A day by day approach to get you moving or improve your movement. 108 Days to Move Your Bodhi.
The term Bodhi means to be awake. This program is designed to get you awake, aware, and moving in ways that are enjoyable and that your body craves.
This is not your average movement or exercise program. This program will look at your body as an integrated whole. You are already moving, maybe not as much as you would like to or as much as you need to but you already integrating some movement into your daily routine even if that is just walking to and from the car to the house. Learn how to integrate more movement in small manageable bites.
This program provides you with practices to:
Create awareness- Tune into your body and how you move. Become aware of how your body is a connected whole and how the movement of a particular part effects the whole and the whole effects the particular part.
Move More and Move Better-Integrate more movement throughout your day. Move more of you- integrate the smaller movements into larger movement patterns. Discover how movement can improve everything from your mental health to your immune system.
Strengthen and Co-ordinate- Move everything from your big toe joint, to the arches of your feet, to your hips, your back, your jaw and everything in between. Once each part is awake, aware, and moving you will learn simple strengthening and co-ordinating practices to help you move with greater strength.
This program is designed for everyone from yogis, to couch potatoes, to fitness fanatics. Learn to move with greater ease, balance, co-ordination, and strength.
Props
A yoga strap with a metal buckle approximately 8-10ft in length. If you are tall you will need the longer length.
A small rubber ball like a Yoga Tune-up ball.
A bolster, a couple of towels or blankets that are firm like towels.
A rubber resistance band.
A wood or foam brick or in a pinch a big book will work.
Move Your Bodhi
Introduction
Whether you are a regular mover, exerciser, or a couch potato you have developed movement patterns that you fall into on a daily routine- you get up and down from a chair, you lie down in a bed, your stand at your kitchen counter. Not only do you do these things frequently but you do them in a way that is unique to you, and your body.
These movement patterns, amongst other things, shape your body, mind, and breath. The patterns you spend the most time in create ease with some movement patterns and leave some movement patterns feeling near impossible. For example if you needed to throw a pitch in a major league game, most people couldn’t stand on a mound and throw a perfect strike 80% of the time. Most of us would need practice and even a major league pitcher probably couldn’t throw a perfect strike with their non-dominant hand.
We regularly do things that would be equivalent to trying to throw a strike with little to no preparation of our body. How many people do you know who go from sitting in a desk all day to going to the gym, run a couple of kilometres, or get into a yoga class?
Most of us transition from almost no movement all day to packing our movement into a small space then back to being still. We end up over using some joints or movement patterns and leaving some stiff and underused. Over the next 108 days I will challenge you to move more, move more often, and move all of you.
Be awake, be creative, be fluid, and be strong.
The practices in this movement series will be set up in 3 different ways
Awareness
Movement
Strength and Co-ordination
Day 1
Big picture- The Connected Bodhi
Did you ever wonder why it rarely works to try to treat one joint, one muscle or muscle group without changing anything else? The problem we often run into is treating a part of the body, the breath, or the mind as if it can be dissected from the rest. Did you know that our body is so amazingly engineered that when we move we power and circulate our lymphatic system? The lymphatic system is a transport system in our body that helps keep our immune system working well.
Each system in the body is not only intricately interconnected with the rest but each part and each system is inter-responsive to the whole. A small shift in one part of the body sends off a cascade of events as the body constantly adjusts and adapts to try to create balance and safety. Millions of years of evolution have created unconscious adaptation towards survival. Our ancestors were the humans that had the bodies that we the most adaptable and the best at staying in balance and staying safe. The problems that we currently face are:
1. Our environment is vastly different. We no longer need to move much to survive but no one told our bodies this. Many of us live in an environment that is temperature controlled, designed for convenience, and where we have to walk to the kitchen to grab a plate of food. We no longer need to hunt or gather our food like we did in the past. A lot of the movement that was once necessary for survival is not anymore. Rather than consistent movement to help us survive we now have little to no movement and if we recognise that this isn’t good for our body we take a small portion of our day and workout just to fall back into a relatively sedentary environments.
2. Our brains and nervous systems are primed to keep us safe and are designed for quick bursts of high stress. Unfortunately we have more consistent, unrelenting, low-to-moderate grade psychological stress that is not matched by movement. Our lack of movement means that we don’t use up much of the cocktail of hormones produced by stress like cortisol and adrenaline. If we do exercise many of us try to work out harder and in a smaller period of time which increases our stress levels getting us into a cycle of craving exercise to burn off stress hormones but producing more stress hormones in the process.
3. Cultural focus has been on form over function. We have been sold a “healthy body” that looks a certain way and does particular things. Unfortunately that body has been part and parcelled out in a way that is not holistic and tends to focus on the destination rather than the journey.
The good news is that we have the power to be awake. We can make our choices conscious to become responsive in our lives and in our bodies.
Practice Day 1 Awareness
We can’t change what we aren’t aware of.
Grab a Journal and log your daily routine.
Answer these questions:
How much time did you spend sleeping? Was it interrupted or was it uninterrupted?
How much time did you spend sitting?
How much time did you spend standing?
How much time did you spend moving? What sort of movement?
To register email info@bodhitreeyoga.com
Cost: $108.00 / $113.40 w/tax (can also pay via etransfer)
Once purchased be sure to email the above address to receive the password to access the classes.