“ The western way of looking at how the body works involves a base-line idea that muscles and tissue are for carrying you, your weight and your structure around, and therefore it is the muscles and connective tissue that are responsible for support. So how they do this has become the focus when we are trying to work out how to move and support ourselves ... To my understanding of things, this thinking is the wrong way round. 

Of course muscles work when we move and assume any position, but in natural movement they are simply responding to the intention to move or to be supported in place.  HOW those muscles work will depend on an infinite number of variable factors, including what the person thinks they are doing, what they are expecting to feel, how they feel about what they are doing, where they are in the cycle of the breath, what is going on in their lives, their minds, emotional body etc. – constantly changing influencing factors that are simply too numerous to list...

 

However there is an axial, un-felt space that lives at the centre of our entire selves, the bones, and they are the framework through which the person must guide their efforts in order to be actually supported in space by the way they engage with the earth.  And the way we organise those forces is through the way we relate to and engage with the space we occupy.

 

 We call the articulating fluid spaces between bones 'joints', but it would be more accurate to call them 'relationships', because these fluid spaces are defined by the way the bones relate axially through to each other.

So if we can visualise the body as bones and structures, with fluid spaces between these these relating things, we can organise ourselves in space, and our supportive efforts through to contact, in ways that can potentially cause zero conflict at these incredibly important zones of relationship we call joints, as well as between whole structures - the relationships that define our felt-sense of the innermost workings of our bodies - between the head, ribs and pelvis.

 

And when we can create and experience this harmony in action, ALL the energy that previously went into 'holding' and 'carrying' the body around is freed up – and can be experienced directly by 'who we are' – within the spine - the body and soul.  And this liberated energy can be assigned to life itself "

 

 - Marc J Acquaviva - 

 

The course itself is a 6-part intensive (recorded live with a small group of people on an online retreat with Marc), and consisting of 3 hour  sessions, covering in depth all the most significant relationships between bodily structures, as evolved from Marc's  approach to body work - Enviro-Somatic integration,  the Acquaviva method.  There are also two bonus 75-90min Q&A practical sessions (answering questions that arise for the students)

 

 A second Structural Intelligence Course will run as a live and interactive weekly program (to follow)

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