, then more flights to get to LA for my sister’s wedding. 5 airports in 4 [...]
