The Heart Openers Portal
Live classes, audio love letters, gentle movement & writing for tough times.
Photo by Hikersbay Hikersbay
Day 14: The Heart
May I invite you to pause, just for a moment, and drop your awareness into your heart, that magnificent, electric, energetic center of you. Over these 14 days, as we've been exploring different areas of the body, we have, in many ways, been weaving a tapestry of a supported, capacious heart.
Our work has never been to estrange ourselves from our hurt and sorrow, but to occupy our bodies and our knowing more fully, to build our capacity to care for ourselves and for each other. This is a moment to sit back and regard what questions have ignited you, what movements brought you alive, where your words took flight. To see the map you've been tracing of your own sweet self. (Day 14 email)
Images from thingswelove2.blogspot.com.
Movement: A heart opening stretch can look so many ways! A few (crudely drawn ;-) options at right, but feel free to find your own way to a movement that opens this area.
Write into: To you, my heart...
Days 12 & 13: Neck, Throat, Voice
The throat and neck house that most important instrument, your voice. Here is our portal for singing and speaking, naming and knowing, harmony, resonance, dissonance. Your voice matters.
Today's audio features a Swedish drinking song and encouragement to borrow my family's custom of letting the voice be unpracticed and playful. Because the voice, much like writing, can be a place where you discover as you create.
Stretching: The platysma is a great flat muscle that extends from your chin, over your neck and down to your clavicles. This is the muscle that pops out when you extend your lower jaw with exaggeration.
Anchor your platysma by placing both palms on one side of your upper chest and pressing in to the tissue, then extend your head backwards and side bend away from your hands until you feel a stretch in the front of your neck. Repeat on the opposite side.
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten
Singing: The Beautiful chorus has a lovely song, Hymn of Healing, with a single repeated line; if you're moved to sing along, do!
Write into: My voice...
Days 10 & 11: Shoulders
We shoulder a lot. Individual responsibilities, familial need, old wounds, collective heartbreak. No wonder that in 10 years of working with bodies this is the joint that I hear about most. Today we’re exploring how this singularly capable joint can forget that it too needs support - which makes the shoulder a particularly potent lens for examining our habits of bearing (for those who’d like visuals of shoulder anatomy, see the blog post I shared earlier this spring).
Day 11 Email: Movement & Writing for Shoulders
As we move into direct work with the shoulders, we listen for how we locate support, nesting in the structures, muscles, and gravities that are already holding us.
Movement: Begin by locating your shoulder in the body; move your awareness from the ground up:
Press feet into ground, alternating left and right
Move awareness into the legs, rocking sitz bones from side to side
Bring articulation into the spine, flexing and extending in cat/cow, walking attention up from sacrum through lumbar, thoracic, and neck
Arriving at the shoulder, pause to roll and shrug a few times
Move into visualization using the Franklin method: raise and squeeze one shoulder as though squeezing out a sponge full of water, then lower the shoulder, imagining the sponge refilling with water (3-minute video for a demo).
Write into: Things I've carried...
Hand art used with permission from wonderful Colleen Kinsella
Days 8 & 9: Hands
Pause for a moment and notice what your hands are doing right now. Tapping? Folding laundry? Cupping a tea? We use our hands for so much, but rarely pause to notice them or their incredible range. Your hands, those workhorses, are also supremely sensitive. Today we're exploring their ability to sing in seemingly-opposite directions: open and closed, giving and receiving, sensitivity and muscling through.
Day 8 email: love letter to hands and transcript. Hear Pádraig Ó Tuama discuss Consider the Hands that Write this Letter by Aracelis Grimay on Poetry Unbound.
Day 9 email. A reminder - if you're moved to do so - to share a few words on what's nourishing you right now (audio / photos work too!)
Movement: For our stretching today, it's helpful if you have a small, tennis-sized ball, but a rolled up pair of socks will do as well.
Begin by massaging the hands: press into the palms, grasp and release each finger, perhaps bring in a bit of gentle traction at the knuckle joints.
Then, using your small ball on a table surface, slowly roll it around the palms, pausing & leaning into spots that feel stuck.
To close, rub palms together quickly, generating heat, and rest them on your heart/chest.
Write into: I fill my hands with / I empty my hands of...
Days 6 & 7: The Belly
Ah, the belly. With its knowing, its circulation of nutrients, and its deep tenderness, the belly actually has quite a lot in common with the heart. The thing is, we're not often as kind to the belly as we are to the heart. Today we’re singing the praises of this tender place that is often hidden away.
Day 6 Email: Love Letter to the Belly & Transcript
Day 7 Email: Rest & Writing for the Belly
Here we are in the belly. You might begin by tuning your hands toward an inward yes, filling them with kindness, and gently resting them on your belly. Let this be a spacious meeting, making small, micro adjustments to soften and listen.
Then, if you'd like to take this into movement, begin a gentle belly massage: Move your hands in slow rotation down the left side of your belly, across the lower quadrant, up the right side and back towards the left. You might echo this movement on the back body, using one hand to circulate the belly while the other parallels the circle on the back. Repeat a few times and return to stillness before turning to write.
Write into: This belly says…
Image courtesy of June Glasson with thanks to Dr. Liz Simons
Days 4 & 5: The Hips & Pelvis
Despite an old inner voice that might tell us to sit up straight, the roots of the word posture are a state of being in relation. Posture actually speaks to connection, rather than rigidity. Which brings us to the wonder of the pelvis and hips. This anatomical bowl is a meeting place between lower and upper, of important organ systems, of movement. As such, it can be a potent amplifier, communicator & dancer.
Day 4 Email: Love Letter to the Hips & Pelvis and audio transcript.
Gentle movement: Placing hands on hips, invite some soft rocking - forward and back, side and side, rotations. Perhaps you might even put on a bit of music as you widen your awareness to notice how this central point connects to feet, to ribs, to shoulders.
Then, move into a figure-4 stretch: Cross your left ankle over your right thigh and bend your right knee until your calf is parallel to the ground. Next, interlace your fingers behind your right thigh and gently pull in toward your chest, rocking gently if you like. Repeat on the other side (see illustration below from hip flexor stretches). As you rest here, you might bring yesterday's queries to mind.
Write: Lucille Clifton begins her extraordinary poem Homage to My Hips:
these hips are big hips / they need space to / move around in.
Write into: These hips need...
Days 2 & 3: The Feet
Early morning foot play in a bubble bath — Sue.
Babies know that feet are both interesting and delicious :-) These 26 bones, 30 joints, and more than 100 muscles are also a potent portal to our ground.
And because most of us adapted habits of standing when we were babies, our ground is both where we come from and where we are.
Audio transcript and email for Day 2: Love Letter to the Feet.
Day 3 Email: Movement & Writing for the Feet
Gentle movement:
Stretching: If you're able to grasp your foot, begin by cradling one of your feet, kneading into the soles with thumbs, gently pulling the toes, squeezing the sides. Alternately, you can stand on a ball or a rolled up towel to press the arches in unhabituated directions.
Gentle traction: Using one hand to anchor the heel, use the other to grasp at the base of the toes. As you make conscious contact with the bones, gently pull your hands apart in longitudinal traction. Take your time and linger in the places that feel beneficial. After you've worked both feet, come to standing and notice how this feels.
Write into: I come from...
Gently traction through the metatarsals to lengthen the foot
Workshop 1: Permission
As we settle into our first day, an invitation to follow the call of your own voice and body.
Transcript for our First Audio Love Letter.
Excerpts from Permission Slips, by Matthew Burgess:
“Permission to stand out”
“Permission to find your groove again”
“Permission to smile at strangers”
“Permission to dazzle ‘em”
Welcome!
This will be the landing site for resources - audio, writing invitations, movement prompts and information - related to Heart Openers. I’ll be updating it as the course unfolds, and will send emails that navigate you directly to new material for easy access. As always, please let me know if you have any questions at all; I’m looking forward to supporting you in care. ~ With love, Johanna
Portal will be available through June, 2024. Because this material was created exclusively for folks in Heart Openers, I’m grateful if you don’t share it - thank you!