What is the Body Wisdom Approach?
Reclaim your delight in whatever you do.
Body Wisdom classes, based on the work of Moshé Feldenkrais, foster internal and external harmony, flexible mind and body, greater power and grace and playful (and sometimes serious) improvements in movement and pacing. The changes arise from the student’s choice. Whether working with seniors for balance, kayakers refining their stroke, performers enhancing stage presence or anyone seeking pain relief, Carie holds a space where the student becomes their own best teacher.
These aren't exercise classes or therapy sessions. They're explorations that wake up your own inner teacher through patient, aware movement. Whether you're feeling your age, hitting performance plateaus, or just curious about how your system actually works, these lessons help you rediscover possibilities that have been yours all along. And it isn’t ‘just’ about how you inhabit your body. Your habits of movement reflect on your patterns of social connection, while the patterns of connection inspire your possibilities of movement.
What’s on the Menu?
Body Wisdom offers workshops and retreats, a weekly clinic and hour-long lessons on a variety of topics: flexibility, aging well, leveling up your game…
Anyone signed up for any of my classes is welcome to come to the clinic, a half-hour, improvisational class focusing on specific problems or aspirations that you bring to the session. These can be magical!
Series
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These lessons offer flexibility, balance, efficient movement and pleasure, all rolled into one. They are for active people who are starting to feel their bodies changing - maybe shoulders are tighter after desk work, the back protests after weekend projects, or you've not bounced back from that injury or operation as you’d hoped you would. Carie sets the context within which your own inner teacher finds its flexibility, power and resilience.
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This series is amazing for athletes and physically active individuals. The coach has taught technique, trainers have built strength. Now these Body Wisdom lessons help you integrate that information with your own needs and experience. And if that next skill improvement has eluded you? Feldenkrais-based methods are excellent for leveling up. There is an emphasis on paddle sports, but the classes are small and can easily be adjusted for your particular sport.
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As a person ages, it becomes all the more important to keep a wide body movement repertoire. Age can so often be a matter of having slowly let options go—through accidents and illnesses, through cultural pressures and life experiences. It doesn’t have to be that way!
Through Body Wisdom, with Carie’s support, you’ll reclaim your options—in your own way, your own time and at your own choosing.
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This class explores flexibility in body and mind. It accesses creativity through movement and awareness. Rather than just asking you to notice your ribs expanding, Carie invites you to notice how you notice—encouraging awareness of awareness itself. This gentle shift in thinking can feel like a “brain stretch,” creating a mental suppleness that parallels physical flexibility. These lessons invite curiosity about how your inner senses coordinate—and how awareness itself can influence balance and ease.
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Drawing on Carie’s 30 years of mediation experience, these talking sessions help surface your conflict patterns. In these small classes, topics will fit what is needed in the moment. This might include classic communication, negotiation or decision-making principles, or something seemingly tagential but ultimately resonant.
Aware movement and the facilitative mediation that Carie practices are remarkably similar. She’s not the ‘teacher’ in order to fix you or provide solutions. Insights? As appropriate. Useful skills, often. In the end, though, you are the real teacher and it is the person you want most to be that is the ultimate, respected guide. Always.
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A clinic is a spontaneous opportunity to address a specific issue: ‘I notice my knee hurt when I did this’ or ‘I tried to change my paddle angle but I keep slipping back to the old way.’ Soon, half the class is trying Carie’s impromptu movement lesson about the knee or paddle angle, some are doing something completely different that the situation suggested to them (which Carie will integrate into the mix) and some people are watching—which is very welcome and useful. These explorations can give rise to full-blown lessons in a later class. It is fun, it is quick, and it often addresses the presenting issue.
What is this method?
Your Body Wisdom is based on Moshé Feldenkrais’s brilliant work, updated and inspired by current understanding of fascia, interoception and neuroplasticity.
In the zoom lessons, in nice small classes, Carie will talk you through a series of slow, gentle, aware movements. The awareness isn’t to make your movements better (though that happens). Rather, the movement is designed to make your awareness ‘better’—more clear, more integrated, more really you. The classes themselves are fun, playful, explorative. Carie’s job is to awaken your own curiosity, and while sometimes she’ll suggest an exquisitely precise movement to trace a certain kind of insight, she’s just as likely—as the class proceeds—to say ‘ask your inner teacher what it wants to know about the relationship between your wrist rotation and how your shoulder blade rests against the wall, and then do it.’
You know the adage about how it is better to teach someone how to garden than to just give them vegetables? In these classes, Carie teaches you how to teach yourself how to garden. And, strangely, the benefits of that approach can grow into all parts of your life.
