TIME IS STRUCTURE:

Years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. We spend our waking hours filling in our calendars, Day Runners, Outlook scheduler with appointments, calls, letters, email, errands, meetings, and other obligations. Time is the great equalizer among men and women; every one of us has the same number of minutes in a twenty-four hour period, 168 hours a week. How we choose to fill those spaces determines who we are, what our priorities are, and expresses our commitment to what we want in our future.

This oh- so- serious – subject deserves a little lightening up!

Enter The Body Knowledge System® a sustainable solution to our health and well being:

DANCE YOUR DAY AWAY!

The elements of dancing lend themselves to everyone’s schedule as soon as we become aware of how to apply them to our activities. It’s your time, it’s your body, and it will become your dance. Take any activity, professional or personal, and apply the metaphor of motion to enhance the experience, improve your production, and enjoy the process! Rather than suffering through your responsibilities, professional obligations, personal tasks; dancing through your day brings benefit beyond your body’s wellbeing and health. The magic of movement increases your breathing that aerates your brain, making your more alert and smarter. Free form motion lifts you emotionally and spiritually as well. As you move to your own music, you strengthen your body with your personal grace. All of these elements increase your confidence, empower your work and play, and your body awareness becomes body AWE!

CHOREOGRAPHY

Planning, coordinating, and learning apply to every performance whether on the stage or at your desk, in your home or on the field, at work or at play. When you check your calendar, you notice the restrictions, the limits of each period.  Like chains wrapped around your body, stifling your creativity, the tick-tock of time confines your body and your mind to the allotted space—at the same time, it cramps your mind and stuffs your spirit.

After imagining your dance, the next element of choreography is warming up the muscles prior to motion. Whether you’re studying for a test, preparing to write a business email, planning a menu, researching a report, the first step is preparation. As a dancer stretches and breathes consciously for release and relaxation, a working person prepares for the assigned task that is part of their job description.

Theatrical wisdom reinforces the importance of practice and preparation prior to performance. Regardless if your scheduled hour or day contains professional obligations or personal play, you’ll enjoy filling those minutes once you’ve warmed up in anticipation of the quality of your performance.

Warm up on the dance floor is physical and motivated by your body. Warm up for each activity during your day to create more productivity during the time you are filling with action. The prep benefits your body, oxygenates your mind, and inspires your spirit.

Try this tomorrow: When you awaken, stretch your muscles beginning with your toes and work your way up to the top of your head. Once out of bed, extend your fingertips over your head, out to your sides, and gently down to the floor in front of you. Scrunch your shoulders as you inhale deeply, and then relax your shoulders as you exhale.

Feel the music?

Hear your body purring in appreciation?

Move your happy feet and get on with your day!

Relish in Today & Take On Tomorrow

PERFORMANCE

Looking at your watch, checking your Day timer, you smile in anticipation of your next activity. Warming up before taking the first step in your dance for that hour will ease the transition between tasks, between mental efforts, between people. If your work requires face to face relationships, either intense or casual, your warm up allows others to interrupt (cut in), change partners, or simply “Exit Stage Left” without causing undue hardship to your or your schedule.

Maintaining the image of your dance throughout your day, allows you to go with the flow. Whether today’s dance is a solo performance, a partnership, a line dance, ballet or a folk dance, your grace, strength, and overall wellbeing brings your best performance to the stage. Depending the dance you select to perform during the period, your movement has the most positive effect on your partners, group, and the audience.

Even though the alarm goes off to signal the end of one activity and beginning of another, your finale awaits you not the impersonal, objective hands of a machine indicating the top of an hour. You may shift from a waltz to a jitterbug, from a tango to hip hop, from flamenco to the electric slide between hours, days, or even minutes, depending on your task, your approach, your feelings about the action and your best approach in the moment.

Try this tomorrow: After appropriate warm-up, perform your activity with your music in mind. Sway in your desk chair, tap your toes beneath your desk, slide across your kitchen, skip to and through the open doors, tippy-toe up the stairs, step up, swing and sway at every opportunity.

Life is a Spontaneous Smash Dance—or it should be!

APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE!

Dancing through your activity broadens your perspective, bringing inspiration and awareness to improve your performance. Before the phone rings summoning you to a meeting, before you put your keys in the ignition to drive home, after the last forkful of the evening meal, always remember to TAKE A BOW! Take several bows, you’ve earned the appreciation of your body, your mind, your spirit—and your audience.

Listening to the admiration from inside and outside you, as you cool down and ease into the next hour, the next activity, this is not the finale. Your dance continues into the next warm up, inspired performance and appreciative cool down before the next time period, the next activity.

Try this tomorrow: Before the final curtain, before you close your eyes to sleep, reflect on those spaces in your day filled with action PLUS motion when you dance through the time doing your work. Are you smiling at the recent memory? Of course you are! You’ve sprinkled sparkle on your schedule, you’ve lightened your load, you’ve created anticipation for the next page of your Day timer—and the dance you will do as you fill the hours with accomplishments

Warm up, perform, and cool down.

Take your bows, relish in today and take on tomorrow!

Dancing through your day becomes a habit, a custom, a daily practice.

“Practice Your Dance! Dance Your Practice!”

Share Tags: Dancing, Life Balance, Mind Body Connection, movement

Share Tags: Body Image, Body Relationship, Fit Relationships, Life Balance, Mind Body Connection, movement, Teleclasses, Work Life Balance

“Work” when applied to the Body Knowledge System always refers to your profession, and not your body. For some of us, work implies unpleasant effort, required responsibility, and dull routine; for others, work is a wonderful word meaning fulfillment, passion, and satisfaction.
Whether you love what you do professionally, or you do it to be free to pursue your passion, when members of the BodyAwe community refer to work—it never, ever, applies to our bodies, or to exercise.

Body Knowledge System applies to what we do professionally, because BKS is integral to everything we do in our lives.  Every moment we live and breathe can be enhanced when we apply the Body Knowledge System.  Our work becomes our play when we are doing what we love, and our body always reveals our life’s work—especially when we are actively engaged in doing it.

Are you doing the work you love? If not, why? I would like to know.

Share Tags: Career Transition, Life Balance, Uncategorized, Work Life Balance

How will you know?

Ask your body.

She always tells the truth.

A mini-test to determine whether your position is your passion:

Stand up in the center of your room, your space.  Take a deep breath—all the way to the bottom of your abdomen, then purse your lips and exhale slowly in an “O” until every molecule of air leaves your body.

1) Think of your job, work, profession.

2) Move with the thought.

3) Observe your movement, your dance.

Write down your impressions and how your body felt, preferably in your Body Knowledge Journal.

Place the date on the page, because you’ll want to refer back to your impressions later in your practice of the Body Knowledge System.

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Hi my name is Stephanie Wood and I would like to welcome you to my blog. I will be posting about your body. Not just the physical, but about self care, listening to your inner voice, making great decisions, and how your body works with you in your work, life, and play.

When we practice Body Knowledge, we dance! That’s right, we practice our dance…and we dance our practice! Body Knowledge(r) is all about you and your partner for life, your body.

Your body is your partner for life. Whether fat, thin, chubby, lean, lumpy, dumpy, plumpy, baby fat, rolly polly, or skinny minny—regardless of the shape you are in, regardless of the shape she is in—you are in it together.

From the day you were born, from the first scream in the delivery room, you had a partner for life. She is also your partner in the practice of Body Knowledge(R). In fact, she is your perfect partner in the dance of life, and the dance of Body Knowledge System(R).

And when, as partners, you move together, you dance.

And when you dance with your body as your partner, you communicate with each other.

And when you communicate with each other, you dance through your life.

The final step in your dance, is applying what you’ve learned to your daily activities.

Body Knowledge is not restricted to eating and exercise. Body Knowledge is relevant to your work, play, daily routine, your environment, health, and the events that take you out of your routine.

Do you have a question that you would like to ask about this post or your body? Go ahead. All questions and comments are welcome.

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