I have been keeping Flexing Your Soul in my purse, finding it helpful to do the exercises during down-time, such as when I was waiting at a doctor's office yesterday, or while I was on a plane traveling during Thanksgiving vacation. Its exercises, at different times, have helped me by, to give some examples: 1) inspiring me to move, so that I found myself the day after reading the leg and thigh exercises portion, dancing around my kitchen using empowering movements based on the movement vocabulary from the book, 2) releasing tension when my energy had been blocked for some time, after a difficult life event from practicing the Full Body Explosion exercise), and 3) introducing me to a new level of grounding, and the enjoyment of walking and being in that state, from doing an exercise in the feet and ankles section.
Flexing Your Soul is accessible, nurturing without being
co-dependent, and has a clarity with which it expresses intuitive understanding, poses questions for reflection that can truly help people transform, in the moment, and over time, into what they want to become on all levels. I cannot review the entire book, because it has a million nooks and crannies of consciousness, with which to explore as a regular regimen, or as the spirit moves. While reading it, I have felt as if I was the kitchen with a warm, nurturing, and very clear friend. At times I felt that the author was quite intuitive, anticipating my feelings just as I was feeling them, during the exercise.
As a social worker/educator, who uses movement based expressive arts therapies, I appreciate the contribution a rich book like this can make to the field of somatic/body awareness, revealing potentialities for people enlivening various areas of their beings - enkindling passions, gently healing areas of past woundedness or limitation, and opening of more spaciousness, aliveness, embodiment and enjoyment of being - all this consciousness opening possibilities as they do easy movements that enliven their bodies. Personally and professionally, I have only begun to tap the riches of this book, Flexing Your Soul. The title says it all.
Did you know your Soul has arms and legs? And a neck and a back? And fingers and toes? A face and eyes and tongue and feet?
Most of us don't. We are trapped in the amber of age-old duality of mind vs body, feelings vs thoughts and Soul vs everything else already mentioned. Most discussions around the Soul are a variety of "Do we have one or not?" Imagine that! We are like monkeys chattering away about whether bananas grow on trees or trees grow out of bananas.
We don't just have a soul. We are one. We don't have a body, our body has us. As many of us are beginning to see, the Cartesian distinctions between various aspects of our being are not only silly, they are disorienting and harmful. They keep us in a tight, small place that is confining, constricting and deadening-often literally.
The new book, "Flexing Your Soul" by authors Jalieh Milani and Alessandra Shepard goes a long way to bring us back to our senses-all six of them! And gently and refreshingly--and with fun to boot--helps us reclaim all of who we are as human beings in a simple, step-by-step and enjoyment-filled manner.
This straightforward book brims with simple and amazing things to do with your body, not to your body. It brings exercise up out of the physical fitness category into a spiritual practice of psychic and emotional wholeness. These "Dances with Self" help us inhabit more of the 70 trillion cells that make up our presence in the physical plane.
"Wish I had the time to do something like this!" is a common response to genuine self-care. Many of the techniques to step into yourself more fully presented here take only a few moments and can be done anywhere.
Behind the step-by-step exercises outlined in easy-to-follow photographs is the astonishing liberating power of Core Energetics, founded by John Pierrakos MD. This awareness tool frees up blocked energy and feelings trapped in layers of muscular armoring and emotional defense with breath-taking ease and breath-giving results.
Core Energetics helps restore vitality, strengthens our sense of who we are (and who we are not!), restores our natural ability to feel pleasure, rejuices our chi and can activate healing of a host of ailments that are related to blocked energy and that great silent killer, stagnation.
And best of all, you can do it yourself-or with a partner, or with your kids. The movements are about as complicated as getting out of your TV chair and going to the kitchen for more chips and dip, with infinitely healthier results.
What is becoming more and more clear is that inactivity is the enemy of health--physical, emotional and spiritual. A number of recent studies have proven that exercise is often as effective as medication in giving relief from depression.
Core Energetics isn't just exercise, however. It's a way of allowing yourself to be more alive, more free, more whole than you can imagine. Jalieh and Alessandra's book is poetry for the body, a songbook for Being.
Most of us lead very busy lives that leave us breathless and tired, and yet the root cause of our fatigue is not that we do too much, but that we aren't doing what will give us the very energy and vitality we are so hungry for.
"Flexing Your Soul" is a recipe for just that-an authentic pause that refreshes body, mind, heart and Spirit by bringing us into an experience of being more alive, awake and expressive in ways that are energizing and de-Light-full.
