Awakening our Bodies with Lavinia Plonka

I don’t know about you, but living “in my body” hasn’t come natural to me. Whether due to innate “bookishness” (yep, I’m a nerd) or a bad bicycle accident I had when I was 10 years old that made me afraid to be as outwardly expressive, I’ve often felt estranged from my own frame. Tragically, “spirituality” often encourages a kind of dissociative split from sinew and soul, joints and joy, nerves and the numinous.

No more.

We’ve survived the mid-term elections (in the United States), and the holiday season is fast approaching. Throughout the rest of November, I’ll be highlighting life-giving embodiment practices that are grounding me, and the teachers who introduced them. My hope is that we’ll discover the resources we need to meet this season with peace, centering, and vitality.

First up is this brand-new dialogue with my dear friend and mentor, body language expert and Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher Lavinia Plonka. Lavinia combines the wisdom of our bodies with the insights of grounded spirituality, to stunning effect.

Somatic practitioners have long known that our most primal emotions often become trapped within us — and become stories connected to particular parts of our bodies.

Your body has an unlimited range of ways to tell its deeper stories — and when you learn to listen and move in new ways, you open a brand-new dialogue between your subconscious and your spirit.

Lavinia’s proposal is simple enough, but profound when we begin to work with it:

By building an awareness of how you move, you can navigate any emotional and physical challenges that you’re carrying from the past. Unaddressed, these areas of constriction and pain become obstacles that prevent you from living your best life.

Lavinia developed a powerful somatic movement approach that builds upon best practices in the field and her decades of teaching Feldenkrais, to help you address any issue that limits your ability to live the healthy, joyful, purpose-filled, and creative life that is your birthright.

In this conversation, we explore each element of her Kinēsa process:

  • KIN — Kinesis/Movement
  • E — Emotion
  • — Sensation
  • — Attention
…but we don’t just talk. Lavinia guides us through a concise internal-awareness meditation that brings us greater empathy for ourselves and others. Please tune in to this wonderful exchange, right here:

If you enjoy this dialogue and would like more, you can also tune in to this hour-long video dialogue with Stephen Dinan. In this session, Lavinia will guide you through an introduction to this life-changing work — and give you a taste of the benefits that are possible by guiding you through a seated Kinēsa movement practice that uses Attention to transform painful Sensations and Emotions into freedom, flexibility, and relief.

In this dialogue, you’ll explore:

  • Lavinia’s powerful movement lesson, “Unlocking the Story in Your Hip Joints”
  • How your hip joints are connected to your most primal emotions —and how releasing these emotions improves everything from your posture, to back pain, to your overall sense of wellbeing
  • The relationship between your breath and freedom of movement — and how your posture, breath, and face send instant messages to your nervous system, creating the sensations that become your emotions
  • How you can cultivate an increased sense of freedom and energy with gentle, focused movements
  • A seated Kinēsa practice to experience hip and pelvis relief — so you can release and liberate trapped emotions, freeing yourself to move through the world with elegance, grace, and power

During the dialogue, you’ll also learn about an extraordinary opportunity to take this learning to the next level, participating in The Shift Network’s Somatic Movement Certification program with Lavinia, where you’ll take a deep-dive into the Kinēsa process.

As Lavinia will explain, during this certification process you’ll learn and practice innumerable movement lessons combined with a multidisciplinary approach that includes modern neuroscience, ancient wisdom, and more. You’ll improve your emotional life, physical health, wellbeing, mental abilities, connect to something fundamental within yourself — AND help others do the same as a certified, professional Kinēsa practitioner.

Finally: Lavinia has a book releasing later this month, called You’ve Got the Power! Four Paths to Awaken Your Body’s Archetypal Energies.

Drawing from Feldenkrais bodywork, contemplative spirituality, the Gurdjieff Work and more — and with QR codes linking directly to somatic lessons you can experience yourself — You’ve Got The Power! is a refreshing manual for change…from the inside-out.

Using pleasurable movement explorations, self-inquiry and practical life exercises, You’ve Got the Power! introduces readers the the wisdom of the body. Each archetype has a physical “center of presence.” Readers will learn how to use these centers: The Warrior: pelvis, Teacher: chest, Healer: hands and Visionary: eyes to develop embodied presence and use it for personal mastery. Each archetype also has a “superpower” and a “kryptonite.” Learning to develop the superpower, while acknowledging the potential pitfalls are part of the journey towards realizing our dreams—whether it’s for healing, learning or achieving.

The four archetypes embody our potential to be the change we want to see in the world. By reconnecting with the intelligent nervous system and developing our kinesthetic sense, we become more aware of ourselves, how we impact others and how others influence our actions. The ability to stand our ground, connect with compassion, heal old wounds and envision our possibilities will be the takeaway from this ground breaking look at body/mind connections.

Her book doesn’t release ’till later this month, but Lavinia is offering a wealth of free resources for everyone who pre-orders. You can learn more about You’ve Got the Power! and the pre-order bonuses here.

I hope these resources from Lavinia help you build a more loving, trusting relationship with the vehicle that brings you here! Please let me know what you think in the comments.

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