Soma Roma: Moving Invitations

kinesthetic . Adaptable . accessible
11 Digital resources

“Dance first, think later, it's the natural order”
Samuel Beckett

These simple invitations follow a sequence through stillness, slow moving and vigorous movement into and out of the floor. Enjoy them in sequence or individually. They are easily repeatable, readily adapted to varying abilities and entirely accessible regardless of prior experience. Try them anywhere, anytime, practice them often and explore your embodied wisdom in process. Enjoy the kinaesthetic you.

Lying Down & Listening

Empowering you to Orient to how you are now

Settling into shapes and simple movement sequences are rich opportunities for personal and physiological attunement.

Try This...

Lie down and get comfy. Let yourself settle into the ground. Notice the sounds, light and temperature of your environment, then direct your attention to your breathing.

Notice how your breath moves, its pathway… Notice how you move as you breathe. All your cells are involved in this process of respiration – it is their call for oxygen that cues your lung breathing. You can imagine the trillions of cells that make up you, like the stars in a night sky organised into your breathing form.

You may like to explore this on your belly as the experience can differ. Lying on your front stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system whereas lying on your back can have more of a sympathetic nervous system charge.

Standing & Sensing

Attune to your inner & outer field

Paying attention to what’s here is a practice. It’s an opportunity for ‘now’ to be a source of interest, discovery and indeed pleasure.

Interoception is your capacity to listen inward and sense what’s happening under the skin. Many systems aid this internal communication network. Exterioception is your capacity to receive information from external sources. You can listen and sense out into the world.

Shake IT Up

Invigorate your cells & mind

The Benefits:

The benefits of shaking are far reaching – from invigorating the circulatory and nervous systems, to trauma relief and transformation, to ‘the release of the structures of the mind, dissolving of the reservoir of habits and the vanishing of lifetimes of patterns’ as suggested in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. Shaking, like laughing, is one of those profoundly infectious, all consuming and dynamic acts that’s certain to shift your state and switch you on! It may even shake you into new possibilities…

Enlivening Touch

shift your state through touch

The first layer of our skin and our Nervous System structures grow from the same cells in utero – our Ectoderm. In the Body-Mind Centering approach, our skin is therefore considered an outer manifestation of our Nervous System. If you’re feeling like you need a bit of a boost, a brushing touch can wake you up!

Dilate your awareness

Expand & condense to actively shift your perspective

You may not have eyes on the back of your head but your capacity to revolve, turn, twist and spiral takes care of all that. It enables an extraordinary sensing out into the world while maintaining a steady centre.

Try This...

This activity is lovely bare foot. Follow the images as a sequence to cue an expanding and condensing exploration. Reach out to your edges and curl back to a quiet middle. Notice how your other senses begin a dilatory pulse. You may start to become aware of your multi-directionality and your roundness as you move. You are spherical.

Flesh out what’s inside

Feel robust & resilient

Sometimes you hear the bubbling & beating of your organs, mostly you don’t feel them unless they’re full or sore. Through toning your awareness and in turn your tissue, you can attune to more of you and invite both a mental and physical sense of presence into your daily choices and actions.

Try This...

Your internal organs may be sensitive but they’re soft, they’ll rebound, move, adjust. Move with them, pay attention to them.

Pour the weight of your contents from side to side. Imagine your brain, your intestines gently softening in a direction leading you into a roll.

This can have a powerful calming affect on your Nervous System. It’s a useful tool that can be practiced anywhere. If you’re not so keen to go to the floor then use a wall to pour yourself from side to side in vertical.

You can also expand both of these activities into a movement exploration letting gravity and weight lead the way.

Made To Move

Mobilise to feel more alive

Playing with pace and direction, weight baring, getting your head below your heart, exploring quadrupedal locomotion… gets your blood moving, muscles firing and your heart pumping. It strengthens your bones, releases synovial fluid in your joints, supports your neural plasticity and a whole lot more. Things start to circulate. You are made to move dynamically not just in the physical realm.

Adaptable Moving

shape shift to state shift - experience your innate adaptability

In life it is common to manipulate objects to your end – this is utilitarian. But what happens when you allow yourself to be shaped by an object – a ball that is soft and malleable like you or a solid structured chair.

Try This...

It is the objects lead, rather than yours. The ball can easily be replaced with a cushion or beanbag or if you’re game, an everyday chair! The solid structure of the chair changes the parameters for your exploration. Notice your desire to take control because the chair is a less responsive object than the ball.

Go slowly at first, finding comfortable places to rest and let yourself soften and shape around the object. Then see what it’s like to keep moving – following your interest as you shape and reshape around the object. Remember to let the object lead.

Find moments of stillness to settle and receive more of what’s there and learn more about your availability, malleability and adaptability.

Moving Bonds

Building relational awareness

Spending time paying attention and connecting through touch, pressure and resistance activates an intimate relationship with things. This interaction between your living tissue and the world around you attunes your sensitivity to the quality of your relationships.

A Moving Drift

generate a drift for nourishment

Drift is present in every day; that dreamy space that creeps in sometimes during a day, the sigh of releif when you have a little space inbetween things, that unnerving sense of feeling out of your depth, or the desperation for time to let things settle… A drift can be brief or last for months. Like our fluids, the ‘drift’ is always present and key to the forming and un-forming of ideas. Wonder, peacefulness, discomfort, frustration and perhaps a sense of suspension can all be present in Drift. Certainly the ‘drift’ has it’s own power. There’s a flux beyond our control. Fluids course through us, as us all the time – feeding and dissolving us.

A Resting Drift

engage a micro drift for releif

Composer John Cage said, “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” This speaks to the Drift.

A Meditative Release

Space to open and generate

Life is about patterns organising into form, ideas moving into action, action catalysing change. Sometimes this is about the shedding of what’s not needed when things coalesce. A pause, a rest, a bracket of time, a seat, a listening for this wisdom, a witnessing of this process, can be experienced through a meditative release.