Movement Forms
Drop In
“Sense all that is occurring right now, you have all the time and space in the world.”
- Mariane Karou
Drop IN to who you ARE.
Drop In is the foundation for staying connected to yourself, your truth, and knowing what to do in any situation.Drop in is the movement form that takes you into connecting to the source of all creation. Deep within us all lies the magnificent being that we actually are. In order to access this space inside, we need our precise attention, our dedicated fortitude to bypass the myriad of thoughts, so we can listen to the calling of our own soul. This happens as you allow all of what is occurring within you to occur, without trying to change what is happening in any way. To uphold this level of presence with pure acceptance sets a foundation for you to connect with your truth and live according to your values.
By allowing sensation to exist, without adjusting, fixing or reacting, the body can neutralize all feeling and a deeper level of knowing is discovered. Through the allowing of breath and the unwinding of your history held in your cellular tissues, you are able to continue to delve deeper into the unknown vast intelligence that lies within you. In relationship, Drop In is the foundation for staying connected to yourself, your truth and knowing what to do in any given situation.Your internal barometer is always turned on, so as you listen, you can find the direction that is most needed for any relationship you are in.
By allowing sensation to exist, without adjusting, fixing or reacting, the body can neutralize all feeling and a deeper level of knowing is discovered. Through the allowing of breath and the unwinding of your history held in your cellular tissues, you are able to continue to delve deeper into the unknown vast intelligence that lies within you.
In relationship, Drop In is the foundation for staying connected to yourself, your truth and knowing what to do in any given situation.Your internal barometer is always turned on, so as you listen, you can find the direction that is most needed for any relationship you are in.
Benefits
Physical
- Calms, stimulates, and balances all the body systems.
- Paces the cerebral-spinal fluid and stimulates whole brain function.
- Builds the immune system.
Emotional
- Unwinds and heals trauma stored in the whole system.
- Expands your capacity to feel and a deep acceptance of all feelings states.
- Heightens your ability to be empathetic and compassionate.
Mental
- Increases mental calm, relaxation, and clarity.
- Develops the ability to alter brain wave frequency from beta, alpha, and theta, to delta.
- Increases creative thought processes and intuition.
Relationship
- Increases your ability to orient to a whole team.
- Increases your ability to create warmth and inclusiveness.
- Heightens your ability to be sensitive and creative while working with others.
Flow Easy
“Move Softly, Smoothly & Steadily! Easy! Easy! and even Easier!
Allow each movement to unfold into the next."
- Mariane Karou
FLOW EASY is about learning how to move on a foundation level, so you can move into action, while staying connected to your whole system.
The body is approximately 80% water. Every message that travels through the body (via nerves, blood vessels, lymph, etc) travels through fluids. When practicing Flow Easy, you can learn to access the fluid system, and tap into the vast intelligence you contain within.
In Flow Easy, you move according to the natural design of your body, without mental interference. As one movement flows into the next, your fluid motion activates your entire being to heal and balance itself organically, and function as a unified whole. There is no push or pull in fluid movement. Like water, which moves around all obstacles and adapts itself with complete ease, you can learn to move around all tension, pain and density through the pathways of least resistance. Sourcing and moving with this continuous flow is deeply healing and regenerating. It is the foundation of all the subsequent movement forms and the formation of life itself.
In relationship, Flow Easy allows your defenses to soften and your sense of separation to dissolve as you learn to harmonize with another. It cultivates your ability to adapt to another personʼs rhythm and to navigate with ease around conflict, creating harmonious rapport. You learn to respect and honor your own pace, timing and rhythm while in relationship with others.
Benefits
Physical
- Develops your ability to soften connective tissue which creates more elasticity and pliability.
- Massages internal organs, increases the ability to feel vital.
- Heightens vital, sensual energy.
Emotional
- Releases held emotion stored in the cells.
- Release body armor and protective defense patterns.
- Stabilizes the flow of emotions, and increases your ability to allow emotion.
Mental
- Opens new neural pathways via the nervous system to the brain.
- Activates synapses that bridge right and left brain communication.
- Increases your ability to problem solve creatively.
Relationship
- Develops the ability to listen and be receptive.
- Develops the ability to be in flow with self while with others.
- Develops the ability to relaxed, responsive, and maintain intimate connection with another.
Reach Out
“Reach out only as far out as you can reach deep inside. Create balance as you move deeper in and further out."
- Mariane Karou
Reach out is the movement that opens, lengthens and expands the entire physical body incrementally in all different directions and shapes. It keeps our bodies open, fluid, and cohesive by balancing the tension throughout our body as we move.
Where there is too much tension in one area, there is too little tension in another. The body then creates compensation patterns in order to stay in balance. Balanced tension is what keeps us connected throughout our entire body.
Movement is constant change and within each moment a new balance is needed. Since we live in constant motion, we always need to continually re-adjust our level of tension inside our bodies.
By learning Reach Out, you are learning how to align with gravity; Drop in to the Earth and then gradually initiate movement. Reach Out is the bridge needed to take action while staying connected throughout your whole system. Reach Out is the bridge between Drop In, Flow Easy and Power Up, which requires letting go while generating effort and increasing resistance. Reach out will gradually train you to inhabit your entire body one movement at a time, building a relationship between letting go and strengthening at a gradual pace.
Reach Out trains you how to combine ease with effort and to gradually and incrementally add more effort as you are moving with ease. This way as you move into your maximum output you have built a strong foundation in which to operate from.
Reach Out is the movement form which creates links and bridges polarities. In nature, opposites always exist to maintain balance. As movement continues to occur, the balance is constantly shifting, generating a new balance point every second. Reach Out is practical training for creating and maintaining balance in a world of shifting change. In Reach Out, you create bridges inside your body and into the world – connecting the inner to the outer, fluid to tissues, tissues to bone, the me to you –unfolding and unwinding internally as you reach out externally. By moving incrementally in opposing directions simultaneously, you expand on balanced pathways. This creates tremendous fluid stretching throughout the entire body.
In relationship, Reach Out guides you into reaching simultaneously into yourself and out to another, creating connection. This connection, when established and maintained, cultivates the ability to meet another and reach into their world while remaining centered and present in your self.
Benefits
Physical
- Increases flexibility through loosening joints and muscles.
- Neurological re-patterning your entire system.
- Creates balance of tension between the fluid and muscular systems.
Emotional
- Increase our ability to move with feeling, as opposed to away from feeling.
- Opens new pathways in which emotions can flow.
- Increases your capacity to sustain feeling.
Mental
- Helps link internal with external awareness.
- Increases focus throughout the body’s geometric structure and new possibilities of thinking.
- Promotes mental balance through Increasing your ability to hold opposites.
Relationship
- Develops your ability to stay connected to your own feeling and organic flow while reaching out into another person’s world.
- Develops your ability to extend and adapt to others.
- Expands your ability to balance resistance and flow together.
Power Up
"Strength is built by meeting challenge.
Commit deeper so you can generate as much energy as is needed right now to meet the challenge that is in front of you."
- Mariane Karou
Power Up is pure love of life in action. In doing Power Up, you exert yourself in every action you are doing. You feel the life force inside of you... awakened. You give your all, into the movement. You can fully connect with your enthusiasm for whatever you are doing, whether you like it or on’t like it, whether you feel comfortable or uncomfortable.
POWER UP is a choice in every moment.
POWER UP is a commitment to engaging fully and exert yourself into the action you are doing right now. You find more life force by breathing deeper, letting go of holding back, engaging more fully, pressing more firmly, and pulling, reaching and stretching to your very edge of where your body can go, expressing yourself clearly, directly with the target you are going for.
Power Up primarily accesses the muscular system. It enables you to move with strength as you utilize resistance internally and externally. The use of resistance increases your ability to define structure and maintain contact. Through the incremental movement of contraction and release, you learn how to gracefully utilize your structure as a natural support system for generating action. This trains you to be self-reliant as you increase the effort you are exerting.
In relationship, Power Up guides you to create harmonious resistance appropriate to the power levels between you so that no one is dominating or being dominated. It increases your ability to meet confrontation and to create and maintain separation from another personʼs experience. In addition, it teaches you how to be respectful of and work within structure so that you can fit into systems and team play.
Benefits
Physical
- Develops muscular system, and trains muscle chains vs. isolated muscles.
- Develops stability, balance, and coordination.
- Increases strength and stamina and core conditioning.
Emotional
- Develops your ability to be in charge, harness and direct of your emotions.
- Increases your ability to contain and manage your emotions.
- Opens you to a deeper capacity to feel.
Mental
- Develops your ability to use the mind, sharpen your focus and increase your concentration to shape and cooperate with the body.
- Develops your ability to manage and direct thoughts.
- Develops your ability to be precise and attentive to detail.
Relationship
- Develops your ability to stand your ground,define and inhabit your space.
- Develops your self confidence and body image.
- Develops your ability to be assertive, interact fully and handle confrontation well.
Gotta Move
“ Do what is needed now, without pushing, forcing or hesitating. Pay attention to your timing and the timing of your whole team."
- Mariane Karou
Gotta Move is change.
You feel an impulse in your body. You let this sensation exist, pause and feel and move from this impulse. I put my attention on where I’m not moving, not feeling. I open to feeling here and moving here NOW. I constantly shift my attention and respond. I am responsive, in the moment, non-linear coherency.Gotta Move is what I do after I feel the full cycle of the wave, from the beginning to the very crest.
Gotta Move is the splash, spraying in all different directions, the breaking of the form and structure as a result of the completion of a cycle. Once the wave has fully formed, a movement occurs and the splash is created where it disperses in all different directions. This movement form requires letting go and moving with the chaos, where reorganization happens.
In this disbursement of energy, we can either fight it or flow with it.In my body, I am done and ready to move on whether I feel like it or not, a new movement is needed now for the movement cycle to keep going.
We have our bodies timing and we have others timing. Our timing requires we listen to the timing within our own bodies. Natures cycle is not on everyone’s individual timing, it is the timing of the whole system, whole planet, whole solar system, galaxy, whole universe. This is the macro-system. Where the macro-system intersects with the micro-system, which is our individual timing is where Gotta Move exists. Time to move within...and time to move as is required to be on the larger wave of motion.
Gotta Move expands your capacity to change. It accesses the skeletal and nervous systems as you are guided to move with the stream of impulses that are constantly flowing through you. In Gotta Move, you are either allowing or initiating change. Change always creates varying degrees of chaos because the structure you once held as stable is being reorganized. This disruptive process trains you to become more flexible and adaptable to change with a continually moving center as your base. Thus your system becomes increasingly capable of being responsive, alert and interactive.Gotta Move inspires the body to fully reorganize and re-balance by breaking up rigid, impeding patterns and creating more fluid, spontaneous connections. This creates new neural pathways, thus opening more opportunities for increased intelligence and freedom of movement on all levels.In relationship, Gotta Move increases your natural expression, vitality and passion for life. It expands your ability to allow and initiate change and enter into new domains. It activates your ability to be spontaneously responsive and interactive with another, and to give a relationship room to move and grow. This is needed for health, freshness and vitality in any relationship.
Benefits
Physical
Emotional
- Releases withheld emotions as you unlock old trauma and withheld pain.
- Increases emotional freedom of expression and activates joy.
- Increases more open and honest communication.
Mental
- Activates creative and non-linear thinking.
- Frees the mind to free associate and brainstorm.
- Quickens, relaxes and calms the mind.
Relationship
- Increases the ability to be spontaneous, playful and have fun.
- Increases the ability to be adaptable and flexible.
- Increases the ability to be responsive, exploratory and interactive.
From Our Students
Dance Alive is an Embodied Life Training Program that encourages personal, relational, and business growth, through Dynamic Movement, Deep Body Meditations, & Embodied Leadership.
Mariane Karou is the Visionary founder of Dance Alive. She has been teaching for over 50 years and is a Pioneer in the field of Somatics, Movement, and Leadership! She is a dedicated guide who Empowers people of all ages, and at every stage of life!
The core practices of Dance Alive include:
MOVEMENT - "Ride the Wave" Classes & Workshops
MEDITATION - "Inner Rhythms" Classes & Workshops
LEADERSHIP-"Take Charge Now" Workshops
Dance Alive offers Transformative Benefits, fostering a deep connection with yourself, greater alignment and clarity in your intentions, and greater movement skills to utilize to build your vitality, relationships, and wealth, with COMMITMENT & LOVE!
Click "See Our Programs" button above and sign up for one of our classes or programs! We look forward to MOVING with you!
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