The Riverstone Movement School, Feel Good Rebellion 42-Day Mindful Movement Challenge: A student's perspective
Read here what Julia P. said about the 42-Day Challenge:
0:26 Julia’s journey
My name is Julia Phoenix and I am a love and leadership mentor and relationship expert. I have worked with Lila in various capacities for the past 3 and a half years and I can’t say enough about what's done for me. Particularly for a woman who has the spirit of an entrepreneur and a body that needs caring for and actually a couple of chronic illnesses that I am still in the process of healing. I learned from Lila all that time ago, about movement and posture. Mostly at the time, she was using the bowspring methodology which is a wonderful physical movement, wonderful physical alignment system. I got so much out of that but I also saw how Lila’s work started to change and evolve and I was so excited to join this last round of the 42-day movement journey that I did with her because I knew that there was going to be something different there for me– and I trust her.
1:26 Fibromyalgia
I came in with this intention of feeling safer in my body, trusting my body more and also of course, reducing or eliminating pain in certain areas. I have a condition that’s known as fibromyalgia commonly. I do experience quite a bit of pain in my body. One thing I want to say about Lila’s work is that it is so individual. You might think ‘I’ll just pop in a video. Don’t you have a video training that I can do where you can learn the posture, right?’
Lila can zero in on what is going on in your body, your unique alignments or misalignments. Your unique patterns of movement, even down to like where your eyes are located most frequently– things that we don’t really see about ourselves.
2:31 Riverstone Movement
On top of that, this evolution of the movement practice for Lila, what she is bringing forward and what she’s creating with Riverstone movement, I have found to be much more accessible and easy to move within its structure. Feeling more free, more light, feeling less of that sense of strain. If you have pain in your body, maybe you’re like me. You can relate to being in yoga classes or bowspring classes or different kinds of movement classes and you’re kind of straining to contour your body into certain positions. Sometimes you can walk away with more pain than when you came in. It's not the case with Riverstone, it’s actually this very beautiful process of softening and opening tissues gradually through flowing and bouncing movement and in ways that don’t have me feeling this pressure in my traps or this tightness in my neck or my hips. Really soft, really gentle but still facilitating that powerful opening that I‘ve learned from Lila can really only come from that sense of selfness.
3:50 Julia’s experience
When I entered the program, I was actually having a really difficult issue with my left hip. So if any of you have suffered from chronic pain, you know that sometimes some parts of the body will start flaring up even if you have body wide conditions, sometimes the pain will move to different locations. You’ll have a problem in this area or that area. And I was experiencing this really intense sensation and pain in my left hip and in my groin area and because of the way that the 42-day movement journey is set up, I had space to be able to ask her directly about it and get coaching specifically from her around it. And just by changing a little bit how I was engaging my ankle– actually– on my left foot. I was able to almost completely eliminate the pain that I was experiencing in my left hip and groin. So that is really priceless, that is something that the chiropractor that I was working with wasn't able to help me do even with … not knocking chiropractic, I love it. I’m going to see her later today but in terms of day-to-day physical body movements.
5:11 What Lila can help you with
Lila will be able to look at your body and tell you what little tweaks you can make. She’ll say things like where to look, softening my fingers, stroking my wrists, and my hands very gently that can have this impact that ripples up to all these other places in my body where I am holding tension and it has been invaluable to me. I also really appreciated the structure of the group calls. There was so much support and so much consistency for me to really feel like I was a part of something and not just practicing yoga in my room by myself everyday, really getting the help and the support that I needed to learn to open and move my body in an even fluid way and an even gentler way to feel even safer in my body and to experience less pain.
6:15 What to do if you’re on the fence of joining the challenge
So, if this is something that interests you at all, at the very least, get on a call with Lila. Even on those calls sometimes, she’ll point something out to you that might be a lightning bolt moment. But if you’re thinking about doing the 42-day movement journey, I highly, highly recommend you give it a shot.
Learn more here: https://www.RiverstoneMovement.com/feel-good-rebellion
