What if you could transform negative emotions, improve your self-esteem, and heighten your wellbeing — mind, body, and spirit — by changing the way you move your body?
Can you imagine the possibility of expanding your sense of choice and freedom... and significantly altering the direction of your life... simply by heightening your awareness of the way you physically move through life?
The truth is, the way you move tells a story — to other people and to your own nervous system...
The way you carry yourself triggers hormonal responses that become part of the chemistry of your self-image.
For instance, slouching and hunching your shoulders signals to others that you’re tired or sad — but did you know it also causes your nervous system to produce the very hormones that then lead to you feeling depressed?
It can be surprising to learn that It’s NOT actually your muscles or joints that are causing your pain or discomfort — it’s the mixed messages your brain is giving and receiving as it tries to navigate old wounds and new fears as you move through the world...
What if, by simply changing the way you carry yourself, you could break free of chronic pain, self-sabotaging habits, unhealthy emotional patterns, and more?
In an exciting online course, celebrated body language expert and certified Feldenkrais Teacher Lavinia Plonka will introduce you to the Feldenkrais Method...
The revolutionary practices Lavinia teaches harness the power of safe, subtle, sophisticated movements to teach you how to reorganize yourself — resulting in improved range of motion, reduced pain, and an opportunity to live a fuller life.
As you’ll discover, your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and movements are closely interrelated — and influence each other in powerful ways.
Lavinia will guide you to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency — not through muscular effort, but through increased conscious awareness of how movement actually works.
You’ll become more aware of the link between your inner and outer worlds... and how your physical movements mirror your feelings about your sense of self-worth and your place in the world.
We’re stepping into a new way of understanding the brain and nervous system — and it starts with awareness of the habitual postures and holding patterns in the body and the way you carry yourself...
Stories continue to emerge about patients who, for example, have undergone surgeries and assumed they were perfectly healthy afterward. Yet they were unknowingly carrying the trauma of the surgery within their nervous systems, causing unexplained physical and emotional symptoms.
Although they had been under anesthesia during the surgery, their systems remembered the trauma...
When they realized they were holding onto the fear or pain stemming from the trauma of the surgery and worked through it using the Feldenkrais Method, they were able to release that trauma — and the pain they had been carrying disappeared.
Through subtle movements, you can transform YOUR story, coming into heightened self-awareness, an expansion of your repertoire of movement, and improved functioning — bringing your life into alignment not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually, too.
When your whole body moves cooperatively, and when maximum efficiency is achieved — with minimum effort — you’ll unleash your powers of creativity, intuition, healthy sexuality, and more...
Welcome to the relationship you’ve been waiting for — your relationship with yourself.
Lavinia Plonka has helped people improve their movement, behavior, relationships, and careers for over 35 years. Her unique expertise connects the dots between posture/movement, emotions, and the mind. Lavinia’s training and professional career have included theater, dance, yoga, and the martial arts.
Her popular workshops explore the intersection between movement, emotions, and the mind. She’s currently the director of Asheville Movement Center, offering a complete movement curriculum that includes workshops and private lessons.
In this 7-module transformational intensive, Lavinia will share her wisdom on the mind-body relationship and guide you through Feldenkrais movements to help you heal emotional challenges as you change your physical movement patterns. As a result, you’ll unleash your powers of creativity, intuition, healthy sexuality, and more.
In this opening module, Lavinia will welcome you to the relationship you’ve been waiting for: your relationship with yourself.
She’ll share why and how trauma, stress, and illness so often create chronic pain that defies medical support.
Lavinia will walk you through how the Feldenkrais Method uses movement to dialog with your nervous system through the language of movement and sensation.
You’ll start by looking at all the ways your body “keeps score” of all the different insults you've suffered — and the baggage that literally constricts your muscles... creating patterns of pain on a cellular level.
Often, your breathing and sleep can become compromised, contributing to more inflammation and discomfort. Your breath feeds your cells. Your sleep literally helps flush toxins out...
In this first lesson on moving out of pain, you’ll:
Back pain has become a multi-billion dollar industry. The statistics of the number of people suffering from back pain are staggering.
How did this happen?
In this module, Lavinia will explain how the perfect storm of too much sitting — at desks, in cars, on couches, and more — combined with the constant stress of contemporary life — has literally imprisoned our backs. In fact, sitting is now considered the new smoking.
Stress, fear, and anxiety also march up and down our spines.
There’s a reason for the popular saying, “I’ve got your back.” It evokes the feeling of knowing you’re taken care of...
And when you don’t feel as though anyone has your back, it can become a vicious cycle: your back hurts from work, you protect your back, your nervous system interprets it as a lack of safety — and makes your back pain even worse.
In this module, you’ll:
Despite the fact that the word sacrum (the lowest part of your spine that connects your pelvic bones) comes from the Latin word for sacred, the pelvis has gotten a bad rap for the last 200 years.
Many of us were (at least implicitly) raised with inhibition and shame around this part of our bodies — resulting in physical and emotional inner conflict.
In this module, you’ll discover how the all-important pelvis is literally your geographic center. .. your legs and spine are actually moving along with it!
From reclaiming your sexuality to feeling confident that you have control over your bladder, reconnecting with your pelvic power will ground and empower you.
In this module, you’ll:
Your posture tells a story... to other people, and to your own nervous system. In this module, you’ll discover how to effortlessly improve your stance to support and even embolden you.
Your posture triggers hormonal responses that become the chemistry of your self-image. For example, slumping, looking down, or even turning down the corners of your mouth signal to others that you’re tired or sad... and causes your nervous system to produce the corresponding hormones that lead to feeling fatigued and depressed.
Many of us have struggled since childhood to “straighten up!” as our parents admonished, but not being unable to sustain it. In this session, Lavinia will share why it’s not your fault.
In this module, you’ll discover:
Put your right hand on your heart, and say, “I promise you...” Now put your hand on your belly and say the same words. Different, right?
In this module, you’ll discover how your heart center is the place for your heartfelt feelings, which are often completely different from your reactive “gut" feelings.
For example, if you’ve been hurt, rejected, or criticized, you may have noticed your tendency to try to protect your vulnerable heart...
You may have experienced your ribs tightening, your thoracic spine stiffening, or your breath becoming more shallow — all of which can lead to feelings of anxiety, sadness, and tension in your shoulders and a tightening in your heart.
In this module, you’ll:
Many of us have a tendency to distract or even sabotage ourselves from achieving our goals. If your intention, for example, is to write a novel, you may find that you’re avoiding it by busying yourself with anything but working on it. Or, if you know you want to end a problematic relationship, you might instead stay in it, despite your unhappiness...
What does this avoidance have to do with the way you physically move?
In this module, you’ll learn how listening to the information from your nervous system creates both pleasure and pain in your life choices. By recognizing how you get in your own way and gaining clarity about the internal blind spots that sabotage your intentions, you’ll learn to hone in on what you really want — whether it’s pain-free movement, or the person of your dreams.
In this module, you’ll:
By this time in the course, you know what your holding patterns are and what’s been in your way. You’ve unlocked innumerable possibilities. In this session, you’ll discover how to listen to yourself and envision what you want. Moshe Feldenkrais said that his method is intended to help people “realize their avowed and unavowed dreams, to restore each person to their human dignity.”
We tend to put our dreams aside for so long... we even forget we had them. It’s time, right now, to re-envision your dreams... to see what’s necessary to achieve them… and to understand how to elegantly overcome the obstacles in our path...
In this final module, you’ll:
In addition to Lavinia’s transformative 7-module online course, you’ll receive these powerful training sessions with leading visionaries and teachers. These bonus sessions complement the course and promise to take your understanding and practice to an even deeper level.
We all need a hug sometimes. This hug will offer new insights into your scapulae and ribs, and will also teach you about the joys of rotation and differentiation — two crucial abilities that are easy to lose in our sedentary culture.
In this information-packed discussion, Lavinia and Cynthia explore exactly what movement is — beyond the conscious ways we move our body and our being — and how the Feldenkrais Method offers us the opportunity to change our movement patterns on every level. There is, in fact, nothing we do that’s NOT movement — from the way we digest our food… to the way our cells bump up against each other… to our every breath. Though we can’t consciously control these inner workings, we can influence them more than we realize. Whether pain is coming from the holding and tension in our body... wear and tear on our joints, resulting in an inflammatory process… or emotional upset and the way we respond to life, Feldenkrais offers relief through the comprehensive examination and resetting of the way we move.
Cynthia Allen has deeply explored wellness and traditional health programs for nearly four decades. Twenty years ago she found the Feldenkrais Method — because of the profound personal benefits she experienced, she went on to train as a practitioner and has never looked back. She is a co-creator of Integral Human Gait theory, and founder of the virtual platforms, Your Learning Body and the Feldenkrais Awareness Summit. She is also a Senior Trainer in Ruthy Alon's Bones for LIfe work and has been published in the Journal of Functional Neurology, Rehabilitation, and Ergonomics.
In this elegant work, you’ll find inspiring descriptions that unlock your mindbody abilities and get them producing for you. Gain an insider’s look at colorful case studies from the Feldenkrais Method® that flesh out the ingredients of balance and alleviate the fear of falling. Lavinia systematically explains how to apply your own skills to transform the fear of falling into greater confidence and ease.
Thank you again for the life-changing three days. For the first time in many years, I drove without any pain in my shoulders. It freed me from a decade of darkness.
— John Carter, Rancher, environmentalist
Working with Lavinia and the Feldenkrais Method® has helped me do things I only dreamed about before!
— Kathy Dee Zasloff
For the first time in years, I was able to walk up the stairs without having to hold on to the banister. Lavinia and the Feldenkrais Method have made a huge difference in my walking.
— Carole Porter, interior designer
I don’t know what you did yesterday, but I had to let you know, my feet feel fantastic! I had no pain all day, what a relief! I just wanted to confirm that I’m coming back again next week so we can do it again!
— Jimmy White, Owner, JW Builders
As an avid tennis player over 50, I experienced what a lot of mature sports enthusiasts encounter, pain. Pain in the hip, knees, “tennis elbow,” sore ankles, and in the tennis-serving shoulder. I have been taking classes in Feldenkrais for about a year and a half and trying to integrate those lessons to my tennis game for recovery and prevention. I can happily report that about 95% of the pains I developed could easily be averted with minor adjustments and paying attention to my body when running around the tennis court and when hitting the ball. I now not only strike the ball with much more power but use much less effort, leaving me with a lot more energy after I play and not feeling physically depleted and sore. I now feel I have more choices on how I approach the sport. I still have trouble remembering the score.
— James Fendleman
Lavinia’s online lessons are an invaluable resource to get out of pain and get back to the ease that our body has capacity for... but that we lost out of habit, stress, or injury. Lavinia’s clarity and excellent teaching makes it simple to do these lessons with her from the comfort of our own home. I am grateful Lavinia is committed to making this profound learning method available to as many people as possible through her online series. If you haven’t tried it... don’t wait!! You’ll be glad!
— Judy Greenman, Feldenkrais Center of the Florida Keys
I love Lavinia’s online class. It is one of the best Feldenkrais classes that I have attended (and I have attended many).
— Hava Schaver
Last summer, I started riding again. What I’m finding is that, even though my riding skills are rusty, I am able to integrate my instructors’ feedback much more quickly because I have so much more awareness of my body than I did before. And in particular, since I started doing your classes, my riding has started improving at an even faster pace... It seems like every lesson you’ve chosen has a direct (and positive!) application to my riding. I also enjoy hiking in the hilly forest around my current home in Corvallis, Oregon. I can now handle the hills more easily and can hike more distance. I believe this is due to using my body more efficiently and letting go of unproductive tension. The hikes are now more refreshing and less tiring.
— Lisa Stanley
I felt taller today when the class ended, and more easefully flexible — which is saying something for me given the physical challenges I’ve been healing from/through. If you cannot do a movement as directed, Lavinia is great about reminding you to amend it and get creative, and often offers specific suggestions of how to try an alternative/modification. These classes are designed to meet you where you are — regardless of physical condition or ability.
— Julianne
Experience a rare opportunity to be mentored by body language expert and Certified Feldenkrais Method® teacher Lavinia Plonka — from the comfort of your own home. Each module includes an on-demand video and guides you to discover specific skills and abilities to transform habitual physical and emotional challenges, and experience a pain-free life of joy, purpose, and freedom. You’ll never have to worry about missing a session, and you can watch anytime and anywhere — on any connected device and at your convenience.
An audio version of each module will be available for you to download in high-quality MP3 format. You’ll never have to worry about missing a session, and you can listen anytime and anywhere — on any connected device and at your convenience.
In addition to the high-quality videos and MP3 audios, you’ll also receive the entire class transcription in PDF format. You can then review, print, and highlight the most important insights and practices you were given.
Between class sessions, you’ll have the option of completing related exercises, practicing new tools, and answering questions to accelerate your learning and integrate each lesson.
We feel honored that Lavinia Plonka has chosen to partner with The Shift Network to offer this exclusive online course. This is a rare opportunity to learn directly from a body language expert and Certified Feldenkrais Method® teacher whose powerful insights and movement lessons are helping us heal while empowering our intentions.
If you’re serious about emotional and physical relationship with yourself, then you owe it to yourself, your loved ones, and our world to take this one-of-a-kind course.
If you’re ready to take the next step in evolving yourself, click the register button below to reserve your space now.
In practicing Feldenkrais, it looks and feels like you are doing next to nothing, yet the effects are profound. Taking Lavinia’s classes always leave me feeling taller, stronger, pain-free, and awakened to the potential of a better me. The power in the art of the subtle can’t be emphasized enough, and Livinia delivers it with fun, precision, and grace.
— Merina Ty-Kisera, LAc, DiplAc, Author of Acupressure with Essential Oils
Lavinia Plonka is one of the most engaging, brilliant, fun instructors I have ever experienced in any field. My students in the Florida Keys and I personally have benefited from Lavinia’s unique blend of somatic modalities that free up our body, relax our mind, and open our hearts. Lavinia’s profound understanding and easy-to-follow teaching of the Feldenkrais Method is refreshing, entertaining, and life-changing.
— Judy Greenman, Body Brain Freedom
Lavinia Plonka has an easy, understated teaching style that gracefully unwinds her vast formal and intuitive knowledge of the body and its metaphors, unlocking the power of the Feldenkrais Method to free attention and create greater ease — in our bodies and in our lives. If you have an opportunity to study with her, I recommend it.
— Mike Morrell, Co-founder of ReWilder and collaborating author with Richard Rohr of The Divine Dance
Lavinia is an engaging and expert movement teacher who helps you know your body in easy and accessible ways that lead to transformation. I’m consistently amazed at how small movements have huge effects.
— Leanne Cusumano Roque, President of Shine Like the Sun and author of the award-winning book, Live Light: Simple Steps
Lately I’ve been appreciating the body awareness I’ve found in Feldenkrais. I feel more graceful, flexible, responsive, and creative in my movement. A few weeks ago on a VERY windy day I was just outside the grocery story when a gust blew a heavy portable sign right at me. I curved my body in a big arch and the sign zinged by, narrowly missing me. One observer said “Wow, that was martial arts!” I said “THAT was Feldenkrais!” Thanks Lavinia, my Feldenkrais guide!
— Yvette Odell, Musician
Lavinia embodies the qualities you really hope for in a teacher: energizing, curious, with a depth of experience and a light, often humorous touch. I would recommend her classes to anyone!
— Matt Zepelin, Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner, acquiring editor at Shambhala Publications, and co-director of the Boulder Zen Center
Lavinia is an incredibly passionate, energetic, and inspiring teacher! She loves sharing Feldenkrais with the world and she changed my life completely! First she taught my how to move better and then encouraged me to become a Feldenkrais practitioner. And that helped me discover an unavowed dream of working in radio. I really can’t imagine my life without Lavinia!
— Jessica Beck, Radio producer, BBC
Practicing Feldenkrais with Lavinia brought me a whole new level of awareness about my body and mind connection. I started practicing with Lavinia to sustain and improve my physical functional ability; I quickly realized the effects on my nervous and energy systems. After any given class I feel strong, balanced, and alert. I also feel relaxed, clear, and open to new insight. Lavinia has a way of speaking and teaching that awakens my possibilities at a core level.
— Rebecca Chaplin, Associate State Director, AARP North Carolina
Lavinia Plonka is a body language expert who has helped people improve their movement, behavior, relationships, and careers for over 35 years. Her unique expertise connects the dots between posture/movement, emotions, and the mind.
Lavinia’s training and professional career have included theater, dance, yoga, and the martial arts. She has taught the Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years and is also an Assistant Trainer. Lavinia is a level CL4 teacher of the Alba Method and an Emotional Body Instructor. She was an artist in residence for the Guggenheim Museum, and a movement consultant for theater and television companies around the world, from the Irish National Folk Theater to Nickelodeon.
From Esalen to the Council on Aging, from Beijing to Mexico, Lavinia’s popular workshops explore the intersection between movement, emotions, and the mind. She is currently the director of Asheville Movement Center in Asheville, North Carolina. Lavinia’s writing includes several books and audio programs.
Q: What is your refund policy?
A: Your satisfaction with The Shift Network and this course is our highest priority! We offer a satisfaction guarantee for a full two weeks so that you can try out the course risk-free. The deadline to receive a refund is 2 weeks from your date of purchase. To request a refund, please click here to submit your Refund Application Form. Your refund will be processed within five business days and we will send you an email confirmation when your refund has been completed. However, we’d love to have a chance to address and resolve your concerns first. If there is something we can assist you with, please email us at [email protected], and we’ll be happy to help!
Q: How can I reach Customer Support?
A: Please visit our Customer Support Center, where you should be able to find the answer to your question or the solution to a problem. And if you can’t, you can submit an online request form and we’ll get right back to you.
A: This course was pre-recorded. Is the content still relevant?
Q: While this is a pre-recorded course, the teachings remain as relevant and impactful today as when they were first offered. We’ve selected these programs because their wisdom, tools, and practices continue to resonate deeply with our global community.
