One Billion Rising Flashmob this Saturday April 19th 10:15am...

At the Corvallis Farmer's Market.  We'll huddle at the fountain at first and Jackson around 10:00am.  If you can't make it to the huddle, join us for the dance at 10:15am at 1st and Jackson.  We'll be on Jackson street.  Please don't block first street.  The introduction will be done by a child, Cleo, then we will all join when the rhythm picks up.  We'll be wearing purple, the color of domestic violence awareness.  If you forget, or don't have purple, no problem, come as you are.  If you feel shy, join the dance later - during the freedance or the last chorus (we repeat the chorus move 8 times).  It's the first outdoor farmer's market of the year and you won't want to miss it.  You'll be there anyway, so might as well dance!

What does Nia do for you? From Timberhill Athletic Club Newsletter

As a long time student and instructor of the Nia Technique, a body/mind fitness class at Timberhill, I can say that it gives me vitality, well-being, fitness, joy, a passion for living, and it keeps me connected to my heart and my highest purpose.  I often feel like a broken record trying to describe what it is to those who have not done it – and, like chocolate, it must be tasted – it can’t be adequately described.  So, I invited some of the Nia regulars to tell you what they get out of class and here are excerpts from some of their comments.  (A heart-felt THANK YOU to all who participated!)  You, too, can experience the joy of moving and being in your body, no previous experience necessary.  Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7:00pm and Sunday morning at 11:30am.

I love that Nia has the power to make me forget I'm exercising, because it's so fun. Nia is based on a variety of movement traditions, including martial arts, yoga, and modern dance, and I feel that my body and spirit receive a wide range of benefits, from stretching to strengthening to cardio.  Nia is exploration through movement--it never gets boring! ~ K.M.

Nia provides regular practice of awareness of my body in space and is gradually allowing me to move with more freedom and awareness in all of my life. ~ C.S.

Nia class is perfect for my physical level with enjoyment.  When I do Nia I can release tension and feel peace of mind.  ~ M.K.

This class is an excellent combination of aerobics, muscle training, coordination training and stretching.  It also helps me relax mentally. ~ S.N.

After trying a variety of classes over the years, I've found the one that gives me strength training, agility and flexibility work, and cardio benefits like no other.  It's a fun fusion of dance, martial arts, and healing arts with great music!  There's no strain for perfection in a Nia class.  You'll find a variety of dancers of different body sizes and fitness levels smiling as we move through our own personal adaptation of the moves trusting ourselves as we make each hour of exercise our own. ~ L.F.

In one word answers : Joy,  release,  balance.  A low back injury forced me to let go of running,  Zumba,  belly dancing,  and several other activities through which I'd previously found fitness and peace of mind.  When I dance Nia I feel confident that I can choose the right level of intensity to take care of my back, and still experience fitness and cardiovascular wellness. ~ C.F.

I enjoy Nia because it's fun to dance. Out of all the classes I take at Timberhill I think I smile the most in [Nia] class. ~ GA

I’ve enjoyed the flowing movement of the Nia class that prompts you to listen to your body.  The instructor is a role model and very supportive in class.  For those who have said to me, “I can’t do the Nia class because you have to be bare foot and I have flat feet”, I'll say to them, it’s o.k. to wear shoes, I do! ~  P.N.

I would love to share what I get from NIA. I tell people it is my church. The most open hearted, uplifting, emotional, mindful congregation I have experienced. My body feels more flexible and elastic, including my organs. And joyfully, my mind. Setting new patterns and intentions. ~S.S.

I love Nia because it improves my strength, my energy and my flexibility all at once and absolutely painlessly, without any drudgery, without having to memorize drills or movements, and it lifts my spirits. I can come to class feeling tired, depressed and/or stressed, and I leave loosened up and full of joy and energy. ~ C.S.

I love Leela's Nia class because no matter what my mood is at the start, I feel light and happy by the end of class.  Also, it is exercise but feels like fun, not work, the time flies by. ~ S.K.

Nia is a freeing, gratifying experience that is so much soul-soothing fun you hardly realize you're also getting a great workout.  ~ M.W.

Nia gives you physical and emotional strength to help you in your personal journey through life.  I have health issues that have become easier to overcome since I started Nia.  I highly recommend the class to everyone who wants to enjoy creating a healthy workout program for your body and soul. ~ V.B.

I notice when I do Nia I move through the world more gracefully for days afterward, lighter in body and spirit. It's amazing for the body and helps lift the late winter doldrums! ~ G.W.

Nia is the best "full body" workout I've found. It's energizing and aerobic, yet gentle to my old injuries. I really enjoy the variety of music exercise routines. Leela is a fantastic instructor!  ~ M.F.

Nia is like yoga for my mind & spirit; I feel looser, more flexible at work and I feel like dancing around the kitchen at home.  It's cool that it incorporates Martial arts moves and concepts. Nia is powerful and playful- a fun and challenging practice for me. ~ K.M.

The movements, music and directions of Leela during the class, stimulate positive thinking and helps you start feeling more confident, happy and hopeful. Every time I go to classes I feel more positive about myself and others…. Sometimes I am dancing but at the same time I am praying and sending love and strength to my loved ones. I am very grateful and feel very lucky to have met Leela and Nia. It is not just a class - it is a way of living. ~ M.I.S.

Here's the Newsletter article.  Please feel free to add your comments below.

Cultivating Creativity Through Movement: a free workshop

If you have attended my classes, Nia or Fit for Life, you may have noticed we start off differently than most fitness classes.  Most classes start out with a fast, boom-boom warm-up.  I tend to start out slow.  There are physical reasons to start out slow:  check out your body, the condition of your joints, discover where you need more or different movement (what feels good?) as well as what hurts, or where you need to modify movements to find more comfort or avoid injury.  Decelerating, or slowing down also helps us to slow the mind and enter a different brain state than we normally walk around in.  This brain state can help us learn movement easier, it stimulates relaxation, and it expands our creative horizons – if we choose to go there.

On Saturday, Feb 15^th at 4:00pm I will be presenting a workshop called Cultivating Creativity through Movement at the Symposium on Transformation without Apocaplypse:  How to Live Well on an Altered Planet.  We can’t solve the problems of our time in the same mindset that created them.  Movement, music, and specific exercises can help us enter into an expanded state of connectedness, mutual inspiration,  and open us to seeing things in novel ways - connecting the dots differently.  Curious about brain states and how you can use your time in class more creatively?  Perhaps even dream up an out of the ordinary solution to a problem you are working on?  Check out this FREE workshop at the symposium.  More about the symposium at the LaSells Stewart Center here.  It features a lot of great keynote speakers, including Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kathleen Dean Moore, and Sarah Van Gelder.  It will be an inspiring weekend (including the flashmob on Friday evening).

Rise! Dance! Strike! One Billion Rising

We're doing the One Billion Rising Flashmob again this year.  However, the V-Day event is now postponed because of impending flooding, deluge, etc.  It will be rescheduled for a much nicer day in April at a wonderful location.  I've been waiting to hear if something might happen indoors V-Day - but no word.  So, unless you get an emergency email - it's off for Friday 2/14/14.

One Billion Rising is an international organization dedicated to ending violence against women.  While violence against women has been institutionalized for millennia, NEVER in the history of humanity has there been a rally this big (planetary) to break the chain of violence.  We are creating history.  Changing our story.  And as cultures learn to appreciate women and stop treating us like things, we change the way we relate to our MOTHER - Earth.  It's all related.

The links you need to participate:
To sign up and find out about group rehearsals and any changes - and make your presence known!
To follow on facebook
Choreography tutorial
See last years flashmob

Where's the Gift?

Dawn came up after class with the most beautiful, touching insight – that I just had to explore it a little more than we could in the moment.  She said that she was thinking of her excess weight as stored energy (not a new idea to her) and wondered – since it is energy – how could she use it to make a contribution?  How could she make a gift of this energy?  [As opposed to thinking of it as something to get rid of.]  She acknowledged that in an agricultural society, people did physical work and used most of their energy, and that this is no longer the case.  As she was puzzling over ideas to appropriately use that stored energy, she thought of biking out to visit the father of a friend who is home-bound.  The thought of making sacred, or making a gift of something that we may be accustomed to seeing as a bother or a problem intrigues me.

Just that morning, I found out that a zumba class had been scheduled at the same time as my evening Nia class, only a half hour earlier – a more desirable time.  This is a worrisome situation for me.  I love my classes so much that I feel grief when I think that my classes may be cancelled because people prefer the better time or other class.  I longed to make a shift that would allow me to see the gift in this – so Dawn’s insight came at just the right time for me.  (Amazing how that happens – thank you for sharing it, Dawn!)  It seemed so easy and natural to her when she told me about it.  And, we set ourselves up for insights by showing up, setting the stage with positive expectations (like we do in wellness coaching), and practice – like we do in class or meditation.  So, I’m guessing Dawn has a number of ways she sets herself up for such a happy insight.

So, techniques I can use to see things differently are:

•  Choosing love (instead of fear).  The classes are so sweet that it is easy to see the love there.  If the classes were to end soon, did I love as much as I could, as deeply as I could, and appreciate everyone as much as I could?  None of us knows how much time we have left.  Will we leave any love unexpressed, anyone unacknowledged?  What can I do to share my love and appreciate more.
• Teach every class as if it were the last.  Again, we never know.  If I knew that this would be my last day on earth, how would I want to show up?
•  Practice being at home in the unknown instead of worrying about what might, or might not happen.  When my mind wants to dwell on the potential loss, stop and celebrate what I have. 

Dawn’s insight adds purpose and meaning to something loaded with negative feelings for most people.  I’m guessing it allows her to live with a greater sense of peace and the joy of making a contribution.  By giving her gift of energy – she becomes the gift.  I’m hoping my strategies will help me live with greater peace, love, and passion through this potentially challenging transition. 

How could you transform the way you look at a challenge in your life to find a greater sense of peace and purpose?  Feel free to comment.

Notes About Posture

If you attend my classes with any regularity, you have probably noticed that I cue a lot for posture.  (And I can never say everything I want to express about it, not even in this blog.)  Our posture determines how comfortable we are in our bodies.  It even predicts how comfortable we will be in the future.  As a tall child, I was often told to "suck that tummy in and stick your chest out" by folks who never modeled that behavior themselves.  As a result, I copied what I saw, not what I was told.  This could be true for you, too.  We learn to walk from modeling mom's posture, if she was the primary caregiver (eventually, boys may try to copy dad).  So look at your mom's or dad's posture and see if you notice a similarity.  Given that these postural habits predict where we hold tension or pain, is any similarity something you prefer, or not?

We live our lives walking, standing, sitting, and lying down.  Pretty much the same way day in, day out.  Our posture creates patterns of holding which become stuck over time as connective tissue shrinks to fit our posture and becomes more rigid.  The beauty of a practice, such as dance or yoga, is the way it encourages us to stretch and move beyond our habitual patterns.  Dance allows our movement to flow, it introduces grace, fluidity, and increased mobility.  It gets us unstuck from our postural habits and allows us to develop new ones.

Some of my postural cues are: lift your heart, lift your sternum, allow the shoulder blades to slide down the back, float the chin, relax the jaw, sense yourself suspended from the top of your head, allow the spine to dangle or flow down from the top of the head, bend the knees slightly, palms up - opens the heart, and many more I can't think of right now.  The cuing, the flow of the dance, the beauty (or fun) of the music, the joy of being surrounded by other dancers, all allow us to just be - differently - in our bodies.  A lot of the theory the cues are based on comes from Alexander Technique (moving from the top), and Feldenkrais (awareness through movement and sensation).  Both of these healing methods involve gentle changes in alignment, nothing radical -- like tuck your tummy and stick your chest out!  It seems to be working because I have witnessed tremendous postural changes in those who have come to class regularly (and practiced) for several years.  The ultimate goal is to dance out of class and into the rest of our lives, pain-free, with the same grace and ease we practice in class.  It's not just an exercise class - it's about how we live in our bodies, how we feel in our bodies.  When we lift our our hearts, we feel better.  When we feel better, we're more willing to be generous and contribute to making the world a better place.  (Oh-oh, the secret agenda is out!  And you are allowed to think it is just an exercise class, if you want.)

Why do we do it barefooted?

The Nia technique was designed for bare feet. We move differently than we do in shoes. Using the whole foot in our dance creates more strength, flexibility, and awareness of sensation and proprioception in the feet. 'The foot has 26 bones, 33 joints, and over 100 muscles, ligaments, and tendons' (from the Lin article below) - in other words, feet are made to move, as with any muscles you don't use, certain muscles in your feet will atrophy when immobilized most of the time.  I practiced Nia in bare feet for about 13 years without any problems with my feet or knees when I began teaching zumba - with shoes. I immediately noticed knee pain, from hitting the ground harder in shoes than I would in bare feet. The fast, lateral movement aggravated the problem. I found that I had to slowly adapt my zumba to my body in order to avoid pain. So, my zumba class was different than most.

The Nia step comes from tai chi, which is traditionally practiced without a lot of padding on the feet. Even as the music and movement heats up, the contact with the floor remains light and easy. I like to tell my classes that we feel the power primarily in our thighs and core, not by slamming the floor with our feet. That said, some students come into Nia with preexisting foot problems, and their doctors recommend shoes, or they may have diabetes, or neuropathy. You can dance Nia with shoes, there is no pressure to take them off, and, you might consider taking them off during the cool-down to build better balance and stability.  Feel free to start slow with bare feet (maybe just walking around at home or in the slow part of class.   From the Christine Lin article below on exercising in bare feet: "essentially, you're renewing all the neurological connections you formed as a toddler but have lost since you learned to tie your shoelaces."  Welcome home to your body!

For a great story on the benefits of working out in bare feet, see:  http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/  The article has amazing artwork, to boot!   

Another interesting article:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/08/20/213882836/golden-arches-human-feet-more-flexible-than-we-thought?sc=ipad&f=1001

And yet another very interesting article (Christine Lin):  http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/117003-doctors-orders-take-your-shoes-off/