Core Awareness, Revised Edition: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise, and Dance

Keeping your attention focused at your hip sockets, initiate movement at the hip socket, allowing one foot to glide along the floor. The pelvis stays centered and stable and remains part of the torso—only the leg extends. As the leg lengthens, notice sensations along your back. Any shortening in the low back (to accommodate the extension of the leg

Another powerful heartfelt center that requires tending is the somatic, enteric, or kinesthetic brain. This somatic moving center located in the belly core is distinct from, yet connected to, both our emotional and mental processes. Kinesthetic awareness is not a feeling or a thought, but provides internal sensory information. The wisdom that comes

It is for those ready to let go of their identification as a dancer, yoga student, athlete, or performer, to embrace the common human experience of sensation in motion.

A neutral body does not look like a body that others recognize as a dancer, cyclist, or swimmer. The neutral body moves from a dynamic, supple core into a movement pattern, embodying form and expression, and then moves back to a neutral body. The concept of moving in and out of expressive patterns suggests never losing one’s self or becoming identi

Maintaining proper positioning while stretching helps unravel muscular substitutions and compensations.

Most of what is called aging might be more accurately understood as a process of drying. The juicy, plump psoas, through time, lack of movement, and lack of support, dries and shrinks. As the psoas dries, it begins to shorten. The image of a bent-over elderly person represents the dry, shrunken psoas. When understood from this perspective, the idea

If the situation is too demanding, we will not be able to stay present to sensory cues and injury will ensue.

One example is in the area of our cultural belief in core strength. Believing muscular weakness to be the primary problem, we embark on programs that continually condition through building muscular control. However, growing density in muscle tissue, disguised as strength, rather than cultivating somatic intelligence simply creates additional armori

Having a feeling in one’s bones is a saying that hints at the authenticity felt deep within the skeletal core. Sensing bone ignites a relationship with gravity that fosters a profound exchange with the Earth.