Category Archives: the body

What? Me worry?

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“Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don’t want.”

Esther Hicks
(and Abraham and Jerry)

 

Worry sits in the body like a dark cloud.  I can often feel it nestling in the old familiar places, making itself comfy, settling in for a stay. Little hooks grasping the cells, tangling the fascia, drying the membranes.  Sticky, sour.

You know – the body eavesdrops on the mind, picks up its signals, amplifies them, swallows them whole.

Worry can easily tip into anxiety, even panic. The body drinks it in, deep into the resevoir of each cell.

What to do?

Here is one way to invite a shift.  Let the eyes meander – just let them move where they want to move, not just slipping over the surfaces, but lingering, and letting what they see come to them. Let them settle on something that feels inviting, even beautiful. Stay there and soak that in.  Breathe easily as you hang out with whatever has drawn your attention.  In, out, in, out.  Feel the breath moving through the whole body – effortless, smoothe.

Here is a story I tell in my book, Our Horses, Ourselves: Discovering the Common Body.

“Emily Jones, head of The Putney School, was speaking about the end of the year, and what comes next, offering strategies for weathering the change. ‘Here is what I want you to do,” she said. “See something beautiful every day and let it make you happy.’

In an age of digital preoccupation, Jones was suggesting something different: that we learn to experience the earth and our bodies as primary sources.She wanted us to be moved and changed by what we see, hear, touch, smell, taste. She wanted us to break into blossom.

When we transform our own bodies through movement or imagination, when we blend our own sensuous physiology with the earth or our horses, we become a feeling, expressive landscape among other feeling, expressive landscapes. This merging and blending is the path to a deep peace and pleasure, where we abandon our separateness and become connected; woven into the fabric of our world. And in that shared terrain we can more easily feel and find each other…and ourselves.”

My book has about 65 different strategies for shifting body and mind toward what we want.  Some of them are about horses and how they can help us.  All of them are for anyone with a body.

You can buy the book HERE.

 

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dancing with Izarra

 

Ben Willis and I were at Little Brook Farm earlier this week shooting footage for my new film, Conscious Touch, Conscious Movement with Horses: Improving Feel and Connection through the Body

Seven years ago, I collaborated with LBF and its wonderful director, Lynn Cross and her daughter Summer Brennan on the performance project, All the Pretty Horses. They are the most generous, compassionate rescue and sanctuary that I have worked with, and I feel so blessed to be working (playing) with them again.

As we were walking around the farm, we went by a paddock where a lovely dark horse stood in the shade of a run-in shed.  “Who is that?” I asked.  Summer said, “That is Izarra. She is one of the Mustangs.” Then she looked at me with a new thought, “You should adopt her.”  Summer knows that I have a long, deep passion for Mustangs.

Yesterday I went back up to LBF to see Izarra and play with her.  She is a dancer!  Curious, playful, unafraid, ready to join.  And so my heart is wide, wide open to this  beautiful being.  I do not know how this chapter will be written, what is the plot or the timeline.  But in this uncertainty and possibility, I am feeling a buoyancy and joy that I have not felt with such clarity for many months.

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Summer said something interesting – that in her experience, Mustangs, because often they have not been domesticated, put into training programs and living situations that can gradually extinguish their essence, are more “here.”  In many cases, they have not closed down, despite the trauma of their capture and confinement.

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california

DSC_0991.JPGDeAnna Pellecchia with Pony

I am thrilled to be presenting a Conscious Touch, Conscious Movement with Horses workshop at the University of California at Santa Barbara as part of the annual Body-Mind Centering Association conference.

Conscious Touch and Conscious Movement is way of improving and deepening our relationship horses through the shared languages of touch and movement. Learning to connect with horses in this way helps us become more comfortable in our own skin, confident, trustworthy to ourselves and the horse, as well as sensitive and skillful in our riding and training, regardless of the discipline.  In my experience, this work with horses translates pretty seamlessly to our relationships with our spouses, children, friends, and ourselves.

When I am working with a client and a horse, I never know just how that session will unfold.  It is what I love about the work – it is deeply improvisational, and allows the essential invitation of Authentic Movement to undergird the process:  “wait to be moved.”  That means that the human has the opportunity to go underneath the cognitive habits of language, interpretation, analysis, and planning.  To rest in the moment and to listen.  To speak when moved in the shared, primal, intimate, and unpredictable languages of the body: movement and touch.

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To arrange a session with Paula and a horse partner, contact me.