Lissa Hammit: Balanced Bodies in Motion

04/03/2025

Today is one of my most favorite days in my practice. I teach a learning to move again class.

One of the students looked at the floor and said it looks like there’s been a train wreck. We laughed. We had joy we had community. I love teaching this class

03/27/2025

Learning to move again. We all use ourselves in a less than optimal way, and we don’t realize it so bringing ourselves to awareness, and conscious movement can shine a light on our habits and help us move in new ways.

03/24/2025

Learning to move again, some of my favorite self treatment, tools, small dryer balls, much more gentle and kind than lacrosse balls.

Taps into my nervous system. Lets my brain and nervous system know that something needs tending to.

Components of learning to move again are release realign, rebuild relearn restore

03/23/2025

03/21/2025

Learning to move again
I’ve learned that this is really humbling and I don’t think I felt that way in the beginning.

at 30 I couldn’t lay on my side and bring my hip forward and back
I remember laying on the floor crying like I’m only 30 years old and I can’t even do what seems like a simple movement to me
This was a doorway to my understanding how I was unconsciously incompetence when it came to me, realizing how much my brain and nervous system have forgotten
I learned a term called sensory motor amnesia at the time from my first movement teacher Carol Welch with Biosomarics

I started to understand moving. I became more consciously incompetent. I was aware of my limitations and my imbalances, and as I got more and more aware of them and became more consciously competent, I still had to think about how I moved, I had less pain and I felt better.

Maybe we become unconsciously competent in relationship to our movement our movement patterns our movement habits.
It’s been my experience that the more I stay consciously competent the better I feel physically, emotionally and spiritually

I coach myself into consciousness around how I move, and now I am beginning to understand, coaching myself, emotionally .

The cycle of transformation. I started to learn that with the Hoffman Process and now have applied it to my physical world as well.
The cycle of transformation, starts with awareness, conscious whole body, movement, beginning to understand omy positive and negative habitual ways of moving and responding emotionally and then experiencing or finding new ways of moving both physically and emotionally and then it begins again,
It is spiral that enhances possibility and supports that it’s a downward and upward flow as I evolve in this life.

11/03/2024

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche = “Now let’s look at the second assumption, that the object of our aggression or irritation is unchanging. In this case as well, our habitual emotional reactions blind us to our own knowledge.

We all know that everything changes. We witness the seasons change; we witness children growing up and adults growing old. Yet in many ways we still hold on to a sense of permanence. For example, we believe that the “me” of today is the same person as the “me” who was born decades ago. But even yesterday’s “me” is not the same as today’s. We have probably all heard that seven years from now all the cells that are in our bodies today will have been replaced. Even though I am told that this information is not completely accurate, the fact remains that innumerable cells in the body are being born and die every day.

These changes are too subtle to notice, but we can clearly perceive how much our bodies change in a year or more. On the most subtle level, every split second is a fresh moment. Every instant, subtle changes take place in the body and mind.

In the last twenty-four hours, every person alive has changed, from instant to instant, an inconceivable number of times. Therefore, yesterday’s problem, threat, or enemy is, in reality, not here today. In our minds, we tend to hold these situations as static, but actually everything is ephemeral, impossible to nail down no matter how hard we try.

If we deeply understand and maintain our awareness that things have no permanence from moment to moment, we will find it difficult to remain upset about anything for long.”

10/18/2024

Sometimes clients who have pain and you’re working with them around their pain, potentially adding movement during your sessions while they’re on the table or learning how to teach movement beyond the table, to help support the change, but sometimes they want a good massage.

Good massage different for everybody and what I found in my own capacity to give meaningful massages was, I had to get my own treatments and learn how to truly move in my body not just place myself and push.

I help bodyworkers learn how to understand their own limitations in relationship to their own body so that they can give meaningful treatments to others.

Shimmyjeuge Align
It starts with us first, our connection to ourselves, physically emotionally and spiritually.

LIssa

10/13/2024

Frank Ostaseski = “When I am with family and friends or at the bedside I try to create a warm, open, and nonjudgmental space in which whatever needs to happen, can happen. This is best done if I can first become a refuge to myself. I can pause and call on the better part of my nature as a shelter from my habitual defensiveness, reactivity, or neurotic tendencies that cause me to be overwhelmed by the chaos surrounding me. We cannot always eliminate difficult conditions, but we can use our acquired skills to transform obstacles into opportunities. We can be that one calm person in the room. In doing so, we can be a true refuge to others. . . . We often underestimate the comfort of silence and the value of simple human presence.”

09/22/2024

Norman Fischer

PRACTICING WITH ANGER

Let’s see if we can reduce practicing with anger to a few more or less clear, if provisional, steps:

1. Think about anger
2. Just notice.
3. Say to yourself, “This is anger. This is what it feels like. It’s just like this.
4. After the anger moment has passed, take time to investigate it.
5. Practice the ninth bodhisattva precept: I vow to practice love, not to harbor ill will.

Step 1 (of 5) Think about anger. Intelligent reflection matters. Read books about anger, listen to talks, journal, talk with friends. Become as clear as you can about what anger is, how it appears in you, how it hurts you, and how it helps you. Bring all this reflection to bear as you practice the second step, in the moment of actually being angry.

Step 2 (of 5) Just notice. That is, before you rush into blame and foolhardy words and deeds, notice the actual phenomenon of anger. How does it feel? Train yourself through repetition to immediately bring attention to your body in the moment of anger. Be with your breathing. Be with your heartbeat. If you don’t remember to do this until after the moment of anger, do it then. Little by little you will learn to do it in the moment.

Step 3 (of 5) Say to yourself, “This is anger. This is what it feels like. It’s just like this.” When you do this, you are slowing things down, gently embracing your condition, neither pushing it away nor getting hooked into it. If you get angry in a moment of intense interaction with another person, train yourself to ask for a pause. You might say something such as, “Hold on for a minute. Let me get a grip on myself.” Resist the impulse to immediately shoot back with aggression.

To be continued. . .

08/19/2024

Sharon Salzberg:
Living Our Love

“…with an eye made quiet by
the power of harmony, and the deep
power of joy,
We see into the life of things (William Wordsworth).”

“We once brought one of our teachers to the United States from India. After he had been here for some time, we asked him for his perspective on our Buddhist practice in America. While he was mostly very positive about what he saw, one critical thing stood out. Our teacher said that those practicing here in the West sometimes reminded him of people in a rowboat. They row and row and row with great earnestness and effort, but they neglect to untie the boat from the dock. He said he noticed people striving diligently for powerful meditative experiences—wonderful transcendence, going beyond space, time, body, and mind—but not seeming to care so much about how they relate to others in a day-to-day way. How much compassion do they express toward the plumber who is late, or the child who makes a mess? How much kindness? How much presence? The path may lead to many powerful and sublime experiences, but the path begins here with our daily interactions with each other.”