Embodied Anatomy Immersions
March-December 2024
These immersions are a way for you immerse yourself without committing to a full teacher training.
Come play, move, put a spring in your step, a smile on your face and joy in your heart. You won't regret it!
Embodiment is ‘the act of awakening and enlivening the consciousness of our whole being’. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.
Embodied anatomy is the study of anatomy from the inside out. It is grounded in your body and your experience. Understanding and embodying your anatomy creates intelligent asana, refined posture, strength, flexibility, co-ordination and balance. It generates a feeling of ease, pleasure and flow. This leads to impeccable alignment, deep self-care and personal agency. Cultivate your inner teacher and watch yourself blossom.
Over these 8 immersions, we’ll explore how to move, feel, express and find support from all your body systems. You’ll learn to dialogue with your nervous system and discover how your mental-emotional-physical-energetic-and-spiritual layers are woven together in a rich sensory tapestry.
You're invited to
Learn how to use embodied anatomy to support yoga including asana, vinyasa, somatic exercises, breathwork, restorative yoga and yoga nidra
Expand your creative toolkit
Deepen your knowledge and understanding
Develop your interoception (awareness of subtle, body based feelings)
Learn how to prevent injuries as well as treat them
Enhance your proprioception (knowledge of where you are in space)
Investigate how to align bones, free myofascial knots and ease body tension
These immersions are a cross-pollination of yoga, somatics, embodied anatomy, breathwork, movement inquiry and developmental movement and guided relaxation.
They are taught using the renowned shared inquiry teaching model using yoga asana and somatic exercises as their foundation.
These Immersions are suitable for...
Teachers and students from all streams of yoga, movement and mind-body who wish to upskill their practice, teaching and knowledge
Anatomy geeks, somanauts and experiential learners
Teachers who feel they could serve their students better if they understood anatomy
Graduates of 200 hour teacher trainings who don't feel equipped to work with the real-life issues that present at class
How It Works...
We accompany you on your 8 Immersion from start to finish, helping to keep you on track, engaged and present.
This training consists of 8 Immersions
- 48 hours of live online teachings (16 x 3 hour livestream immersions)
- 3 x 1.5 hour support circles (dates to be confirmed)
- A full-colour manual for each immersion with text, images and reference
- Edited and upgraded recordings available for one year
- There will be a short lectures using kinaesthetic and visual material (powerpoints, anatomical models, and other creative avenues) to help you think and experience yourself in new ways.
- Access to our online community platform Sutra
- Clear, direct, practical, accessible, directly applicable knowledge and practices infused with heart, presence and an infectious joy for movement and the body
- A chance to experience the shared inquiry model of teaching in action and see it modelled by an experienced teacher
- The experience of being in community with a wise, compassionate sangha of somanauts, pulmonauts, embodied anatomists, experiential learners, and spiritual seekers
- An opportunity to experience a unique cross pollination of yoga, somatics, embodied anatomy, Body-Mind Centering, developmental movement, biotensegrity and functional movement. As one long-term student said, ‘it’s all there in one package.Breath-lead asana, vinyasa, and restorative practice
Investment
€670
For the Full series
Immersion content
01
Cultivating the Inner Teacher
Friday 1st – Saturday 2nd March, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
Every journey starts with a step. Learn how to cultivate your inner teacher and walk towards self-knowledge, personal agency and self-awareness. Each of us has an exquisite inner intelligence that unfolds through skilful education. This immersion explores how that intelligence is supported by embodied anatomy, a somatic perspective and the shared inquiry model for teaching.
Key Learnings:
02
The Breathing Body and Yoga
Friday 5th – Saturday 6th April, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
Learning about breathing is the simplest way of deeply nourishing yourself. This immersion is an invitation to feel nurtured, sustained, and vitally alive by tapping into your beautiful breathing.
This immersion explores the dance of your diaphragms. We’ll study the fundamentals of internal and external respiration and examine how your relationship to the ground, gravity and space profoundly affects your ability to breathe. We’ll investigate the endlessly adaptive quality of the breath in asana and vinyasa and the therapeutic applications of breathwork as a powerful tool for transformation.
Let your practice become a moment-to-moment meditation on the breath. Discover how breath awareness helps you access your deepest intelligence and reveals the clearest pathway for movement.
Key Learnings:
03
The Fluid body and yoga
Friday 3rd – Saturday 4th May, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
Your physical and energetic centre of gravity lies deep with you. This immersion invites you to connect with your centre and relax into lightness, authentic ease and the unshakable strength of your deep navel centre, or hara.
Come and investigate how your fluid breath is the key to accessing your fluid body and awaken creativity, curiosity, pleasure, play and fun in your practice. Explore how to integrate your centre with your limbs; discover the inner blueprints for all alignment in your body through a primordial movement pattern; experience how asana practice effortlessly evolves; awaken the feeling of free flowing prana.
Beyond the physical practice, we’ll explore how working with the hara allows you align yourself with your higher purpose or dharma.
Key Learnings:
- What does it mean to embody your fluid breath and your fluid body in a movement practice?
- How do you connect and move from your core?
- What are your internal blueprints for alignment and how do you access them?
- The art of intuitive alignment and internal sequencing
- How to awaken creativity, curiosity, pleasure, play and fun in your practice.
- Learn how to release tight, stiff and stuck places everywhere and free your energetic self
04
The Organ Body and Yoga
Friday 14th – Saturday 15th June, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
Your organ body offers nourishment, vitality, relaxation and wholeness. Organs bring weight, volume and buoyancy to your posture and movement. This immersion explores how getting ‘organ-ised’ in your movement practice actively supports posture, movement and alignment. It invites you to discover how poses unfold naturally from the inside out as you become increasingly receptive to your inner intelligence.
Explore how to consciously recruit support from your organs, as well as sensitising yourself to their location, function and structure from the perspective of embodied anatomy. Investigate how organic awareness offers ease and power within movement and sustains the muscular-skeletal systems. We’ll also examine the mind-body link between the emotional body (manomaya kosha) and yoga.
Experience inner buoyancy, a sense of core support which goes far beyond muscular strength, and a deeply seated trust in your inner teacher.
Key Learnings:
- What does it mean to be ‘organ-ised’ in a yoga practice and how it can help us
- How to recruit organic support in asana, vinyasa and restorative practice
- Organs as keystones for the muscular-skeletal systems
Working with process: organs and the emotional body (manomaya kosha) - Accessing and dialoguing with your organs for parasympathetic nervous system support
- Cultivating compassion
05
The Skeletal body and yoga
Friday 2nd – Saturday 3rd August, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
Our bones are the most clearly defined support system in the body, twice as strong as granite in withstanding compression and five times as light as steel. The beauty of bone is that it is living tissue that is shaped and moulded by your movement practice.
This immersion explores how to embody the support of your bones to create inner strength, ease and impeccable alignment in asana and vinyasa. We will investigate how your bones ‘talk’ to one another through your joints, and how they relate to muscles, connective tissues and other body systems. We will examine how bones dance with your breath and the forces of gravity travelling through them.
Learn how to create a more conscious conversation and feel a whole new body unfold in your awareness.
Key Learnings:
- How to build strong bones and maintain happy joints over time
- What does it mean to embody bones in a yoga practice and how can they help us?
- Spinal integrity: how to move and use your spine in an optimal way
- Understanding sequential flow and pathways of weight through your bones
- Exploring how the shoulder and pelvic girldles relate to the spine
- Troubleshooting common issues
06
The Muscular Body and Yoga
Friday 4th – Saturday 5th October, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
Your 722 muscles generate heat, locomotion, vitality, power and strength. They work in concert with other tissues as part of vast web which allows you move about in the world.
This immersion dives into the anatomy and physiology of muscles to develop your understanding of the seamless relationship between muscles, fascia, ligaments, tendons, and periosteum (the skin of your bones). We’ll examine the roots of muscular tension and unpack the moment-to-moment conversation between your muscles and your nervous system. This immersion offers a somatic perspective on intelligent stretching and balanced muscle tone.
Learn how to keep your muscles long, strong and injury-free.
Key Learnings:
- The role of muscles in the myofascial web
- How to acquire long and strong muscle tone safely through an asana practice
- How to deal intelligently with the ‘s’ word (stretching)
- Understand the conversation between muscles and the nervous system
- Train sensing, feeling and moving in a refined way
- Learn how to prevent injury and adapt practice for your existing muscular tension
- Develop a therapeutic toolkit for strains, aches and pains
07
The FaScial body
Friday 1st – Saturday 2nd November, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
This immersion explores the practice of asana as a meditation in motion. It asks how do we feel our way into form from the inside out? We’ll examine how to create seamless flow within asana and vinyasa and dive into the sensory experience of three-dimensional whole-bodied movement.
Along the way, we’ll visit fascia as a fluid and examine how fascia is dynamic, elastic, continuous, and gel-like. The absence of internal glide creates muscle knots, tension and a dull, stagnant feeling in the body. When you learn to embody your fascial fluidity, movement becomes juicy, adaptable and full of glide. A more fluid consciousness allows many yoga teachers tap into a deep well of personal creativity.
Key Learnings:
- Introduction to fascia as the integrating matrix of the body
- How to create seamless flow and whole bodied integration in movement
- Explore 3-dimensional movement from fascial support
- Fascial continuities (anatomy trains) and three dimensional movement
- The anatomy of different sorts of fascia and fascia as a fluid
- Understanding biotensegrity and tensile load
- How to create movement sequences that train fascia
06
The body and the nervous system
Friday 6th – Saturday 7th December, 2024
10.00AM-13.00PM each day, Irish Standard Time
Each class between 2.5-3 hours
The nervous body is the part of our system that records and stores our perceptions and experiences. The result is the lens through which we experience the world. It is woven throughout our mental, emotional, physical and energetic selves in a rich tapestry called experience.
This immersion offers a somatic perspective on your nervous system and explores how self-care and self-trust lead to personal agency, inner strength and resilience. It offers cutting edge neuroscience grounded in ancient wisdom practices. We’ll explore the anatomy of the brain-body connection and how to dialogue with your nervous system to create lasting change. We’ll also explore what is appropriate practice at different stages of life and how to offer skilful practices to others.
Key Learnings:
- The power of self-care, self-trust and personal agency in a complex world
- The somatic perspective on your nervous system
- Exploring how to make the unconscious conscious
- Understanding how the nervous system translates sensory experience
- Balancing, restorative and meditative practices
- The role of active asana/movement practice and the nervous system
- Homeostasis, autogenics, relaxation response, body and breath sensing practices
Why Us...
You want your investment of time, effort, energy and finances to pay off. This training that has been developed and refined over fifteen years to serve real life students, just like you. We consistently engage in feedback during and after each delivery and use it to develop the course materials and meet your needs.
We have retained an in-person, hands-on experience as our primary means of teaching, while adding additional online support materials so that you can study in your own time, and in your own way. This offers you the best of both worlds.
Lisa is accompanied by 2 to 4 assistants on every module. They are experienced graduates of the training. Assistants provide extra eyes, ears, hands and hearts in the room. As one student said, ‘there is always someone to help nearby if you need it. All you need to do is put up your hand.’
Our teacher:student ratio offers unparalleled support that is simply not possible in online training whether live or pre-recorded. The presence of extra teachers make an enormous difference to the personalised feedback we can offer you and to the depth of your learning.
This course has been running since 2015 in over five countries. We have graduates in Ireland, the UK, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Australia and New Zealand.
Hi, I'm Lisa... It's nice to meet you!
Welcome to the world of somatics. I am here to serve you.
I have three passions: yoga, somatics and embodied anatomy.
For me they are inseparable waves in a larger ocean of learning and living.
I use these practices to find the sthira or steadiness and the sukha or ease within movement and within life.
I’ve been teaching for over 20 years and training teachers for over a decade. I’ve worked closely with both Donna Farhi and Amy Matthews over this time.
My experiences as both a student and a teacher have shown me that each person has an exquisite inner intelligence that unfolds through skilful education.
Learning happens when we feels safe. It blossoms through cultivating three superpowers: curiosity, exploration and self-inquiry.
Teaching students to sense and feel, trust the information they perceive and know what to do with it is at the heart of what I do.
I am a teacher-of-teachers. It’s what I was born to do. I specialise in teaching with clarity, depth, humour and compassion.
I teach this way because these are the skills I had to cultivate when meeting myself and attending to my own self-care.
Students often say, ‘I always knew I could feel like this. I just did n’t know how to get there.’
A new door opens. Step through and discover what somatics can do for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, you don't. Recordings will be available for all sessions.
Yes, absolutely. Saturday's session does build on the Friday session, but you will still be able to attend it without struggling.
We aim to get the class recordings to you within a week of each livestream (by the following Saturday after each module). Please understand and bear with us if there are times that technology dictates otherwise. Sometimes the tech gods like to laugh at us puny mortals! You have access to the recordings until March 2025.
You will have access to all material until March 2025 which is a full year from start date of the current co-hort.
Yes, this course is available for 46 hours of Yoga Alliance Continuing Education credit through the Subject Matter Expert pathway.
No you don't. Each Immersion can be purchased individually
Yes, you can sign up for one immersion to try it out. If you decide after your first session you want the full series, please email us at training@living-yoga.ie and we will send you a discount code so you will only pay the €670 for the series.
You will be a Living Yoga Somatics Teacher
We currently don't offer refunds on this series as the recordings are available for you to view for a whole year.
Need more information? Still have questions?
Emailing us on training@living-yoga.ie and we're more than happy to answer any further questions for you.