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CONTINUUM

What is Continuum?

Continuum is a meditative practice using breath, sound, mindful awareness, and gentle movement.
Continuum’s founder, Emilie Conrad, developed Continuum for almost 50 years until her death in 2014. The teachers she authorized, including Cherionna Menzam-Sills, have continued to nourish its evolution as its popularity spreads throughout the world.
Emilie was a somatic visionary and a pioneer in the field of Somatics. Her ground-breaking research at UCLA demonstrated the vital power of fluid movement in restoring neural function.
Emilie has shown that movement can return even with the paralysis of spinal cord injuries.
Continuum has been used over the years to enhance health and function with many types of health issues.
Our bodies are made up mostly of water. Continuum explores our fluid nature and this important key to health and well-being.

How Can Continuum Help Me?

Modern life is fast and stressful. As you rush through your life, engage with electronics, and multi-task, your body tissues become more dense and less fluid. Physical and emotional trauma can also have this effect.
With speed and stress, your body becomes more rigid and less able to move. You are less able to respond in new ways and adapt to what life presents.
Continuum helps you to:

    • Interrupt the aging process
    • Increase fluid movement and flexibility
    • Enhance your scope of health and vitality
    • Experience deep relaxation, pleasure and enjoyment in your body
    • Develop renewed creativity and spontaneity

Practicing Continuum is like giving yourself a bodywork session, without any effort!

How does Continuum Work?

Breath: Slowing down, bringing awareness to breath…

  • Enhances relaxation and mediates stress
  • Increases oxygen flow to all your cells
  • Facilitates detoxification so needed in our polluted world
  • Unlocks your dipahragm and helps your lungs, heart, and digestive organs work better
In Continuum we practice being aware of our breathing patterns and use specific breaths to effect change.

Sounding: Making specific sounds …

  • Releases patterns of stress and tension
  • Tones your diaphragm
  • Helps you slow down and relax
  • Vibrates your body tissues, shaking loose old patterns of tension and trauma
In Continuum we make sounds that we usually direct into the tissues to help them soften, liquefy and let go of history they may be holding.

Movement: Moving, or being moved, in spontaneous, new ways with awareness …

  • Dissolves rigidity in your body tissues
  • Increases flexibility
  • Enhances ease and vitality
  • Builds strength
  • Frees you from the bondage of old patterns and habits
  • Helps you be more present and comfortable in your body
  • Crates new pathways in your brain
  • Develops creativity and ability to be present in every aspect of your life, work and relationships
In Continuum we use intentional movements, which are often very tiny “micro-movements” to awaken fluid potential within our tissues. We also allow spontaneous fluid movement to arise in response to the breaths, sounds and intentional movements offered to our bodies.

Who Can Benefit from Continuum?

CONTINUUM IN FLOW

WHO CAN BENEFIT FROM CONTINUUM?

Continuum can be beneficial for anyone dealing with stress and aging, as well as specific health issues. It also supports creative activities like writing, dance, visual or performance arts.

It has been helpful for …

  • Traumatic brain injuries
  • Spinal cord injuries
  • Back and neck pain
  • Chronic pain, fatigue and neuromuscular problems
  • Heart and breathing issues
  • Arthritis and other joint problems
  • Osteoporosis and other issues related to aging

* Unresolved trauma from prenatal, birth, early childhood and other life experiences

Do you suffer from physical pain or tension?

Continuum can be helpful through offering

  • relaxation
  • releasing tension patterns
  • re-directing your attention to the health and comfort still present in your body
Are you recovering from a traumatic event in your past?

Continuum supports:

  • Slowing down so you can make new healthier choices
  • Learning to relax and orient to what is still ok or even pleasurable in your body and your life
  • Dissolving old patterns in your brain and nervous system and establishing more functional neural pathways
  • Interrupting habitual fight-flight or freeze reactions
  • Stimulating your social engagement nervous system to enhance your ability to be in present time, accurately assess threat or safety, and socially interact with greater ease
Are you a practitioner or therapist looking to develop your skills?

Continuum can be a useful tool to:

  • Enhance your facility for grounding and presence
  • Become more creative and innovative in your work (and life)
  • Be more embodied and aware of your body as a resource
  • Help you to help your clients be more present, embodied and resourced
Are you a Craniosacral Therapist?

Continuum can be particularly supportive for Biodynamically-oriented Craniosacral therapists. In Continuum we tend to enter similar perceptual territories to those essential to Biodynamic practice. As in Biodynamics, we orient in Continuum to health, wholeness, fluidity, vast energetic fields and dynamic stillness as an ultimate resource. Continuum can help you as a Biodynamic student or practitioner to experience Biodynamic concepts in your own body.
Read more here (article comparing Continuum and Biodynamics).

Are you looking for a mindfulness meditation or to deepen your current practice?

Continuum is in many ways like a body-based mindfulness practice.
We practice:

  • Being aware of our breath and body sensations with curiosity
  • Observing how the body responds to breath, sound, and other stimuli without judgment or expectation
  • Deepening into silent presence as our awareness becomes increasingly subtle and wholistic
  • Being present with whatever arises, observing and letting go of attachments, orienting to what is beyond and prior to our personal history and conditions

OUR CONTINUUM OFFERINGS

Cherionna Menzam-Sills was authorized to teach Continuum by Emilie Conrad in 2007 and is a member of the Continuum Teachers Association (CTA). She enjoys incorporating her experience with mindfulness meditation, trauma therapy, teaching embryology through movement, and prenatal and birth psychology into her Continuum classes, mentoring and one-to-one sessions.

Live Webinar Classes with Cherionna

Short Courses

In-depth Courses

TESTIMONIALS

 

 

I'm doing some Continuum every day and very much benefitting. I feel like a different person. More me in-depth. Not sure how to put it. Thank you for your wonderful workshop
Sherry Paran
Semi-retired, OT, mental health worker, Edmonton, Canada
I must say after that one Continuum class I have had a big shift in many ways notably in slowing down and slowing down in my tissues too. The other notable aspect is the amount of love and joy expanding throughout my field. I've never felt so resourced even after cranio and hakomi sessions, I feel continuum adds in a deeper layer or level of consciousness. I am truly grateful for being introduced to this beautiful practice. I have so much vitality flowing throughout my midline. I have also noticed in my daily meditations this week that the unfolding of the body continues to happen with spirals waves and pulsations. So very grateful once again.
Brendon Whitmore
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist, Massage therapist, PPNE , New Plymouth New Zealand
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