Workshop Summary:

Embodied Acceptance is a 90-minute movement/meditation/writing/discussion experience in which we work towards acceptance of the whole self: body, mind and soul. Diet culture and Weight Stigma have taught us to be at war with our bodies. If you live in your body without acceptance, you are being drained of your power, joy, and sense of worth every day. This gentle, loving, healing group online workshop offers you a way into deeper awareness, body liberation, and personal growth through the essential act of moving.

Each class begins with a discussion about one of five facets of body acceptance, followed by a series of movement explorations to unlock, engage, and empower the body. Discussion and writing prompts along the way help ground and solidify the ideas from body to brain. 

A five class series moves through multiple facets of self awareness and self-love, including:

Sensing and Feeling as a way to know and appreciate ourselves. 

Surrendering and Yielding in order to receive external support as well as discover and connect to our internal supports. 

Unconditional Worth, in which we connect to our true essence on a body level, and foster positive embodiment. 

Power and Presence, where we can define and determine our own choices and practice taking up space..

Pleasure,  Joy and Play, where we will tap into our inner well of creativity in order to connect to our delight

The goal is to move in our bodies with love, awareness, acceptance, joy, and power, hopefully leaving with a more compassionate, empowered, and generous relationship with our bodies.

Workshop dates: Sundays, April 25th - May 23rd 2021 4-5:30pm EST

Cost: $100 for 5 sessions Early Bird until April 12th, $125 Regular fee

Class descriptions week-by-week:

Sensing and Feeling

Self-acceptance begins with self-awareness. We can’t accept something we don’t know intimately. Avoidance and denial will usually disconnect us from our feelings and sensations. Even cues like hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain can become dulled or waylaid when we are not living fully in our bodies. This class asks our senses to guide us back home into our bodies. We will practice body neutrality and body appreciation by simply noticing first our internal signals, cues, and sensations, and then experiencing the ecosystem of our environment. We will explore both interoception (inner sensing) and proprioception (sensing our relationship to the world). We will use our bodies to gain awareness, and we will dance in celebration of it’s miraculous abilities. 

Unconditional Worth 

Underlying our ability to accept ourselves is a very big question: Am I worthy? Feelings of worthlessness can sabotage our efforts and desire for self-love, creativity, relationships, and growth. And yet, our worth is unconditional. We don’t need to do, make, say, create, or provide anything to have value. We need only be. But what does being mean? We can notice and be in our bodies, but we are more than just a body. There is something that animates us; our energy, our spirit, our essence. In this class we will connect to our essence as a way to experience our undeniable worth and we will move and dance with it. We will open our awareness to how unique is our essence and also to its potential to connect us to everything else in the world and experience a deep sense of belonging.  

Embodied Support 
Support is a foundational need. At the body level, our inner support systems allow us to breath and move and survive. Our inner emotional support systems allow us to both function and express ourselves, creating relationships and meaning. Support, though, is not a one-way street. To truly receive support, we must also know how to surrender to it, to yield. Feeling “safe” is not only determined by our environment, but also by our own choices to be moved, held, and supported. Often, though, we are surviving without feeling supported, either by ourselves, or others. In this class we will practice yielding and surrendering as a way to feel physically and emotionally supported and we will notice if that feeling of support can entice us to explore the space around us in a more integrated way. 

Presence and Power

Grounding. Strength. Impact. Flow. How often do we feel we are living inside these qualities richly and deeply? What systems are required in order to access our inner power? How can we detach the idea of power, and impact, from ideas of violence or harm? How can we use our inner support, our sense of worth, and our self-awareness, to become powerful activists in our own lives? In this class, we will practice connecting to our power by embodying physical qualities such as strength, directness, and flow. That same strength can also help us notice the impact that we can have on our environment. We will observe what type of impact we want to make. We can also practice moving with both control and abandon, in order to experience our agency and conscious choice-making. 

Play

No one needs to teach us how to play. But sometimes we need help remembering that we deserve to play, that our delight, desire, and joy are essential components to our life. There are so many ways in which we get shamed, bound, silenced, and stifled and our play gets put in a corner. In this class, we will remember joy, flow, release, delight. We will actively engage in play as a mindful choice, and we will bring pleasure back to the center of the room. We will activate our bodies to prioritize creativity and play. Because we are worth it.

What would it feel like to truly accept your body?

Through delicious movement, playful creation, and rich discussion, we will engage in our internal support, power, joy, and sense of unconditional worth to find true acceptance of our bodies, and their connection to the world.

Right now, you’re struggling with…

You feel shame about your body, and it makes you numb to your body’s cues—like hunger, thirst, fatigue, and other emotions. 

You find yourself working hard to prove yourself because you don’t feel worthy, perfectly imperfect, as you are. Because you’re working so hard to prove your worth, you can’t pay attention to your sensations and feelings. 

The enormous energy you spend thinking about, judging, loathing, critiquing your body could be used towards creation, relationships, career building, self-care. When you spend half of your attention thinking about your body, your time for noticing your life slips away.

You carry a lot on your shoulders, including the shame imposed by weight stigma, but you lack the support to let go.

You need a safe space to practice surrendering and receiving support.

Life is a constant struggle inside your body. The feeling of worthlessness permeates every action.

You feel shame participating in activities that seem “meant for” smaller bodies. You feel excluded from living in your body fully and with unapologetic delight.

You don’t feel allowed to have fun or take pleasure in your body.

You don’t create regular space in your life for pleasure, joy and sensuality. 

Imagine if...

You were more connected in tune with your body and learned how to accept it as it is... 

You had new ways of accessing your own body’s resources for support in a very physical way 

You felt that your value is unconditional and unrelated to your shape or size 

You were more aware of your own abilities to make an impact in the world and to set boundaries to outside forces that might undermine your confidence in your path 

You could experience living in your body fully with unapologetic delight accessing your innate ability to play and experience joy and pleasure.

Odelia’s Bio: 

My journey into body acceptance started when I was thirteen and experienced the onset of an eating disorder. I’ve tried to change my body my whole life. As a dancer/mover, my concentration on body image has taken up so many hours I wish I could get back. Recently, with the support of the body liberation community, I’ve realized that I’ve just had enough! The more I learned about body liberation, the more I understand how widespread the struggle to love and accept our bodies is, especially for women. My decision to not engage in body-shrinking behaviors has resulted in changes to my body that have forced me to find new strategies to accept myself. My lifetime of working in movement, coaching, and counseling has offered me a road map to healing myself, and others. My training has included Yoga, Shake Your Soul®, Soma Soul®, Authentic Movement, Body Mind Centering®, Laban Movement Analysis, Viewpoints technique, and Bartenieff Fundamentals, among other practices. I’ve combined my love of movement with my deep-seated belief in the healing power of music, dance and movement. This offering is a labor of love and a gift to you that I would love to extend which comes from my years of practicing inviting change and transformation through listening and following the biggest healing expert and teacher of all: our own body. 

Testimonials

“Odelia is a masterful teacher devoted to the work that lies within her passions.”

— SHIRI REDENSKY

“Our Somatic Movement Therapy session was a powerful experience - not only in the moment, but also hours and even days later. I quickly came to realize how this practice has the potential to take me out of my thinking brain and begin to listen to the wisdom that my body contains. ”

— SUSAN GELLERT

“Odelia’s classes are taught with skill, insight and depth. Compassion is felt throughout, allowing us to delve into ourselves and move therapeutically.”

— KRISTAN GALLO-BRIDGES

“Odelia is a very kind and caring teacher who puts her heart into teaching the class. As a result it was a wonderful and heart-opening experience for me.”

— STACEY COHEN