51BLUE Courses

This training establishes wakeful and comforting REST as the 1st fundamental of wellbeing.

Attaining wellbeing requires the ability to rest before you engage in movement. Rest is the waking state between sleeping and acting.

To prioritize rest over movement, learn to deactivate your sympathetic mobilization and activate your parasympathetic rest. This involves engaging your whole organism, particularly your thoughts, breath, and muscles, in support of rest.

To help reduce the urge (and compulsion) to move, detect the pull towards resting comfort and recognize it as a bio-signal of homeostasis and wellbeing.

Finally, strengthen your motivation and commitment to slowing down and embracing rest (before movement), by learning to appreciate the pleasantness and comfort of rest while acknowledging any discomfort you may feel.

This training enables you to:

• Establish a safe space to rest
• Focus on the here and now
• Direct attention from looking outward to sensing inward
• Alternate attention between looking outward and sensing inward
• Prioritize inward sensing over looking and listening outward
• Explore and regulate your breath to facilitate rest
• Remain awake while resting
• Explore muscle-tension and muscle-softness
• Systematically soften muscles across your body
• Combine soft muscles with a calming breath
• Prioritize sensing over thinking to calm the mind
• Recognize thoughts that seek movement, not rest
• Recognize thoughts that invite rest before movement
• Scan your body for signs of comfort to confirm restfulness
• Recognize rest as the primary state of wellbeing
• Discover the pull of comfort despite repelling discomfort
• Recognize comfort as the bio-signal of wellbeing
• Develop an insistent focus on comfort alongside persistent discomfort

This training establishes attentiveness to FEELINGS as the 2nd fundamental of wellbeing.

Attaining wellbeing requires a restful attentiveness to all your feelings, even the uncomfortable ones.

Furthermore, rest and wellbeing will be inhibited until you are no longer overwhelmed by discomforting feelings and have overcome the instinct to avoid them.

Learn to recognize emotional discomfort and establish a sense of safety to feel it. Deepen your rest by relating to your emotional discomfort in a restful and attentive manner.

This training enables you to:

• Verify the safety of physical discomforts such as illness, injury, or bodily needs
• Recognize your emotional muscle-tension
• Detect the resistance to feel emotional muscle-tension
• Overcome the instinct to avoid discomforting feelings
• Verify the safety of emotional muscle-tension
• Manage intensified thinking accompanying your emotional muscle-tension
• Bear, contain, and gradually soften emotional muscle-tension
• Deepen your rest by describing and verbalizing your emotional discomfort
• Deepen your rest by accommodating and comforting your emotional discomfort

This training establishes EMBODIMENT as the 3rd fundamental of wellbeing.

Attaining restfulness and wellbeing requires embodiment, by consistently sensing your physical existence and presence.

To cultivate embodiment, practice kinesthetic (proprioceptive) sensing, which involves experiencing your body from within. To develop consistent embodiment, combine kinesthetic sensing with other senses, such as, sight, and hearing.

Additionally, recognize when absorbing thoughts disconnect you from sensing your body, known as disembodiment, which is a significant obstacle to finding rest and wellbeing.

Lastly, prioritize the sensing OF your body over any other experiences WITHIN your body, to help you accommodate your discomforting feelings and deepen rest.

This training enables you to:

• Cultivate kinesthetic sensing to experience the substance of your body
• Strengthen your groundedness and sense of physical stability
• Acknowledge your physical separateness
• Strengthen your physical presence
• Sense the permanent substance of your body
• Sense the impermanent nature of feelings and thoughts WITHIN the body
• Prioritize body-sensing over attention to thoughts and feelings WITHIN the body
• Accommodate muscle-tension WITHIN your soft body
• Lessen attention to thoughts that exclude body-sensing
• Cultivate embodied “inside-out” looking and listening
• Strengthen “inside-out” embodiment in the presence of people and animals

This training establishes the REASSURANCE of safety, as the 4th fundamental of wellbeing.

Attaining restfulness and wellbeing requires the assurance of safety. Rest and wellbeing will be inhibited until you feel safe despite unfavorable circumstances.

The first step to confirm your safety is to observe and acknowledge the absence of imminent danger in your surroundings. However, it’s common to feel unsafe even when there’s no immediate threat to your life. This restlessness and unsettledness can intensify when unfavorable circumstances impact you.

To cultivate a sense safety and restfulness, despite the discomforting impact of circumstances, ensure you remain embodied and focus on your uninterrupted breath and the intactness of your body. Acknowledge the discomforting impact of external circumstances but learn to differentiate between danger (threat) and dislike (loss).

Finally, to deepen your rest, validate your dislike of unfavorable circumstances, attentively accommodate related discomforts within your body, and repeatedly reassure yourself that there is no life-threatening danger present.

This training enables you to:

• Confirm you are in a safe space to practice rest
• Focus on the intactness of your body and uninterrupted flow of your breath
• Strengthen your embodiment and prioritize attention to breathing-aliveness over thoughts or discomforts
• Strengthen your embodiment while recognizing your embeddedness within the environment
• Recognize the comforting or discomforting impact of external conditions, people’s behavior, and availability of external resources
• Recognize the discomforting impact of illness and injury
• Facilitate rest and the sense of safety by resisting the urge to move in reaction to unfavorable circumstances
• Facilitate rest and the sense of safety by confirming the absence of life-threatening danger despite unfavorable circumstances
• Deepen rest by acknowledging your dislike of unfavorable circumstances
• Deepen rest by accommodating the emotional discomfort caused by unfavorable circumstances

This training establishes SELF-CARE, as the 5th fundamental of wellbeing.

Attaining restfulness and wellbeing requires self-care. This involves relying on yourself as a primary and dependable source of care.

When we lack self-love, unfavorable behavior from others may trigger a sense of abandonment, insecurity, and restlessness. Conversely, cultivating self-care strengthens your emotional and physical independence as a foundation for consistent restfulness and wellbeing.

To cultivate self-care, strengthen your sense of SELF as separate and embodied. Acknowledge your need for CARE and how it helps you attain restfulness and wellbeing. Acknowledge how uncaring behavior from others can impact your restfulness and wellbeing. In response to the uncaring behavior of others, guide your mind to recognize yourself (the embodied SELF within which the mind is housed) as the most reliable and ideal source of care.

For sustained restfulness and wellbeing, prioritize self-care over other-care, acknowledge both, and cultivate care for others.

This training enables you to:

• Cultivate the awareness of your embodied separateness
• Recognize your autonomy to rest while others move
• Define the three core elements of care
• Acknowledge the comforting (or discomforting) impact when others show care
• Strengthen your sense of self as separate and embodied when others offer care
• Identify and temporarily resist the urge to seek attention and care from others
• Deepen your rest in responses to the urge to seek external care
• Acknowledge emotional discomfort (muscle-tension) triggered by the uncaring behavior of others
• Resist the urge to react to people’s uncaring behavior
• Deepen your rest in response to people’s uncaring behavior
• Recognize your embodied self as a primary and reliable source of care
• Reduce emotional dependency by prioritizing self-care over other-care
• Experience comforting self-care in response to discomforting circumstances
• Differentiate between the inside-out and outside-in flow of care
• Deepen rest by acknowledging your dislike of people’s uncaring behavior
• Deepen rest by attentively accommodating the emotional discomfort caused by people’s uncaring behavior
• Deepen rest by cultivating care for others as an extension of self-care

This training establishes effortless and balanced MOVEMENT, as the 6th fundamental of wellbeing.

Attaining wellbeing requires movement that nurtures it. INTENSE movement is fueled by your dominant sympathetic mobilization. It inhibits restfulness, interrupts wellbeing, and offers the necessary power and speed to escape or eliminate imminent life-threats. To ensure survival, restful living and wellbeing must be put on hold.

On the other hand, BALANCED and EFFORTLESS movements are facilitated by your sympathetic mobilization when it aligns with your parasympathetic rest and your nervous system operates in harmony.

These two types of living-based movements (balanced and effortless) nurture wellbeing in different ways. When seeking pleasure, balanced movement can enhance wellbeing through the spontaneous and flowing expression of vitality. When seeking to prevent loss and find relief from unfavorable circumstances, effortless movement can facilitate wellbeing by minimizing disturbances to rest.

To ensure balanced and effortless movements, prioritize rest before engaging in pleasure-seeking or relief-seeking activities. Also, prioritize the long-term comfort of rest over the short-term gratifications of our desires and the short-term relief of discomfort. This means learning to let go of our desires and accepting losses, rather than trying to prevent them.

Cultivate balanced and effortless movements that bring long-term joy and comfort, by learning to envision them before you perform them. Observe how these living-based movements naturally emerge from a state of rest and are defined by it, rather than being in conflict with it.

The first fundamental introduced REST, before movement, as the initial foundation of wellbeing. The second through fifth fundamentals enabled and deepened your restfulness. Lastly, the sixth fundamental introduces balanced and effortless MOVEMENT, that emerges and extends from rest, as the final foundation of wellbeing.

This training enables you to:

Balanced Movement

• Recognize the emotional muscle-excitation of pleasure
• Detect the urge to move towards pleasure that accompanies your muscle-excitation
• Suspend intense pleasure-seeking movement that interrupts restfulness
• Reduce disembodying thoughts accompanying intense pleasure-seeking movement
• Strengthen your embodiment and separateness in response to pleasure
• Strengthen your autonomy to rest while others seek pleasure
• Establish embodied restfulness before moving towards pleasure
• Reassure yourself of the safety to rest and suspend pleasure-seeking movement
• Rest, provide self-care, and soften emotional muscle-excitation
• Rest and acknowledge the loss of instant pleasure alongside the gain of long-term comfort
• Rest and gradually let go of unfulfillable wishes for pleasure
• Rest and awaken vitality by identifying flowing and balanced pleasure-seeking movement
• Sense how balanced movement naturally emerges from the state of rest and is defined by it

• Detect emotional muscle-tension and identify discomforting circumstances
• Detect the urge to move and seek relief from discomforting circumstances
• Suspend intense relief-seeking movement that interrupts restfulness
• Reduce disembodying thoughts accompanying intense relief-seeking movement
• Strengthen your embodiment and separateness in response to discomforting circumstances
• Strengthen your autonomy to rest while others seek relief from discomforting circumstances
• Establish embodied restfulness before you move to seek relief from discomforting circumstances
• Reassure yourself of the safety to rest and suspend relief-seeking movement
• Rest, provide self-care, and soften emotional muscle-tension
• Rest, accommodate, and localize emotional muscle-tension within your soft body
• Rest and acknowledge the loss of unrelieved discomfort alongside the gain of long-term comfort
• Rest and gradually let go of unfulfillable wishes for relief from loss
• Rest and identify effortless, balanced, relief-seeking movement to prevent loss
• Sense how effortless movement naturally emerges from the state of rest and is defined by it