OUR VISION – our Nia Sacred Livelihood
We have a collective Nia vision that We personally want to share with you. We love the “AHA” moment in Nia. The “aha ‘ is that flash of movement experience that consciously connects you to a new way of being. It leads you to self-discovery. Nia gives you the space to have a new awareness about your body, about your movement, and about your relationships. In Nia, you learn to come into the body in order to reconnect with the awareness of physical SENSATION, emotion, and spirit. Nia awakens the self through the empowerment of your body.
EMOTIONS
Nia empowers your body to integrate the most powerful healing force in your life: EMOTIONS. Nia stands apart from all other trainings because of this thread of making deeper contact with EMOTIONS in your body. Nia enriches your experience of emotion. Nia gives you the inner scaffolding to go deeper, to allow emotion to move you and to heal you. It gives you the freedom to become self-inspired with positive emotion, and it gives you space and acceptance to process heavy or stuck emotion. When you embody emotion in Nia, at a cellular level, your whole body comes alive. Nia releases emotional stuckness by allowing you to become fascinated with the movement of ALL emotion in ALL parts of your body. We call this fascination “JOY”.
ART – Self-Mastery, The Power of Choice, and a sense of Lightness
The art of Joy teaches you how to use 4 main tools you have in this life: your body, your emotions, your mind, and your spirit. These four aspects of your self are your most valuable tools in life. As you acquire skill and develop the personal mastery of your tools, you come to realize they give you the energy for the power of choice in your life.
Nia’s 13 White Belt PRINCIPLES are the essential foundation of developing these skills. In learning the 13 principles you access the expression of energy through your body of a particular MOVEMENT ART FORM (Martial Arts, Dance Arts, Healing Arts). You can be a disciplined martial arts warrior one day, and a free-spirited Duncan dancer the next. You may exercise and increase the range of motion in your shoulder, or you can dance Nia and jump rope. Nia’s 13 principles and movement arts are specific channels for you and your body to go beyond regular exercise, and to make contact with the emotions and internal layers of the self. When this happens you have the opportunity to connect to your spirit and heal.
We call this ability to choose to move from one energetic layer to the next “SELF-MASTERY”. Through awareness and self-mastery you can discover how to be empowered to make choices. Because Nia gives you the tools, you can remove physical and emotional burdens. It is often most difficult to manage emotions, to feel as if you have the power of choice. Without choice, you may develop inappropriate ways of holding on to emotion and coping – food, drink, numbing out. Nia says “how can I not hold on to this emotion, but instead, fully experience it in order to become more agile, and then to let it go?” Learning how to move emotion in your body creates an opening for new choices. Through Nia, you can learn to lighten up.
SCIENCE – Form, Function, and Dynamic Ease
The science of Joy teaches you to access the five sensations of Nia (FAMSS: flexibility, agility, mobility, stability, strength). These give you the physical scaffolding to re-build the structure of your tissues and to re-organize your nervous system. Science allows you to understand your own body, to know its function. In doing so, you can begin to achieve what Nia calls dynamic ease, a distinct physical sensation of effortless power. For instance, the Healing Art of Feldenkrais inspires you to give your conscious attention to the sensations of non-habituated movement in your body. The Healing Art of the Alexander Technique guides you to use your eyes to expand your peripheral vision, create focus and explore your surroundings.
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”. We hope to share with you a new of experience of your own body through the eyes of Nia.
Through Movement We Find Health,
Gloria, Leora, Rocco
