Lavinia Plonka
Your Journey Awaits
Enroll in the On-Demand Course With Lavinia Plonka
Learn at your own pace, access materials anytime, and revisit the content whenever you need.
The live course has ended, but you can still embark on this transformative journey with Lavinia Plonka by enrolling in the on-demand version! Enjoy the flexibility to learn at your own pace, access course materials anytime, and revisit the content as often as you’d like.
Get startedExperience greater ease, presence, and spiritual clarity through somatic explorations — blending mindful movement and global sacred gestures to release tension and reconnect with your higher self.
In these turbulent times, many of us find ourselves riding waves of emotional overwhelm, disconnected from our bodies, and longing for a deeper sense of peace and presence.
This inner dissonance doesn’t just affect our hearts and minds — it settles into the body, manifesting as fatigue, tension, or chronic discomfort, says Lavinia Plonka, Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher® and founder of the Kinesa® movement process.
The good news is, the healing you need lies within the power of movement.
Since ancient times, people across all cultures have used sacred gestures and intentional movement to connect with the Divine and foster deeper connection with one another. From raising arms to the heavens in praise, to placing hands over the heart in gratitude, to bowing in reverence or placing palms together in prayer, these movements carry profound meaning.
Even simple movements create energetic and neurological links that communicate beyond our rational minds. They soothe the nervous system, open the heart, and create a bridge between the physical and the spiritual, allowing us to feel seen, supported, and aligned with something greater than ourselves.
Lavinia is a certified teacher of The Feldenkrais Method®, a somatic practice that uses movement and real-time awareness of your body’s sensations to guide you toward the positive changes you seek.
Now she’s sharing how to merge the healing power of Feldenkrais and sacred gestures for spiritual transformation.
Experience Lavinia's powerful 7-module journey and explore how movements — including prayer gestures, postures, and mudras — are connected to the world around you, the cosmos, and the laws of the Universe.
Through these sacred practices, you’ll discover how intentional movement can ease pain, quiet the mind, and support clear and compassionate connection — both within yourself and in your relationships.
If you’re seeking an embodied spiritual practice but aren’t sure where to find the tools you need, or you’d like to make ancient wisdom part of your journey in an accessible way, this course is for you.
You're invited to experience the life-changing connection between intentional movement and your physical wellbeing, clarity of mind, and emotional resilience.
In this 7-module on-demand video course, you’ll:
- Practice movements, gestures, and postures in each session from a variety of world traditions
- Explore the fascinating connection between your posture, gestures, and emotions
- Improve your breathing habits and health when you connect the breath to your spirit through your intentions
- Experience stillness as a shamanic practice as well as a path toward contemplation
- Harness the flow of energy throughout your body for pain relief and stress reduction
- Regulate your nervous system and support healthy organ function with the power of your breath
- Use gestures and mudras to improve your relationships, increase positive thoughts, and connect with the Divine
- Enhance cognition, spark inspiration, and cultivate enlightenment through mindful walking
- Honor the sacred vessel of your physical self when you invoke the Divine
- Create a personal mantra to uncover your essential sound and deepen your relationships, health, and spiritual practice
- Practice intentional movement to energize your inner world — which also impacts your outer circumstances
- And much more...
What You’ll Discover in These 7 Self-Paced Modules
In this 7-part transformational course, Lavinia guides you to explore the art and science of sacred somatic movement for peace and presence.
This course features step-by-step teachings and experiential practices from Lavinia. Each session builds harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of movements, gestures, and mudras from a variety of world traditions — so you can cultivate a greater sense of yourself in relation to the higher power of the Universe. Your purchase includes 24/7 ongoing access to your course content, allowing you time to review the materials at your own pace and integration.
Module 1: Harness the Power of Your Breath to Regulate the Nervous System & Support Organ Function
Breath and spirit are inextricably linked in our language.
We aspire, inspire, conspire, and respire — all based on the root word of spiritus. Whether you call it prana, Qi, or ruach, it is connected to your life force…
You’ll begin your journey with the basis of life itself. Breath is the sustaining force that we cannot live without for more than a few minutes.
It impacts health, emotional expression, and can serve as a pathway to awakening the spirit through simple, pleasurable practice.
In this opening module, you’ll explore:
- Breath practices from different traditions
- An experiential practice connecting breath to emotional patterns
- A breathing practice for calming the nervous system
- A somatic practice for internally regulating breath and supporting organ function
Module 2: Improve Your Relationships, Increase Positive Thoughts & Connect to the Divine Using Gestures & Mudras
Perhaps you recall a time as a child when someone soothed you by gently stroking your forehead. Or the electric feeling the first time you and your beloved’s fingers touched.
From Christian saints to the great Tai Chi masters, the power emanating from our hands can heal and transform. There are images of Jesus using his hands in the same position as Indian mudras.
When we shake someone’s hand or bring our hands together in prayer, we are creating both energetic and neurological links that communicate beyond our conscious thoughts.
Lavinia shares how mudras are connected to different functions, the relationship between how fingers connect to each other, how your hands link to your thoughts, and much more.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- A somatic movement practice for connecting your hands to the divine
- A moving meditation that accesses the healing power of your hands
- A guided experience on the power of mudras
- How the gestures you use can influence your interactions with others — including some gestures that can be counterproductive in your life and relationships
Module 3: Embrace Mindful Walking for Improved Cognition, Inspiration & Enlightenment
The word “saunter” has two possible origins…
One comes from a word meaning “to muse.” Thoreau cited another origin: that idle wanderers and beggars of the Middle Ages would claim to be on a pilgrimage to Sainte Terre, the Holy Land. They became Sainterrers… and then saunterers.
Each of these definitions reminds us that walking is connected to both thinking and pilgrimage. Every step should be a prayer.
Whether it’s on a Camino pilgrimage route or at a Buddhist sesshin (a period of intensive meditation), mindful walking can serve as both a healthy and a sacred activity.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- An Awareness Through Movement® lesson to feel the power of each step and how to feel the force move through you
- An anatomical introduction to your feet and their relation to intention
- A guided inner pilgrimage practice where you’ll take a tour inside the body of what happens when you press your foot against a surface
- A mindfulness process to take outside on your walks
- How walking interacts with the brain, improving cognition and reasoning
- Insights on the connection of walking to inspiration and enlightenment
Module 4: Invoke the Divine Using the Sacred Vessel of Your Physical Self
When we think of an invocation, whether it’s a wizard chanting a magic spell or a shaman “calling upon the higher,” the body is always involved.
With the arms outstretched, we open ourselves to be filled, like a sacred container of the life force, evoking insight, power, grace, support, and answers.
Whether the invocation is one of power, calling down the forces, or of humbling oneself before something greater, we raise our arms to communicate, conduct, and channel spirit. This seminal gesture involves a total use of self, engaging the spine, activating the heart, and empowering the whole self.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- The connection between your arms and your nervous system
- An Awareness Through Movement lesson for liberating the arms and invoking internal power
- An overview of world traditions related to the gesture of invocation
- Tools for finding your personal approach to invocation and evocation
Module 5: Craft Your Personal Mantra to Find Your Essential Sound and Improve Your Relationships, Health & Spiritual Practice
We all know the power of music to influence our mood. Drumming, singing, and immersing ourselves in sound can heal and transform.
The different vibrations in mantras, chants, and even spoken words can have transformative power. Just think of the difference in how you feel when someone says “Have a nice day” with love versus sarcasm. Within our vocal chords we carry this power to transform, heal, or hurt.
Finding your essential sound, using your sonic vibration, is a human superpower that can impact your life on every level.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- The science behind the sound of ohm
- A somatic practice for clearing your voice and freeing your resonators
- Why words have the power to energize you and those around you
- How to craft your own mantra
- A somatic practice for healing physical and emotional wounds
- How learning to listen to yourself while listening to others can change the conversation
Module 6: Energize Your Inner World & Influence Your Outer Circumstances Through Movement
You are a mini-universe, or what some people would call a microcosm of the macrocosm.
For example, turning (in the Sufi tradition, etc.) connects to the movement of the planets — with you becoming a channel of energy, a connection of the Universe going down into the earth and up into the sky.
Just as the planets revolve, the galaxies move, and the Universe expands, energetic processes are also constantly at work within us. If we zoom in even closer, we see that the movement of atoms and the subatomic world never stops. They’re locked in an endless dance of constant transformation — of energy expanding, contracting, flowing, streaming.
Throughout history, cultures have embodied movement in their prayers, rituals, and dances. Listening to the movement inside as you activate outer movement offers a path to connecting with your own higher intelligence.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- A survey of traditions and their approaches to moving energy
- A somatic Awareness Through Movement practice for energizing your inner movement
- How different tempos and movements can revitalize and reconnect you to the movement within
- The relationship between your inner life and your outer circumstances — and how to improve both
- A meditation to allow inner movement through your whole self
Module 7: Practice a Variety of Intentional Postures for Contemplation as You Celebrate All You've Learned
While many of us have a sitting practice, the act of sitting itself can become physically uncomfortable.
Why sit instead of lying down during meditation? Is there a reason people have sat or knelt for thousands of years? What is the difference between a seated meditation and a lying down meditation? And what happens when we combine stillness with intentional postures and gestures, as in certain shamanic traditions?
So many exciting questions to investigate and experience! This final session brings together all the knowledge you’ve gained and culminate with a powerful sitting practice.
In this final module, you’ll explore:
- An Awareness Through Movement lesson for easier cross-legged sitting
- A somatic movement practice for finding seiza — the Japanese practice of meditating while sitting back on the heels
- The importance of posture in a sitting practice
- Practice two different kinds of meditation — seated and lying down
- A powerful shamanic practice using ancient imagery
SPECIAL BONUS OFFER
Talking With Your Hands
Video Teaching From Lavinia Plonka
In Lavinia’s 2-hour video teaching, you’ll discover the power in your hands, and how you can best use them to help your entire body feel better. Whether you’re gripping the steering wheel, throwing your hands up in surrender, or clasping your hands in prayer — your hands never stop talking and working. They magically type hundreds of words, chop onions, hold ski poles, and heal the sick. The muscles and tendons of the hands connect the arm to the shoulder and shoulder pain is often the result of the misuse of the hands, and vice versa. Follow along and learn more about these powerful tools you use every day.
Heaven and Earth and the Pelvis in Between
Audio Teaching From Lavinia Plonka
What happens when you reach up? What happens when you reach down? Or when you reach in both directions at the same time? And what is the relationship your pelvis and ribs have to the act of reaching? Lavinia’s classic Feldenkrais Method® lesson is a whole-body experience that offers options for movement in many different directions.
What People Are Saying About Lavinia Plonka…
Founder of Body Brain Freedom
San Jose, California
Derby, United Kingdom
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio
Here’s What You’ll Receive
Seven Pre-Recorded 90-Minute Modules
Experience a unique opportunity to learn from Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher® Lavinia Plonka, from the comfort of your own home. Each session includes a video and guides you to explore the art and science of sacred somatic movement for peace and presence.
Seven Transcripts of Sessions
You’ll also receive sessions transcriptions. You can then review, print, and highlight the most important insights and practices you were given.
Exercises and Questions for Each Lesson
Between sessions, you’ll have the option of completing related exercises, practicing new tools, and answering questions to accelerate your learning and integrate each lesson.
An Unprecedented Opportunity to Join the Online Course, The Feldenkrais Method® for Embodying Prayer
We feel honored that Lavinia Plonka has chosen to partner with The Shift Network to offer this exclusive online course. This is a unique opportunity to learn from a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher® and the founder of Kinesa® whose powerful insights and pioneering work are helping us heal and awaken ourselves and our world.
If you’re serious about exploring how movements — including prayer gestures, postures, and mudras — are connected to the world around you, the cosmos, and the laws of the Universe, then you owe it to yourself, your loved ones, and our world to take this one-of-a-kind program.
If you’re ready to take the next step in your own evolution, click the register button below to reserve your space now.
It’s not too late to join the Journey!
While the original enrollment deadline has passed, you’re still welcome to join us with a few important notes:
- Non-Refundable: All sales are final.
- Course Access: You’ll get instant access to all past modules and course materials.
- Catch Up First: Please review previous sessions before asking questions, as they may have been addressed.
- Live Class Replays: Miss a live session? Replays will be available within 48 hours.
Your Satisfaction Is 100% Guaranteed!
Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed! If you don’t absolutely LOVE The Feldenkrais Method® for Embodying Prayer — or don’t feel that it meets your needs — please submit your refund request form 14 days from your date of purchase and we’ll happily issue qualifying customers a refund.
More Praise for Lavinia Plonka
Author of Acupressure with Essential Oils
Cofounder of ReWilder and collaborating author with Richard Rohr on The Divine Dance
President of Shine Like the Sun and author of Live Light: Simple Steps
About Lavinia Plonka
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Body language expert Lavinia Plonka has helped people improve their movement, behavior, health, and careers for over 35 years. Her unique expertise connects the dots between posture, movement, emotions, and the mind. Lavinia is the founder of Kinēsa®, an educational process that integrates movement, science, and ancient wisdom traditions.
Lavinia’s training and professional career have included theater, dance, yoga, and martial arts. A former vice president of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America, she has taught the Feldenkrais Method® for over 30 years, is a lead instructor of the Emotional Body® and an ISMETA Master Somatic Movement Educator. Her theater credits include the Guggenheim Museum’s Learning Through Art program, international tours, commercials for Nickelodeon, and more.
Lavinia has written several books exploring the intersection of movement, awareness, and wellbeing, including What Are You Afraid Of? which has been translated into seven languages. She is director of the Asheville Movement Center in North Carolina, where she maintains a busy private practice.