Find Your Backbone: Experiential Anatomy for the Spine
In this 10-hour immersion, we'll explore the spine from the inside out — through experiential anatomy, somatic inquiry, therapeutic yoga principles, movement repatterning, asana, breath, and sound. We will use the kosha model to discover how the interplay of bone, fascia, and nervous system creates both stability and freedom, and how a felt sense of your central axis can improve spinal health and lead to deep personal transformation.
This immersion is an invitation to find your own backbone — literally and metaphorically — and to move, stand, and live from that place of integrated resilience and strength. We need this more than ever at this time in history.
We say it without thinking — "she has backbone," "he's spineless" — and yet how often do we actually feel our own spine? Not think about it, not picture it in a textbook, but sense it: curving, breathing, holding us upright in gravity.
The spine is the first part of the skeleton to form in the womb. It is the structure we share with the earliest fish. The capacity for spinal side-bending is an echo of that ancient lateral undulation. As vertebrates moved from sea to land, the spine evolved to move in every plane, each of its 24 vertebrae capable of small, precise motion that adds up to extraordinary range. Spinal curves and different shapes and sizes of vertebrae and discs evolved to provide stability and structural integrity yet allow multiplanar movement.
Course Structure:
This blended seminar will be taught over 3 weeks in three-2.5 hour live online segments with 2.5 hours of prerecorded video material for a total of 10 contact hours. Handouts will be provided.
By the end of the workshop, you will have experienced:
- Embodying experiential anatomy of the spine as the body's central organising core
- Establishing a felt sense of the spine as midline, a “home-base” that can change how you perceive and meet Life.
- Initiating strong, graceful and integrated movement from the spine
- Understanding how the musculoskeletal, fascial, and nervous systems stabilise the spine
- Re-patterning spinal curves and integrate "neutral spine" into asana and daily movement
- Freeing the movement potential of individual vertebrae and vertebral zones
- Intelligently balancing mobility and stability throughout the spinal column
- Practicing safe, sustainable spinal movement in everyday life
- Using somatic inquiry to explore the shift in consciousness that comes from mindfully centering yourself in the physical and energetic spine
- Deepening interoceptive awareness to encourage self-regulation and resilience
Who would benefit from this workshop?
This immersion will appeal to experienced yoga students, yoga teachers and therapists, personal trainers, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other health professionals who are interested in learning an embodied, experiential approach to the spine that can transform physical, mental and emotional experience.
Meet the Teacher
Leila Stuart BA, LLB, C-IAYT is a retired Registered Massage Therapist and has practiced and taught yoga for over 40 years. She developed and taught an innovative 300-hour Yoga Therapy training for 15 years, focusing on experiential anatomy, alignment and movement repatterning, and embodiment of the deeper teachings of yoga as pathways to self-healing. With a deep love and intuitive knowledge of experiential anatomy, Leila specializes in transforming academic information into somatic awareness and life changing experience. She is an international teacher, online educator, and conference presenter. Leila is author of Experiential Anatomy: Therapeutic Applications of Embodied Movement and Awareness and co-author of Pathways to a Centered Body with Donna Farhi.
Visit www.leilastuart.com
