Workshops

Janet offers a variety of workshops and events ONLINE and IN PERSON in Fort Worth, Texas to enable you to dive deeper into learning about how Somatic Movement can benefit you, expand your Pilates practice with a Pilates Master Classes or top up your Continuing Education Credits with Balanced Body Pilates Courses.

Curious about Somatics? Not sure what it is? Keep an eye out for upcoming workshops.

December 2022

De-Stress this Holiday Season with Somatic Movement

Holiday seasons around the world, whilst a happy period filled with anticipation, excitement, and nostalgia, can also bring with them an element of stress. Both good stress and bad stress can cause our nervous systems to become overwhelmed when we are not paying attention to how stress is affecting us physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Some examples of seasonal events that contribute to an increase in our stress levels include:

• Organizing family gatherings
• Impromptu parties or travel
• Un-foreseen financial expectations
• Cultural stories
• The grief of losing a loved one that often resurfaces during the holiday season.

While one person can embrace these events, they can be a source of worry, stress, and anxiety for another. From the somatic perspective, only you know what it feels like to be you from the inside out. This is called your first-person perspective.

This holiday season knowing that we tend to overschedule and end up snapping at our friends or family, feeling pain, tension, or emotionally overwhelmed with duty or sadness, we can choose to connect with our felt sensations through somatic movement. Being able to identify that sensation in the earliest stages, while there’s still time to shift it to a more positive fruitful response can create a more joyful holiday season. When we choose to respond somatically we can speak to the stress response before it becomes habituated.

Somatic Movement is a comprehensive system for muscular function and also addresses mental and emotional stress helping to alleviate the effects of seasonal stress.   When these stressors are not addressed they can accumulate over time and manifest in what Dr. Thomas Hanna called Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA). SMA is a habituated response to physical, mental, or emotional stress or trauma. SMA shows up in a variety of ways that may leave us feeling bodily pain, headaches, feelings of frustration, and anxiety that result in restless sleep. Comprised of simple easy-to-learn movements that you can do on your own.

Somatic movements address the primary reflexes associated with our stress response. Hanna recognized that these responses manifest in 3 distinct patterns:

• Firstly, the startle response (fear) can show up in times of grief, working long hours at the computer, driving, or even cooking your holiday meal. This reflex can result in head, neck, and shoulder pain.
• Secondly, the landau reflex (action) is our get up and go, our happy muscles and get things done response. From holiday shopping, meal preparation or even dancing the night away, it’s our “ON” button that keeps us upright and moving forward. Habituation of this “action” reflex often manifests as lower back pain.
• The third reflex is called trauma. A reflex that is a one-sided response to accidents and injuries to one side, compensation patterns or simply carrying children or items on one hip only. These reflexes can be addressed by specific somatic movements created by Hanna and other somatic pioneers.

As you navigate the upcoming holiday season, consider giving yourself the gift of a series of somatic movement classes to help you shift from a reactionary state to a mindful place, where you can sense what you are feeling and choose how you want to respond.

End the cycle of holding on to tension that is the root cause of chronic muscular, mental and emotional pain caused by stress. Whether it is seasonal or situational, learning these movements can help you reset your body’s involuntary or habituated response to life’s stressful circumstances.

Join me ONLINE Mondays December 5th, 12th, and 19th for 90 minutes of Somatic Movement to De-Stress your holiday season, recalibrate your mind and body and set you up for a season of joyful celebrations.

7:00-8:30 pm

Gift yourself the joy of a stress-free holiday season and share some wellness with MI Studio’s contribution to Balanced Bodies Mental Health and Mental Wellness Campaign so collectively we can mindfully embrace this season of celebrations with peace and grace.

Book Here

September 2022:

Defining Clinical Somatics

This is a 1 hour Lecture on understanding Clinical Somatic Education and how it will benefit you. The feelings of stiffness and muscular pain that are often associated with getting old starts in the brain. How we live in our bodies, trauma, stress and postural habits change how our brains move our bodies and how we relate to our physical and emotional selves. This can change and Somatic Education is the first step to understanding how the brain and body relate and how you can relieve yourself from chronic pain and tension.

Introduction to Somatic Education

This workshop covers the basic movement exercises related to the reflexes defined in the previous seminar. Each two hour session will uncover 2 movement patterns to help you recognise faulty patterns that may be the result of your pain, relearn new patterns and find a renewed sense of pain free movement and strength potential.

4 days, over 4 weeks…treat yourself to the freedom you deserve.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

 

May:

“Myth Of Aging” a primer in Somatic Education in the style Thomas Hanna PhD.Somatic Education is a way to better know your body and your experience of the world though your sensory motor system.

A form of neuromuscular recalibration that teaches you techniques that you can use yourself to address your chronic muscular tension that results in poor posture, pain and movement limitation.

FIND OUT MORE HERE