Open Level
25.–31.10.2025
Artis Umbria, Italy
maRia’s focus is on achieving a childlike lightness through movement and slowing down. With Christian, balance, strength, coordination, flexibility, reflexes and endurance flow into a special kind of strength through playful movement, helping us to physically interact with the world around us and reinforce our self-confidence. Together the group is exploring the environment in field trips.
Participants can either join both workshops to gain the most experience or book just one – Flow into Ease or Flow into Strength – to enjoy more unstructured time during the retreat. Each workshop includes approximately 100 minutes of activity per day. The Fun(gi) Field Trips offer shared moments for all and is therefore included in every workshop booking.
Together, we create an experience of ease by reconnecting with the powerful resources that a free-flowing breath offers in this retreat. By listening to the language of the body and its expressions in movement, you can harness your potential to regain a childlike ease in your daily activities and beyond.
We slow down, allowing our bodies to open and expand like a landscape. The willingness to engage with momentum, gravity, centrifugal force, and other forces creates lightness in movement. We support each other with appropriate touch, exploring biomechanical connections within ourselves in an embodied way – for example, how to allow ourselves to fold deeply at the hip valleys as a base for effortlessly lifting the leg.
We learn how fascia functions and support it with imagination and joyful, dynamic movement. The shape, weight, and gliding ability of our organs enable us to swing effortlessly through space.
On this bodily journey, we draw from several somatic movement practices, such as Trager Mentastics, Qi Gong, Body-Mind Centering, Skinner Releasing, and others.
This workshop can be booked individually or together with Christian Apschner’s Flow into Strength.
Duration: Approximately 100 minutes daily
Participants of all experience levels are welcome – we will ensure that the needs of all fitness levels, ages, and abilities are addressed!
Through playful movement, we will enhance balance, strength, coordination, flexibility, reflexes, and endurance, enabling us to engage physically with the world around us. Using balance exercises, crawling, climbing, running, and simple parcours exercises, we will challenge ourselves to our individual limits, building self-confidence in the process.
Developmental movement patterns and partner exercises will help us rediscover and expand our physical competence, while bringing fun into the experience.
We will make use of both indoor and outdoor training opportunities to achieve our goals.
This workshop can be booked individually or together with maRia Probst's Flow into Ease.
Duration: Approximately 100 minutes daily
Together, we explore the Umbrian mushroom paradise and observe the wildlife along our path. Christian will share his profound ecological knowledge of the world of fungi with us. Their fascinating existence reveals how an individual can be part of a larger system. “Mushrooms can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature's processes.” (See Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life). Fungi allow us to recognise the connections between humanity’s challenges and opportunities – but, above all, they help us discover new relationships between ourselves and within ourselves.
Our mushroom foraging becomes a mindful and collaborative experience with nature – a dance in which we encounter fungi as "companion species," as Donna Haraway describes. Biodiversity also means diversity in movement: through improvised scores, we create spontaneous works of art – as unexpected and organic as the sudden emergence of mushroom fruiting bodies in the forest.
One of our excursions will take us to a nearby medieval town, where we will indulge in the delights of la dolce vita.
Fun(gi) Field Trips is included in the registration for both workshops!
Duration: Approximately 100 minutes daily
