This week we want to tell you about our sponsor SOMANDA BODYWORKS.
Amanda Coleman offers private hands-on healing and therapeutic movement classes. Her work is called Structural Integration, it is both a gentle and deep hands-on approach. Her goal is to coax her students into deep fulfilling partnership with their own physical nature by upgrading both hardware: bones, muscles, and organ function; and software: creativity, movement, energy, beliefs and habits.
As you can probably guess from the description Amanda brings a robust holistic perspective to her practice. Amanda sees the structure of the body as supported by what she calls tensegrity, like a suspension bridge, and she works to strengthen that suspension. Her work succeeds in spreading out the load to diffuse work throughout the body so that you are more springy, buoyant and quick.
Moreover, Amanda sees each physical issue as a microcosm of a systematic symptom. She said that for example, when clients work on balance and make progress on the physical level they often start to see opportunities to attend to balance in their relationships with their self, their partners, their surroundings.
Amanda loves Booty Camp because it’s a space for women to build strength while connecting with nature.
The biggest message Amanda has for us Booty Campers is that “it can all be much easier”. Amanda explains that we often feel like it’s so hard to work out, move, and engage with our bodies because we are often fighting with ourselves. Both physically and psychologically we are working at cross-purposes.
Amanda uses her incredible skill at bodywork to attend to the physical and make room for the rest to follow. She says that contrary to what many of us have learned to believe “moving can feel totally free and light, without big wear and tear on the structure, if things are balanced and calibrated.”
Amanda explains that many us have bodies that habitually recruit a large number of excess muscles when we move. She calls this “bound flow”. She says that at any age and with any body she can work to take the strain off a system. What’s the carrot that you get when you do this? Playfulness, she says, just shows up. Ease and enjoyment are freed up to emerge.
Quite a carrot isn’t it?
Amanda gave the Booty Camper blog a few tips:
- Breathe – Direct Don’t Restrict. Allow the sensation of breath to move throughout your entire body. Amanda says the number one thing we do to make things harder is that we hold and restrict breath, even while breathing “hard”. She says we can direct it. But do not wall it off from parts of our body.
- The Starfish – Amanda tells us to imagine our bodies as starfish. Just like starfish we have 6 limbs. The head and tailbone in addition to our arms and legs. Amanda says that a starfish moves because the center moves. And so do we.
Above all Amanda brings an exuberance and a deeply felt conviction that everyone can live with more ease in their body. People who work with Amanda come to really love and appreciate their bodies. To everyone she says with fierce and unabashed hopefulness – “It’s all still there and you can get it back! It’s all accessible.”