May Feldenkrais Classes

Happy Spring!

Now Announcing…our Yukon Island Women’s Weekend Retreat!
Invite a friend & join us for solitude, scenic beauty, beaches & trails, fresh air & friendship as we journey across Kachemak Bay from Homer to relax & rejuvenate. Save the dates August 28-30 and join us for a Feldenkrais & Bones for Life Retreat that will refresh, restore & revive you! Sign up now for our Early Bird Special!

Take a May Feldenkrais class to limber up for summertime activities as you regenerate agility, balance and ease. Let Shari’s soothing voice guide you through gentle, easy moves that reduce stiffness & pain, so you can feel your best again!

Hands-on Individual Feldenkrais sessions are available at Shari’s Movement Options Studio and at two medical offices in Anchorage (Eastside & Midtown) where you can use your health insurance. Contact me for more info, or contact the office directly to schedule your session with me at either clinic location. Or, take advantage of the lower cost convenience of self-pay at Movement Options. Call 274-3539 or email me feldenlee1@aol.com to schedule your app't here at Movement Options studio.

Think Sun!!!
Shari


Move Freely Without Pain
Tu/Th 11:15-Noon May 19, 21, 26, 28
4 days $65/ Drop-in $18/class


Yukon Island Women’s Weekend Retreat
August 28-30, 2009
Includes: 2 nights lodging, All meals & snacks, Water taxi from Homer,
Six Feldenkrais or Bones for Life group movement explorations, Sauna,
45 private acres, 2 Beaches, Berry picking-in season, Walking Trails.

Individual Feldenkrais sessions available for additional fee.
Early Bird Special $425+tax when paid in full by May 15, 2009

Individual Feldenkrais Sessions Insurance Billing at
Natural Health Center
561-2330
3330 Eagle St.
Known to many of you as “Hope Wing & Rick Abbott’s Clinic”. Choose a Naturopath or Chiropractor to initiate your Feldenkrais treatment plan of neuromuscular re-education. Use your health insurance to pay for your Feldenkrais sessions.

My current schedule here: Monday afternoons & Thursday mornings.

Medicare patients: *IF you have secondary insurance coverage from a group policy that covers you to see a Naturopath, you MAY be able to use your secondary insurance to cover your sessions with me for neuromuscular re-education. *Be sure to check with your secondary insurance carrier to confirm this!

Insurance Billing at
Alliance Chiropractic
337-6770
Dr. Rich Tieszen 4316 Kingston Drive

Bill your insurance directly for sessions at Alliance, just pay your deductible & co-pay out of pocket. My current schedule here: Tuesday & Thursday afternoons.

Self-pay at Movement Options Studio
274-3539

Schedule your sessions at Movement Options and make payment in full. Receipts are available upon request if you wish to submit them to your health insurance carrier, or use pre-tax dollars from your health care reimbursement account.

My schedule here: Mon, Tue, Wed & Fri mornings and Wed & Fri afternoons.

***Total cost of sessions with Shari at Movement Options Studio is substantially less than the price of sessions at the above medical offices. Out of pocket expenses at Movement Options may be higher or lower than at one of the clinics, depending on your health insurance coverage.

Shari Lee
Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner
Certified Bones for Life® Teacher & Trainer

Movement Options LLC
907-274-3539
feldenlee1@aol.com
www.FeldenkraisJourneys.com
Feldenkrais® is a registered service mark of the Feldenkrais® Guild of North America.

Contemplative Calm

A calm mood can color your perception of the world around you today, inspiring you to put aside your worldly cares so that you can focus on your inner world needs. As you quiet your thoughts through meditation or meditative activities, you may find that you feel compelled to contemplate your life as it has unfolded up until this point in time. Reflection may not come easily to you today, especially if you are confronted with parts of yourself you do not care for, but the effort you put into introspection will likely make it entirely worthwhile. This can be the perfect time to call to mind issues that may be having a negative impact on your earthly experience as a whole.

The art of living a contemplative life is one that few every truly master, but even our unpracticed attempts to incorporate reflection into our lives can help us attain a more conscious command of our thoughts and feelings. Contemplation promotes calm because it encourages us to get to the bottom of issues that might otherwise have the power to negatively influence our moods. Thinking critically about the unnecessary baggage we have carried for so long provides us with a much-needed opportunity to gain a new understanding of the circumstances that have contributed, in one way or another, to our development. We are then empowered by our conscious awareness of the self to let go of hurt, anger, and resentment. You will feel wonderfully peaceful today after you take the time to bring unaddressed issues into the forefront of your mind.

re-printed with permission from Daiyl Om (April 16,2009)

" A Nice Cup of Tea"

By George Orwell
Evening Standard, 12 January 1946.
If you look up 'tea' in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.
This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.
When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

• First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.

• Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.

• Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.

• Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.

• Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.

• Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.

• Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.

• Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one's tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.

• Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.

• Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

• Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don't like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one's ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

(taken from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3, 1943-45, Penguin ISBN, 0-14-00-3153-7)

Recent Benenfits Of Tea

We've all seen positive research results about the benefits of green
tea. Well now there's a study documenting positive benefits resulting
from drinking both green or black tea.

Dr. Lenore Arab, PhD, Professor, Department of Medicine and Dept of
Biological Chemistry, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
explained, "This Meta analysis suggests that daily increase in
consumption to three cups of tea per day could lower the risk of
ischemic stroke by 21 per cent." Stroke is the second most common
cause of death globally, claiming 5.4 million lives per year. It is a
major cause of disability and has a significant impact on quality of
life. Of the two types of stroke - ischemic and hemorrhagic -
ischemic stroke accounts for around 83 per cent of all
stroke cases.


The study results indicated that drinking three or more cups of green
or black tea a day may reduce the risk of stroke by 21 per cent. And
the more you drink, the greater the cuts in stroke risk, according to
this meta-analysis conducted at UCLA on nine studies involving 4,378
strokes among 194,965 individuals.

Green tea contains between 30 and 40 per cent of water-extractable
polyphenols, while black tea (green tea that has been oxidized by
fermentation) contains between 3 and 10 per cent. Oolong tea is semi-
fermented tea and is somewhere between green and black tea. The four
primary polyphenols found in fresh tea leaves are epigallocatechin
gallate (EGCG), epigallocatechin (EGC), epicatechin gallate (ECG),
and epicatechin (EC). Though no one is certain which compounds in tea
are responsible for this effect, researchers have speculated that the
antioxidant epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) or the amino acid
theanine may be what helps. Antioxidants are believed to help prevent
coronary artery disease.

"And we do know that theanine is nearly 100-percent absorbed," the
head of the research team reported. "It gets across the blood-brain
barrier and it looks a lot like a molecule that's very similar to
glutamate, and glutamate release is associated with stroke. "It could
be that theanine and glutamate compete for the glutamate receptor in
the brain,".

"In recent years, a body of scientific evidence has shown that
regular tea drinking can have an important role in healthy fitness,"
says Douglas Balentine, Ph.D., Lipton Institute of Tea. "This new
study provides further support that regular tea drinking may be one
of the most actionable lifestyle changes a consumer can make to help
maintain heart health."

All these studies continue to contribute to our belief in the power
of tea