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~ From Belly Distress to Belly Health~
(register for online course with mentor Lisa Sarasohn )

Drawing on ancient wisdom and contemporary practice, we'll attend to our bellies' well-being. We'll engage in experiential learning, energizing the body-mind transformation that supports healing.

With creative and playful activities, and strengthened by our mutual support, we'll develop our relationship with the healing life force already dwelling within us.

Please note: The information and activities offered in this course are for educational purposes only and are not intended nor should be used as a substitute for proper health care. If you need health care, be sure to seek the appropriate diagnostic and treatment services.

Lesson 1: What is healing? What is dis-ease? We consider healing as a process of resolving internal conflict. Activities include learning the Centering Breath and honoring your belly's biography. In our teleseminar, we'll share our reasons for choosing this course and our intentions for ourselves and our learning community; we'll make agreements ensuring our privacy and confidentiality.

Lesson 2: How does healing happen? We explore the act of centering and the quality of compassion in relation to the healing process. Activities include writing a letter to your belly and learning a body-centered approach to resolving internal conflict. In our teleseminar, we'll share our comments, reflections, and questions relating to the Lesson 1 activities.

Lesson 3: How do we embody the healing process? We consider our body's center as portal to our center of being, and our center of being as portal to our source of healing. We learn that worldwide traditions of healing revere the body's center, the belly, as a sacred container for healing energy. Activities include locating your body's center and dialoging with the inner wisdom your belly shelters. In our teleseminar, we'll share our comments, reflections, and questions relating to the Lesson 2 activities.

Lesson 4: What is the connection, if any, between our bellies' health and the health of our planet? We explore the resonance between the body's center and Earth's center. We engage in an imaginative journey — a pilgrimage to a sacred cave — to release an image of dis-ease that's ready to expire and replace it with a new image of wholeness. In our teleseminar, we'll share our comments, reflections, and questions relating to the Lesson 3 activities.

Lesson 5: Concluding the course with no additional text, only a teleseminar, we'll share our comments, reflections, and questions relating to the Lesson 4 activity.

Course goals:
1. First and foremost, my goal is to create a supportive community for you and for your learning.

I've designed the activities accompanying each lesson to support your experiential learning about a body-centered process of healing. I urge you to complete these activities and post your comments, reflections, and questions on the course's web page before the next scheduled teleseminar.

I heartily encourage you to make use of the forums, teleseminars, and other opportunities for interaction. Participating actively, we can support each other's healing process.

2. Beyond creating a supportive learning community, my goal is to introduce you to information and skills you can use to support your well-being in concert with whatever health care services and treatments may be necessary and appropriate.

Register Here

 

~ Initiation 21st Century: Awakening Your Sacred Center ~
(register for online course with mentor Lisa Sarasohn )

The year 2012 heralded a revolution in human consciousness. The signs suggest that the Sacred Feminine will be informing, and reorganizing, every aspect of human experience. As we embody the Sacred Feminine, we'll be equipped to participate in -- and shape -- this evolution of human awareness with wisdom and grace.

This four week online course is part of an ongoing process through which you embody the Sacred Feminine by energizing your body's center with breath, image, story, and movement. As a first step, this course focuses on befriending your body's center and learning yoga-based movement and breathing exercises that will form the core of your practice. (Even if developing a movement practice isn't for you at this time, you'll still find a process that engages and rewards your participation.)

Our first lesson brings ancient prophecy together with astronomy and sacred geometry -- including Joseph Campbell's writing on "the mystery number of the Goddess" -- to explore the connection between the year 2012 and the emergence of the Sacred Feminine. You begin developing a practice for embodying the Sacred Feminine by honoring and energizing your body's center.

Each lesson blends experiential learning through reflection and creative expression with instruction in movement and breath. Every lesson guides you to work with words and images to develop an ever more intimate knowledge of and appreciation for your body's center as the source of your soul-power and the sourcepoint of the Sacred Feminine.

At the same time, the lessons provide opportunities to investigate the ways that society and culture have shaped your experience of your body's center.

In the first lesson, you'll play with word-webbing to explore your experience. Activities in the following lessons include "Draw Out Your Deepest Knowing," "Honor Your Biography," and "Dialogue with Your Inner Wisdom."

Lesson one also shows you how to deepen your breath into your body's center with the Centering Breath. You learn the Side Stretches and Diagonal Stretches to limber your spine and prepare your whole body for movement.

By the end of four weeks you'll have learned The Gutsy Women's Workout as presented in The Woman's Belly Book: Finding Your True Center for More Energy, Confidence, and Pleasure. You'll have learned a total of two breathing patterns and ten moves, adding Cradle, Energizing Breath, and Bright Blessings (Lesson 2); Belly Bowl, Power Centering, and Lily (Lesson 3); and Wings, Tree, and Alignment (Lesson 4).

You'll have developed a spiritually potent practice that enhances your vitality, pleasure, confidence, compassion, creativity, intuition, and sense of purpose -- qualities of the Sacred Feminine indeed.

The Gutsy Women's Workout is the short form of the longer Honoring Your Belly ritual presented on the Honoring Your Belly DVD. Sequels to this workshop will provide instruction in additional moves, preparing you to practice the ritual as a whole. They will also offer you ways to expand your practice into new dimensions of insight, creativity, and purposeful action.

Course goals

1.    Develop awareness of and appreciation for your body's center.
2.    Explore your experience of your body's center in relation to the Sacred Feminine.
3.    Learn two breathing patterns and ten yoga-based moves that honor and energize your body's        center. 

Lisa's book and DVD are required resources for this course, order here

Mentor: Lisa Sarasohn

My workshops flow from my quest for the Sacred Feminine blended with my experience practicing and teaching yoga.

I've been a Kripalu Yoga instructor since 1979. I've also trained as a yoga and bodywork therapist.

From 1981 to 1988, I served on staff at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Lenox, MA. During this time, I led yoga classes for thousands of guests, conducted a practice in bodywork therapy, designed workshops on many aspects of holistic health, and trained yoga teachers and bodyworkers.

In the course of my continuing yoga studies, I learned how cultures around the world have valued the body's center as sacred. Delving deeper into this subject revealed connections between the body's center and qualities of the soul, the extent of women's power in family and society, and the degree of a culture's reverence for Sacred Feminine.

Listen to an interview with Lisa Sarasohn


MP3 File

30 minutes on-demand, listen now or download MP3


The Woman's Belly Book: Finding Your True Center for More Energy, Confidence, and Pleasure
(New World Library, 2006) presents what I've learned about the body's center through teaching and research over a period of nearly twenty years.
Live Your Belly Book

My articles on honoring the body's center have appeared in publications including Yoga Journal, SageWoman, Radiance, and Personal Transformation. My workshops have been sponsored by colleges and universities, health education agencies, and holistic learning centers.

My intention is to provide you an opportunity to delight in the vitality and pleasure, the creativity and confidence, the intuition and sense of purpose that already dwell within and emerge from your body's center. My greatest joy is to offer you ways to discover the Sacred Feminine as she already abides within you.