Reflections and practices will be offered each day. Journalling the thoughts, images, dreams, emotions, sensations and experiences that arise throughout the entire week can deepen your journey and the process of healing and transformation.

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Offered by Shelley Ostroff

 

INVITATION

 

DAY THREE: Rest in Loving Movement – Reflections and practices

 

Guidance and Practices: Day 3

 

1.      Breathing with the solar plexus:  Place your hands gently on your solar plexus and allow yourself to feel the warmth of the energy moving between your hands and the solar plexus. Breathe gently and feel the sensation of your body rising and falling under your hands. Spend as much time with this as feels right and when it feels complete, spend a few moments noticing your energy. What has shifted? What are you feeling now?

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2.      Rising from essence: Lie down on the ground in a comfortable position and just follow the sensations within with curiosity. Follow the sensations until they amplify and notice when and how you feel called to rise from the lying down position. Discover how the body wants to rise, slowly in a spiraling form like a plant opening. Imagine that you are letting go of habitual ways of moving and asking the body to show you how it wants to move. Follow the movement into a dance of spontaneous slow motion with loving attention to what evolves.

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3.      Intention setting: Find a comfortable position and focus on your breath until you sense yourself as empty of thoughts. From this place of quietness, offer an intention to learn, rediscover and honor the essential unique movement that wants to move through you as a vessel for life-serving action. Agree to learn how to reconnect with you most natural, agile, loving and responsive movement that comes from the core of your being and is aligned with the harmonies of all of Creation.

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4.      Noticing Movement: Every now and then, as you go about your day, check in with your body and notice your movements as you are moving. Often we are preoccupied with thoughts and the movement becomes automatic and habitual.  So when you remember, just pay attention and be present with the movement noticing it from the inside – what does it feel like? How does the body shift from leg to leg as you walk?  What happens to the rest of the body as your arms reach out for something? How does your mouth move when you chew? How do your eyes move when you look at something? And how does the rest of the body respond to these movements?

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5.      Loving Movement:  Imagine yourself sprinkling the ingredient of love into your movements – how does that change the way you move?

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6.      Nourishment: How do you move when you prepare your food, and when you eat your food? How does this impact your relationship with food? How would it look if you were to choose and prepare and eat your food with more loving movement?

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7.      Moving with others: Notice how your movements shift when you are around different people. Notice how your movements and energy may affect them and how their movements and energy may affect you. When you notice this, practice shifting your movement so that it comes from a quiet loving space within you and notice the impact it has on others.

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8.      Moving with the Animals and the Trees and the Elements – Spend some time connecting with an animal – either a real one or in your imagination. Notice how it moves. Become the animal and imagine yourself moving as it knows how to move.  Thank it for its embodied wisdom. Spend some time connecting to a tree – either a real one or in your imagination. Notice how in its stillness how alive it is within and how the branches and leaves move – become the tree in your embodied imagination. What does it feel like? How do you move? Spend some time with the elements and imagine yourself moving like the air, the water, the sun, the earth.  Movement is not always expressed in a way that is visible to the eyes, yet the energy is always moving and when we connect with it through connecting with different elements, we activate and discover and honor those elements within us.

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9.      Movement Practice: Consider how you would like to continue to discover the essence of movement and a practice/practices you would like to continue.