Find Your Balance

Find Your Balance

Moving into Balance: Experience the Power of Inward & Outward Movement

The art of functional movement offers a powerful vehicle for reconnecting to the body and to our innate somatic wisdom. Moving the body can catalyze a healing of the psyche, body, and soul and provides a wonderful way to release stress and tension. In a safe and dynamic environment, participants are encouraged to explore, experience, and transform their own bodies while guided through a series of exercises designed to increase skills and awareness in the areas of focus, coordination, posture, and balance. Guided imagery and trance are used as creative channels.

Life in Balance: The 7 Keys

Cultivate Skill Power not Will Power to achieve greater balance

This program, developed by Maria Connolly and Nando Raynolds, helps you systematically hone the specific skills that contribute to a deeply satisfying and effective life. Much of the suffering and discontent that people experience in life is due to skill deficits. By identifying and systematically strengthening these areas, your life will naturally improve. This process is deeply empowering: you will gain an expanding understanding of how your thoughts, feelings and behaviors are impacting your own experience of life, gaining greater and greater choice.

This comprehensive program provides the building blocks to cultivate balance and satisfaction in everyday life. It draws on solid research and specific knowledge of human behavior, and the impact of mindfulness and consistent practice on neuro-physiological well-being. This is a powerfully inspiring, yet practical training program. In the company of others, you will develop core competencies, and quickly become skillful with advanced strategies to take personal excellence to a new level! The programs are largely experiential, giving you plenty of time to practice and apply new skills.

The 7 Key Areas:

1) Balanced self-care
In order to function at peak performance, you naturally need to follow a self-care program that attends to diet, exercise, sleep, social contact, stress management, avoiding addictive behavior and taking any necessary medications. Identifying your body’s needs in these areas and building habits to support yourself is a significant work in progress.

2) Self-understanding and mindfulness
Humans are complex organisms and, from a scientific perspective, we are still learning the basics of brain function. It is very helpful to have a basic understanding of what to expect from your human organism! It is essential, also, to be able to pay attention without judgment to your present experience (mindfulness).

3) Freedom from your past
We have all learned from our experiences what to expect from ourselves, others and life. Some of what you have learned continues to be helpful, while some of it is an ongoing source of pain. Choosing what to retain and where to retrain is essential for staying current in your life.

4) Self-empathy
Most people have never learned to treat themselves with the kindness and patience they have learned to bring to others. The skill of self-empathy is deeply related to issues of self-motivation and overall well-being.

5) Nourishing relationships with others
There are concrete skills for creating more nourishing relationships, including being able to explore difficult topics with others and to resolve conflict. Gaining these skills leads to emotionally cleaner and more effective relationships of all kinds.

6) An inspiring personal vision and concrete goals
If you do not know where you want to go, you are unlikely to get there. An effective life includes an inspiring vision and detailed plans for how to manifest that vision.

7) A meaningful spiritual life
A meaningful life is lived in relationship to something larger than yourself. You have your own personal experience of spirituality and it is deeply nourishing to give that appropriate time and attention.

“Maria and Nando conveyed an accessible warmth that eased me into being curious about my inner critic and to truly befriend every part of myself, making it possible to transform my inner voices from pain and loss into voices of strength and encouragement. I use the skills that I learned from their group on a daily basis.” ~ Ashland

Trainings Life in Balance: The Seven Keys are offered in conjunction with our Life Coaching program and independently. Check with us for the current schedule. We also do periodic weekend workshops on specific Keys.

Read more about Nando and Maria @ The Local’s Guide.