Lavinia Plonka
Experience 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.
Join Lavinia for a brand-new 7-week course 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.
Join Lavinia and experience the life-changing connection between intentional movement and your physical wellbeing, clarity of mind, and emotional resilience.
In this 7-week live video course, you’ll:
- Practice new movements, gestures, and postures each week 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 Weeks
In this 7-week transformational course, Lavinia will guide you to explore the art and science of sacred somatic movement for peace and presence.
Join the Livestream — or Stream Later to Watch at Your Convenience
You’ll connect with Lavinia and experience her teachings through livestreaming video via any connected device. This connection is easy to use and will enhance the impact of Lavinia’s transmissions. Can’t make it live? After each class, you can stream the video and audio recordings to enjoy anytime and anywhere at your convenience.
Weekly Sessions are on 2025-06-10 1:00:00 pm
This course will feature LIVE teachings, interactive sessions, experiential practices, and Q&A with Lavinia. Each session will build 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.
Module 1: Harness the Power of Your Breath to Regulate the Nervous System & Support Organ Function (2025-06-10 1:00:00 pm)
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 (2025-06-17 1:00:00 pm)
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 will share 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 (2025-06-24 1:00:00 pm)
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 (2025-07-01 1:00:00 pm)
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 (2025-07-08 1:00:00 pm)
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 (2025-07-15 1:00:00 pm)
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 (2025-07-22 1:00:00 pm)
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 will bring 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
When you register by 2025-05-17 12:00:00 am , you’ll receive special bonus offerings designed to complement Lavinia’s transformative 7-module course — and deepen your understanding and practice even further.
The Art & Science of Emotional Fluency: Getting to the Core of Your Primal Emotions
Video Teaching From Lavinia Plonka
Your emotional body has a huge repertoire. Many deep, powerful emotions are directly connected to the functions of the lower abdomen, sacrum, and pelvic region. These “core” emotions can be triggered during any powerful experience, from ecstasy to grief. By connecting with the experiences in your core, you can begin to regulate the powerful reactions that can sometimes seem overwhelming. Through movement, inquiry, and discussion, Lavinia’s rich 2-hour video teaching opens the door to understanding and serenity.
You've Got the Power: Four Paths to Awaken Your Body's Archetypal Energies
Digital Copy of Lavinia Plonka’s Book
Lavinia’s book, You’ve Got the Power, examines the four foundational archetypes — Warrior, Healer, Teacher, and Visionary — and offers a somatic approach to understanding and embodying the power within each of them. Discover the superpowers, and understand the kryptonite, associated with the embodiment of each of these archetypes. By connecting with the centers and movement of each of them, you will be able to better move through life with strength, compassion, intelligence, and vision.
Plus... you’ll receive these bonuses too!
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…
Lavinia Plonka is one of the most engaging, brilliant, fun instructors I have ever experienced in any field. My students and I personally have benefited from Lavinia’s unique blend of somatic modalities that free up our bodies, relax our minds, and open our hearts. Lavinia’s profound understanding and easy-to-follow teaching of the Feldenkrais Method is refreshing, entertaining, and life-changing.
Founder of Body Brain Freedom
Learning about Feldenkrais has taught me about my body and how it’s adapted to my life without my choosing! The more I learn, the more I’m able to effect change in a positive way, for both my physical being and my mental and spiritual ones. Lavinia is a wonderful teacher and she makes these teachings easy to understand.
San Jose, California
Lavinia’s course was a powerful, clear, insightful, and practical introduction to developing an awareness of your body’s habitual movements and postures, with experienced and skillful guidance to support you in developing a new kind of relationship to your body and habits. I’d really recommend her course to anyone curious about their habits and keen to understand how to create a more positive and connected relationship to their body.
Derby, United Kingdom
This course was positively transformational for me... I feel more awakened to who I am, what I am feeling, and where I am going. Lavinia embodies the Feldenkrais Method. The beauty of her lessons is that every time I do the same lesson again, I discover something more about myself. In my day-to-day life, I notice more clarity and spontaneity that I clearly (pun intended) attribute to this course!
Cleveland, Ohio
I was gifted the Feldenkrais course by a dear friend. What a gift! What a friend! I am a health and life coach who has been challenged with rheumatoid arthritis since early years. I am exposed to many health-related concepts that have given some measure of non-pharmaceutical relief over time. However, I am thrilled to say that this class has given me such significant relief and flexibility in a surprisingly brief and gentle manner like no other method or experience. I look forward to using it often for myself and including the concepts in my resource toolbox for others too.
Cleveland, Ohio
Join the Global Community
The Feldenkrais Method® for Embodying Prayer offers some of the most transformational online teachings available, within a thriving global community of learning and practice.
Join fellow students and practitioners to support and inspire each other as you integrate the teachings and practices Lavinia Plonka will share in this powerful program.
You’ll join an international community on the leading edge of manifesting a world grounded in the principles of cooperation, harmony, and reverence for all of life.
Here’s What You’ll Receive
Seven 90-Minute Class Sessions With Lavinia Plonka
Experience a unique opportunity to be mentored by and learn from Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher® Lavinia Plonka, from the comfort of your own home. Each class session includes a livestreaming video option and will guide you to explore the art and science of sacred somatic movement for peace and presence. Course sessions are on 2025-06-10 1:00:00 pm
Seven Video Recordings of Class Sessions
After each class, the video will be available for you to stream in a high-quality format. You’ll never have to worry about missing a session, and you can watch anytime and anywhere at your convenience.
Seven Audio Recordings of Class Sessions
After each class, the audio will be available for you to stream. You’ll never have to worry about missing a session, and you can listen anytime and anywhere at your convenience.
Seven Transcripts of Class Sessions
You’ll also receive the entire class transcription after each session is completed. You can then review, print, and highlight the most important insights and practices you were given.
Seven 30-Minute Interactive Group Practice Sessions
With live class attendance, there will be a 30-minute optional interactive practice session directly following each class session. You’ll be placed in an intimate group with several other participants on the Zoom call to interact, share, and do additional practices to help you further integrate the weekly lessons. Practice sessions are not recorded for playback; if you’re unable to attend the live sessions, the online community group allows you to connect with each other and find alternative times to interact.
Interactive Exercises and Questions for Each Lesson
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 week’s lesson.
Online Community
Our exclusive Facebook online community is the perfect place to continue your discovery process after each class. Here, you can continue the discussion about your course materials and interact with your fellow students to take your exploration to an even deeper level.
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 LIVE online course. This is a unique opportunity to interact directly with 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.
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 on or before June 24, 2025 and we’ll happily issue qualifying customers a refund.
More Praise for Lavinia Plonka
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 Lavinia delivers it with fun, precision, and grace.
Author of Acupressure with Essential Oils
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.
Co-founder of ReWilder and collaborating author with Richard Rohr on 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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s a virtual course?
Can I still benefit from the course if I miss the live classes?
Can you tell me about the private online community group?
Are there scholarships available for this training?
Please note: Scholarship applications must be submitted before the refund deadline, as we are unable to accept applications after that point.
What’s your refund policy?
If you’re within the refund period, the deadline to receive a full refund is June 24, 2025. To request a refund, please complete this refund request form and submit your request. Qualifying refunds will be processed within five business days, and you’ll receive an email confirming the refund.
We’d also love the opportunity to address and resolve your concerns directly. If there’s anything we can assist with, please get in touch with us at support@theshiftnetwork.com — we’re here to help!
Please note: Refund requests are not accepted after the deadline or for courses purchased with scholarship awards.