1. What are the easy-to-remember ingredients of your loop?
Side fetal position
Banana stretch
leg reach to belly roll
leg reach to half straddle
2. Describe your process. How did you choose the parts? How was your experience leading up to filming this? What did you need to do to get in the right state of body/mind/spirit to flow?
These movements were chosen to depict exactly how my life feels right now: Contraction, expansion, new perspectives on a low and high plane. Leading up to filming this, I’ve had weeks of mentally toiling over making this loop look unique, pretty and welcoming the energy of a direct to flow state. I put off filming because I felt like I needed to be in a sound state of mind to be able to offer all of the above.
Today I gave up all of that. I know simple is best and having a completely sound state of mind is rare in myself and probably rare in most of those that I’ll teach.
I found that I needed to express the experience I’ve been riding the past couple months and chose some of my favorite movements that were taught in most of the classes that embodied those feelings. In keeping the loop simple, repetitive and meaningful to me, I was able to let go of overthinking this assignment and just do it. This offered me a sense of flow where I didn’t expect it!
3. What felt good (or provided a healthy challenge) in this loop video experience?
What felt good: Rocking at the beginning, letting the floor hold me, feeling the pressure of the floor on the different parts of my body as I moved.
The healthy challenge: I didn’t want to follow the beat of the music but instead focus on my breath and the pressure I felt in my contact points with the floor. I found myself starting to move with the beat a few times and had to bring back my awareness to resting/pushing into the floor.
4. If there is ONE thing that you would do differently, what is it?
I would’ve gone even slower. This was very slow movement for me and was timed by my breath capacity. But if I did it again, I’d see how slow I could go in each movement allowing the breath to be more naturally flowing.
5. What did you learn from this experience that you will apply to your own training or teaching?
I learned that slow breath doesn’t exactly equal slow movement, and slower movement doesn’t need to depend on each breath. This changes how I train/teach in that I usually cue to do a movement per inhale/exhale… that doesn’t help with staying slow and can feel very restrictive.
I also learned and will implement that letting go our expectations of what movement needs to look like/feel like can totally change how it looks and feels. There’s no right answer, but not having specific expectations can really allow for an easier flow state.