Dunstable Park Health Practice

In this lesson we will be doing solo, partner and group exercises to develop our balance. There are small muscle groups involved in balancing which rarely get used. How often have you tried balancing on one leg? We will start with this; exploring movement with one leg in the air. Also, we will discover how our upper bodies can pivot around one leg. Then we will move into unique partner and group work. With a partner we will, for example, try to write letters in the air while keeping foot to foot contact. This is quite difficult and will help us build those fine motor skills. These exercises are also great for team building. We can take this fun exercise further, with multiple people in a circle, maintaining foot to foot contact; we will try to move as one, writing numbers or letters. Have you ever tried anything like this? It's fun and also has some seriously good health benefits. Come down and have a go.

Moving meditation in a great park. We will be practising breathing and movement exercises while standing and walking around. There are many exercises we can do solo, in pairs or as a group. Solo exercises include walking drills with deep breathing and relaxation. Solo movements in the standing position. Partner exercises include blending with your partners movement. They move and you follow as closely as possible, without jerky movements, or stopping your breathing, trying to move as one with your partner. As a group we can take this blending idea to another level where you can move one way with one person, following their direction exactly, before tagging onto someone else. Giving a dynamic feel to the blending subject. We can practice walking through a crowd while doing breathing exercises. There are so many variations to this movement practise, I can't list them all here, and of course, it is very good for the joints and muscles. Come and give it a go. You will be pleasantly surprised.

We will be studying structure of movement in Mentmore park. We will start with a solo drill: walking with conscious breathing, then adjusting the shoulders, the chest, the hips etc until we find the perfect structure for ourselves. Then partner work: one person walks towards the other, aiming to push a part of the body, the aim here is to evade while maintaining that perfect structure and form which we found in the solo drill. In groups we will take this further, multiple people walk towards you with arms outstretched, how will you move efficiently though the crowd while keeping that relaxed form. All while maintaining good breathing and relaxation. This practice will make us aware of how we walk and stand to a fine detail. Come down to have a go.

Using the breathing practices from the eastern art of Systema, we will get to that deep relaxation. This isn't the typical meditation you are used to, this is highly involved. You will be learning to breath whilst using tension in selected body parts. By intentionally and selectively tensing, we can do two things. Firstly, we can understand how to scan our bodies for tension, to know when we are relaxed or not. And, secondly, we can oxygenate and nourish ourselves. There are many variations of this practise, such as creating waves of tension inside of us. The foot tenses, then the calf and then the thigh etc and it moves up to the head. This technique, as well as others we can do, will teach us how to heal ourselves and build that deep mind-body connection.