Ashley Lauren Frith is a violist, song writer, facilitator and educator. She is also a Zen student, Contemplative End of Life Caregiver and yoga teacher. Her practices particularly addresses how oppression affects our individual and collective interiority; with an emphasis on how we can enter this work through embodied trauma practice. Currently, Ashley serves as core faculty of the LA Philharmonic’s YOLA National Institute and teaches strings with the music organization, Global Arts.

Full Transcript

Well, it's nice to sit in person with you all. I gave a really brief offering in the fall on Zoom. So I'm just happy to share a little bit. There are a lot of new faces and folks that I don't know and folks that I do know. We're going to do mostly some breath work and some movement. As Rebecca said, I'm a yoga teacher and I've been practicing yoga for about as long as I've been sitting zazen, sitting meditation, which is about 15 years or so. I do a lot of anti-oppression work in classical music spaces. My practice is to incorporate as much embodied work as possible in our lives because I feel like it really helps. We can all use a little bit of processing tools. I'm sure we all have our own movement and mindfulness practices for those of us that come here and practice here. So hopefully this will just enhance that.

I think about whatever I offer as a continuation of our walking meditation and essentially just being more and more in our bodies. I know we've been sitting for a little while. I thought we would just start with a few seconds of stretching and then we'll go into some breathing exercises. I think we'll have some time for comments and anything like that at the end. I try to pick some things that are maybe unique that are not commonly practiced in different places. There's a little play too, which is something else I've been trying to incorporate in my practice, because as adults, we're not always encouraged to play. It feels like you get to just do that as much as possible.

Let's do a little bit of movement. Feel free to start with just a little bit of wiggling of our shoulders. Go one direction. That feels good. And then switch directions. Then take a moment and we'll look to the left, just trying to stretch and not strain. We're just sort of starting with a little bit of movement after a lot of sitting. Then look to the right. And then one more time to the left. And again to the right.

With a breath, if it feels good, maybe on an inhale, we can take our left ear to our left shoulder, just reaching that down. It feels nice to sort of support the left shoulder releasing away from our ear, maybe add a hand. But not necessary. Whatever feels good. And then on an exhale, let's bring our right ear to our right shoulder. Let's take another breath here. Let's inhale here and exhale, let it out. And then switch shoulders. Left ear to left shoulder. And then maybe take a breath here and let it out. Just opening up the neck a little bit. We can release that.

Let's take a moment and look up towards the ceiling. Maybe our shoulders and our upper back come with us just a little bit. Inhale here. And then exhale. Let's just curl down. So looking down towards our belly button, shoulders can come with us, just releasing the head as much as we can. Drop the shoulders away from the ears. And one more time. Inhale, maybe our hands on our thighs. Lift us up a little bit more. We add some micro movements from side to side, just loosening and opening up. And then exhaling, bringing our eyes to our belly button and release the head all the way down. Maybe we even curl our spine down a little bit.

Lastly, just wiggle out our arms in a few different directions. I'll just say while we're doing this, obviously we all have very different bodies and different states. So just please do whatever variations or versions of the things that we're doing. I'll try to give some alternatives and options too.

Let's just twist to the left. If it feels good, we can take our right hand and place that on our left thigh. We can bring the left hand and wrap it around our hips or just place it on our lower back, encouraging our backs to be nice and long, lifting up out of our seats and drop the shoulders again away from the ears. Let's take one more breath here. Exhale. Sorry, one more breath. Inhale. And exhale and do the other side.

Whatever twist feels good. So left hand on right thigh, maybe our right hand is supporting our back, lifting up or hands on our opposite hip. Take a nice breath with the spine being nice and long, lifting up out of our seats. Inhale. Exhale. One more breath. Maybe we twist a little bit more. Maybe the neck doesn't need to twist too much. It can just be whatever feels happy for it. Inhale. And exhale. Okay, great.

For our bodies, we've been sitting for a little while. If you need to move and adjust your seat, just feel free to do that and find a seat that feels comfy because we'll be sitting for a little bit longer.

The first thing we're going to do is a tidal breath. I think this is a really great exercise to calm our heart rate and kind of settle into our seats. We can do it for as long or as short amount of time as we want to. Again, just sort of feel nice and comfy and settled. I'll keep encouraging you to just encourage the face muscles to be nice and soft, our jaw to be soft, maybe it releases a little bit towards our neck, let our shoulders draw a little bit away from our ears, so that everything sort of settles.

We can even make a little sour face, like we've just tasted something really sour with our face. So scrunch your face muscles up and then let it go. Just encouraging it to get a little softer. Let's do that one more time. Scrunch your face muscles up. Get it weird. And then release it. Great. And even just an extra softness with our jaw, we can make this little puff sound. Just encouraging our jaw to relax. Maybe it relaxes so much that our mouth is a little bit open, which is totally okay.

Tidal breath. It starts by just taking in our breath as it is. So before we take a big or small breath, just take a moment and notice its current state. Maybe it's a little shallow in our chest. Maybe it's already feeling a little deepened from our sitting practice. Just kind of take it in. I think folks are already doing this, but feel free to lower your gaze or have your eyes closed, whatever feels good.

We'll start with our attention on our inhales. I'm going to encourage folks that each inhale is just going to get a little bit longer. So just focusing on the inhales for right now. Each inhale a little bit longer. We can sort of imagine this as almost like the tide coming in. So each tide just comes in a little bit more. Each inhale is a little bit deeper, taking in a little more air. We'll do this at our own pace for several seconds. Take your time. Maybe we get to the point where our chest is rising a bit, our belly is expanding on the inhales. And we're just taking in a lot of air. Tide fully in.

Now we'll bring our attention to our exhales. Similarly, each exhale we have our nice long inhales that are still with us. And each exhale is going to get a little bit deeper, letting out more air. It's helpful to imagine this tide going out. So each exhale, each time we come back to our next inhale, it gets longer and deeper. Maybe we're at a point where we have these nice fuller inhales, find an edge that feels good there. And then some nice deep exhales, we're letting a lot of air out to make room for new air. Maybe our belly even kind of comes in a little bit on each exhale as we let out some air.

Staying with this breath, we're going to go ahead and take a place of hand on our heart. And just add a heart press here. This is sort of tapping into fascia, so it's the tissue underneath our skin. Each time we come to an exhale, let's do one breath and then I'll explain. So let's inhale and exhale. Go ahead and inhale again. And on our exhale, we're going to add like 5% effort, 5% of a press on our heart. And then inhale, release that press and keep our hand on our heart if that feels okay. And on the next exhale, add just 5% of a press on our heart. And all of our attention there. And then inhale again. This time, let's play with what it feels like to add like a 10% press. Inhale, release that press. And exhale one more time, 10%. And we can let that go.

I'm just going to keep us moving. Obviously, if you need a moment to not do an activity, just take your time and just join when you're ready. I just wanted to point that out.

We're going to do some eye exercises. Some of you might be aware of there's a desensitization practice. Eye exercises are really great for trauma release and support. And just all of us like moving through the many things that sort of come up in our lives that we tend to hold on to. So I thought I would just share this eye exercise that I think is really accessible and that we could all sort of do on our own.

Again, we have just a nice settled body. Go ahead and just because it's this can't remind ourselves enough. Nice soft neck, release shoulders, release jaw. And we'll do our best to keep our head in a neutral position. Sometimes the head wants to go where our eyes go. And we'll start really gently. We like to feel this like a stretch and not a strain. So just kind of go with as far as your eyes go that feel comfortable. It shouldn't be super uncomfortable.

We'll start by just looking with just our eyes to the left. Just a stretch. And to the right. And to the left. Maybe there's a we're still breathing. Just checking with our breath. And switch directions. And the left again. And the right. Great.

If it feels comfortable, we're going to take our hands and place them behind the base of our head. Maybe they're clasped. Or maybe we just have one hand on top of the other. If this feels like too much at any point, you can just bring one hand down. So just gauge comfort. Again, just drop our shoulders away from our ears and just take a second. And I like everybody to just kind of bring our attention to our back body. Just kind of imagine for a moment that we just got a really wonderful embrace from somebody that loves us very much. That feeling we can sort of like sink and relax into our back. It feels very comfy. Maybe even that embrace, that softness in our back body allows our arms to open up a little bit more. Love the breathing.

As we're ready, we're going to look to the left. So we're kind of looking towards our left elbow. And we're going to keep our eyes there. Just the left. Check in with our head and our face muscles that our head is still neutral. And our face muscles are soft. And just looking to the left, just a stretch, not a strain. Go ahead and let's inhale here. And exhale. As we're looking over, the next inhale, notice if there's any discomfort or tension we feel in any other part of the body. See if we can just encourage it to soften. Again, inhale. And exhale. One more big breath here. Inhale. And exhale. Great.

And let's look over to the right. Nice neutral head. Big breath here. Inhale. Let the spine be long. Exhale. Shoulder soft. Inhaling. Exhale. Drop the left arm if you need to. Two more breaths here. Inhale. Exhale. One more big one. Inhale. And exhale. Beautiful. And let those arms go. We can close the eyes for the moment. Rub the hands together. I'm getting a little chronic energy going. And just place those hands, a nice breath, over the eyes. Nice closed eyes. Take a breath here. And let it out. Great. We can let our arms go.

Let's end this by just doing, just scanning one more time at a little quicker pace. So neutral head, neutral neck. Look to the left. And the right. Keep breathing. Left. And right. Left. And right. Beautiful.

The next exercise, I'm going to use my viola. This is a practice I've been working on for a few years now. And the intention is for us to sort of create, I'm calling it a song for our wounded selves. And so the idea is that even though I'm the only one with an instrument, we're co-creating the sound in the space. So your task is just to be just as present as possible as we practice. And I want everybody to sort of pay attention to when the sound starts. And listen to it as it's there and then as it ends. We'll add a little bit of a movement component to the end of this, but we'll just start with just that.

Just sit as however feels comfortable. And I'll just encourage us to just do our best to listen with our whole bodies. The first part of this, we'll just take a moment and just think about a part of ourselves that needs a lot of attention today. So maybe it's something physical. Maybe it's emotional. Maybe it's spiritual. Maybe it's a part of our heart that's just aching for the hurting world around us. Just whatever, it just kind of feels like it needs some attention. If it feels good, we can place a hand on our heart and one on our belly. Just have our both hands on our belly or hands down on our thighs. So wherever we want them to be right now. And we'll just keep our attention on this area. I'll encourage folks to just keep breathing. Keep that nice, beautiful breath that we conjured in the tidal breathing. And we'll play this piece together. And let's all just take a nice inhale together. And then a sigh out. Thank you everybody.

I have one more share if that's okay. Just a couple minutes and then we can move on if that's alright. I thought we would end with a little bit of laughing yoga, which is a little silly and can be a little awkward, but we'll be awkward together if that feels okay. I've been recently doing these clown trainings, and the amazing thing that I've been learning is that the body doesn't know, the mind body doesn't know the difference between actual laughter and simulated laughter. And maybe for those of us that have done this before, we can sort of actually end up feeling like we're just laughing and laughing once we just sort of get started.

So I thought we'd just try a little bit of this together. The first thing is just sort of getting a little settle in. We're gonna just try like a little bit of like a very soft like a little chuckle. So we'll start with like some hee hee hee hee hees. Can everybody try that? Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. and just keep it going, keep it going and this might feel a little ridiculous and we're gonna move into some ha ha ha humor ha ha ha ha я Ha ha ha ha, keep it going. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Maybe our body moves a little bit. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Maybe there's some ha ha's and some hee hees together. Ha ha ha ha ha. Hee hee hee hee hee hee. Ha ha ha ha ha. Maybe we get some random claps going there. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. Some knee slaps. Ha ha ha ha ha. Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Hee hee hee hee hee. Maybe we're a little brave to make some eye contact with our laughing friends. Ha ha ha ha ha. Hee hee hee hee hee. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. Ha ha ha. A few more seconds. Hee hee hee hee hee hee. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh. And then let it relax. Ha ha. Hee. Oh. A little bit. Yeah.

Oh, my body, my whole body feels a little tingly. And that's it. Thank you all so much. Thank you very much. Thanks for going on with that. Oh.

Yeah. And I guess this is obviously not nowhere near a Dharma talk. But if there's any comments or even if we have time, we could do some things again or more of something. But yeah, just whatever's coming up for folks, we have a little space now for that.