Where do I start? This place is the shit.
It's perched atop a nondescript office complex in Sullivan's Gulch. Blink and you miss it, even though it has a big, comfortable parking lot. Parking lots are rare in that neighborhood, which makes a Levity trip even THAT much more convenient. The studio is huge, bright, sage, bamboo and airy. It's clean, it has a toilet that squirts your butt, and a sauna. The only other public place I've seen have a bidet was Google's Mountain View campus, so you can revel in the exclusive lifestyle choice of the nerd set right here in Portland.
You'll be greeted by Jessica, who is approximately four feet tall,maybe three foot ten, and looks like she was sculpted from the pages of Leonardo Da Vinci's sketchbooks. She also kind of *acts* like a character borne of Da Vinci's sketchbooks. Her studio, with all its Gyrotonic accoutrements, kind of looks like a modern Da Vincian training ground. Gyrotonic pulley towers and toners and jumping stretching boards, all made of old world wood and steel, things you WOULD find in a 1500s invention lair, are scattered about the studio, able to be configured in any multitudinous ways, to tease your body out of its compressed, strained, modern-world, infinitely tight yarn ball body, and stretch it into this otherworldly, floaty existence.
You lie back on one of these contraptions, and Jessica will strap your feet into some sort of pulley system designed to effortlessly float you into space and semi-weightlessness. Following that, Jessica will lead you down into a rabbit hole of engaged imaginative process, engaging your consciousness to acknowledge all the tiny little sinews and rubberbands and connective tissues that are holding your body together, and then informing them where they are SUPPOSED to hang. She will even slip a Buckminster Fullerian vocabulary out of her mouth to explain what is going on in your skeletal and muscular structure, as though everyone is as genius and nerdy as she. When you get it, you GET IT! It's a very psychadelic experience in a way, I'm sure because your brain is listening intently and connecting what she says, to what is stretching and teasing and expanding under your skin. It helps when you know what "tensegrity' is, or have watched Donald in Mathemagicland.
She helps rebuild your muscle memory and strengthen all your little human parts, by coaxing teeny amounts of pressure into where you just "think" are "here and there"... while in reality, she is like an eagle eyed kitty, watching where all your connections come into place, and is offering resistance in JUST the amount of pressure, in JUST the right place, for your body to make a giant "EUREKA!!" moment. At that eureka moment, all the tension just oozes out your musculature like a pour of runny milk and a wave of relief and endorphins wash over your limbs. You'll encounter maybe a dozen eureka moments during your imaginative journey, and your body will remember them until your next visit, when even more eureka moments are piled onto the top of your eureka sandwich.
I'm currently going during my last month of pregnancy as a quasi-labor-bootcamp. I hobbled in with a basketball belly, my body so tense and tight from the extra weight I had significant problems walking and spent most of my pre-levity days in bed. Within one session (and more so afterward!) the scorpion stings and sacral strains of child-carrying had been drained out of my entire body and I discovered I could walk and animate and LIVE again! my hips had been teased out from their compressed seat and stretched into seemingly perfect harmony. I could feel baby expand his little self, stretching into all the space we had just created from my sternum to my baby bucket (pelvis).
There are plenty more conversations I can ignite based on this sort of body awareness and training, but the best way to understand this in full tilt is just to give Levity a call and sign up for a session or two. Training this delightful doesn't come cheap -- what you're paying for is quality of process. If the pricetag still pales you, think of it as an active chiropractor. Average folk only need an adjustment every now and then, right? Even one visit every so often informs your body to exist in a much more elevated way. (Though for ladies in their last trimester, you would do worlds upon worlds of good coming in as often as possible as pre-labor body conditioning!) read more
