In Defense of a Good Yawn

A blog about the importance of stretching and mobilizing.

Hi! How are you today? Good to see you around! Today we have a special blog.

But first; let us take a moment to fully arrive. Get comfy and share with me a few seconds of quietude, let us close our eyes and breathe deeply three times.

I like to give myself every so often a respite of inner silence, just so that I can better acknowledge that a new action is about to begin. It’s a way of honoring every new beginning. It also allows me to connect with the purpose of this new encounter, which would be hard to do if the inertia and noise of what came before was still active in me.

The purpose of this blog is to clarify why it’s important to mobilize daily all our tissues and joints.

I’d feel satisfied if at the end of your reading you feel a little more inspired to move your joints daily… even if you don’t start doing so right away.

So, knowing what this blog is about, what is your purpose for being here?

I’ll begin by revising the fundamental principles that underlie what I’ll suggest as a daily practice.

Then I’ll tell you a little about:

- why it’s important to move your joints daily

- what joints you should be moving

- how you should move your joints

Whenever you actually do this mobilization work, I suggest you remember that:

1. You’re a Unity: All your tissues are connected, which is why when you move one part of your body it is inevitably having an effect in the whole. Try therefore to be aware of your whole body as you move a part of it.

2. Your Use, Your Functions and Your Structure are all interrelated: Remember that body and mind are also a unity, which is why the quality of your attention and your thoughts will be affecting the quality of your tissues and the degree of tension in them.

3. If you Remove Interferences Everything becomes Easier: When your tissues and joints are tight, contracted and lacking space for free movement and expression, all actions that you undertake will require a lot more effort and tension. As you start gaining space and mobility in your joints, your physical and mental output will increase with half the effort you are exerting today.

4. Interferences are spotted as Perception becomes more Precise: The more perceptive you become, the more you’ll discover about your own functioning, and hence the better able you’ll be to catch your habits as they come in to interfere.

5. The Key to raising your Sensory Appreciation is keeping your Curiosity Alive: Your habits will want to make you believe that you already know everything about a certain action. Do not allow them to misguide you so. There is always something new to learn, one new layer to peel, from even the simplest action.

Why is it important to move your joints daily?

Cats, dogs, horses, toddlers to it instinctively and regularly.

Even you do it occasionally. A good yawn and stretch after a long day’s work.

The body and mind do so to self-regulate, especially after they have been fixed in one same position or attitude for a long time.

Mobilizing your structures with conscious awareness will also help you to:

1) rediscover the movement possibilities of your body;

2) recognize the effect of having a limber, loose and flexible body on every level of your being;

3) calming your mind and teaching it to inhabit the body, improving your ability to hold and focus your attention.

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What joints should be moved?

The ideal, of course, is to move all of them in all possible directions and ranges.

Observe how dogs and cats do it, how they stretch, yawn, roll-over and around, twist and shake all over, and go on with their day.

If you prefer a more detailed guide, you can use the following:

Legs and Feet:

- tense and stretch your toes and feet

- rotate your ankles

- bend and straighten your knees

- allow your leg to loosely rotate in the hip socket, making circles inwards and outwards.

Arms and Hands:

- tense and stretch your fingers and hands

- rotate your wrists

- bend and straighten your elbows

- - allow your arms to loosely rotate in your shoulder joints, making circles inwards and outwards.

Head and Neck:

- gently say “yes”, “no” and “maybe” with your head, as if you were drawing lines and arcs with your nose in the air.

- Remember that your head meets your neck at the midpoint between your ears, right in the center of your head. As you move your head be aware of that pivoting point.

Eyes and Mouth:

- Squeeze your eyes and your jaw and then open them wide.

- Yawn deep and wide and unabashedly.

- Think of something funny or sweetly pleasurable and allow that memory to bring a true smile to your face, one that shines in your mouth and eyes.

Trunk:

- Interlace the fingers of your hands, straighten your arms, and stretch forward, up, slightly back, sideways and twisting around side to side.

How should you move your joints?

This series of gently stretches and movements can be practiced by anyone. The important thing is to do it consciously aware of each movement.

Remember to breathe. When we concentrate sometimes we hold our breaths, and this generates unnecessary tension in our systems. Breathe freely and in rhythm with each movement.

If you do the full practice, remember to take frequent breaks to rest body and mind between one exercise and the next. If you are not used to taking your attention into your body, the practice can be at first quite tiring. So allow your body and mind to wander a bit between exercises, and then gently rein them back in for the next set.

Ok, that’s all for today.

Stretch. Yawn. Make it big, exaggerated and noisy.

Get rid of the cricks, cobwebs and lethargy.

Expand, contract and expand again, like an acordion.

See you next time.

Victoria

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Stop! Before reading this blog...

You’ve arrived at the blog. Welcome.

Before we begin, let us take a minute to come to internal and external stillness.

Sit down as comfortably upright as you’re able. Relax your eyes and your jaw.

Become aware of your breathing. Allow the air to go in and out without trying to directly control it, allowing your breathing to be just the way it is right now.

Little by little we’re going to let go of what we were doing before arriving here: the previous webpage, what we were reading, what we were thinking.

Every action has a certain degree of inertia.

We are like a bucket full of water. We thrust our bodies and minds to and fro, and all our internal environment (physical, mental and emotional) becomes agitated, like waves in a storm.

Now we want to start something new, we’re going to read a new blog, it’s a new action, distinct from the one that preceded it.

Stopping before starting something new allows us to give the new action its due space (physical, mental and emotional)… or to simply realize that we don’t want to or don’t need to undertake it at all.

Do you really want to read this blog? You won’t know until you stop, allow the storm of residual activity inside of you to quiet down, and take a moment to listen to yourself.

That is why we bring out bodies to stillness for a moment, and we bring our senses to our inner environment for a check in. Even though we have brought the bucket to a standstill, the water inside it takes a tad longer to quiet down and pool.

Bring your attention to the sounds around you, those at no more than arms length, and then those a bit further. Take your attention to furthest sound you can perceive. Let go of that sound and bring your attention back to the space around you. Now take it into your inner space. Listen for the sounds of your heart, your breathing, your guts. 

Without losing that connection to your inner sounds, expand your attention up to where you find it adequate and comfortable in order to read the rest of this blog.

With this act of stopping and coming back to your senses, you are preparing yourself for receiving, opening up for perceiving, for taking note of how you are right now and how you feel about what you’re reading.

You are already reacting to the stimulus of these words.

If the water in your bucket is still, you’ll be able to notice what that reaction is.

What wave is stirring your water? Is it the response you want to give? Is your response appropriate for your desired objective, for achieving that which you came here to achieve?

No response is correct of incorrect. All are possible and valid. The question is not one of right or wrong, but one of useful or not for achieving your goal. Does your response help you or hinder you?

Perhaps your response is taking energy away from your objective, funneling it instead towards other needs. Perhaps those needs are valid and deserve to be listened to and heeded. Or maybe they are just part of an old habit, an automatic response whose expiration date has long passed.

If you are able to ‘see’ your response to the stimulus, you’re ready to let it go and give way to the next logical, organic action that is in line with your objective.

Working with the Alexander Technique is based on this premise. We cannot change what we cannot ‘see’. We cannot change what we don’t understand. And the first step to changing something isn’t doing something new. The first step is recognizing what we’re doing and choosing to not do it any longer, and thus give way for the next action.

Some day perhaps, we’ll be able to match the inside with the outside. Bucket and water will move in such harmony that there will be no separation, no storm. We won’t need to stop our bodies first in order to stop the water. Stillness will be part of our movement, and harmonious movement will be present in our stillness.

But we’re not there yet. Today we’re at step one. Today we quiet the external, to give a chance to the internal to come to stillness too. And that’s alright. That’s the first step. All journeys start here.

So go back to your breathing for a moment. Allow the air to come freely in and freely out.

You’re ready for your next action. You’ve prepared the ground, you’ve quieted the internal and external waters. You’ve given yourself time. You have given yourself time and space to decide.

What do you want to do? What do you need to stop doing to allow yourself to go in that direction?

See you next time.

Victoria

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Victoria Stanham, Alexander Technique teacher and Pilates instructor.

I study developmental movement, taking great inspiration from the organic and free movement of the animal kingdom.

My goal is to achieve comfort, efficiency, elegance and balance, both in movement and in stillness, according to our physical, mental and emotional design.

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The reason why articles on “how-to” perform exercises are useless to you right now… and how to make them useful again.

The internet is full of articles on how to do and how to improve your execution of almost any exercise.

Want to improve your posture? Search for “posture exercises” on Google. Want to tighten up your core muscles? Search on YouTube “core exercises”. Want to learn how to do barefoot running? You search for “how to start barefoot running”. Etc.

Image from Yoga Journal

Even I had thought of writing today a guide on how to do isometric abdominal exercises (planks) without tension (they’re in vogue apparently… all my students ask me to teach them those… they even came out in the last edition of Yoga Journal).

But if identifying what you want to change (e.g. posture), and googling what exercises remedy the condition were enough, we’d all be set for life (and a whole lot of teachers and coaches would be out of business). However, not one of those articles or videos will help you see why it is that the exercises should work but actually don’t do so fully.

Therefore, before starting to fill the cybersphere with even more how to articles, I want to clarify what you need to know before you read another how to article on specific exercises. Only then will you be able to take advantage of the invaluable information floating around the web.

It all starts with your BodyMap...

Body-mapping is your ability to know how and where your different body parts are, and what they’re doing at any point in time. Your ability at body-mapping is at the base of your ability at controlling your body movements with any degree of precision.

For example, if the instructions for doing a correct ab-crunch call for, “keep your neck long and relaxed”, it isn’t taking into account the fact that you and I have different definitions of “neck”. Therefore, when we “relax our necks” we’ll relax slightly different parts in slightly different ways… and when it comes to your body, accuracy in your body-map makes all the difference in the precision of your movement.

Much of what you believe about how your body is designed, and where you feel the different body parts articulate with each other, could be sabotaging your success and creating unnecessary tension, wear and tear.

Learning to tune up your sensory appreciation, that is your mental body map, will give you the strategies to develop a precise control of your body. That fine control will make you more efficient in your energy usage. And that efficiency will give your more strength, power, and stamina to use in what each exercise or movement really requires of you (and not misuse your energy in tensing muscles that little have to do with the action at hand).

In order to start tuning-up your body map, you need to know which key parts are missing from it today.

The way to improve your body-map is first to discover which bits and pieces of the map went MIA.

Self-knowledge is at the base of sensory appreciation.

Become and impartial witness of your own Self.

You need to become the subject of study in your own investigation. Any teacher can give you a bunch of tips and experiments on how to explore how your body feels. These exercises will be based (at least we hope so) on their own experience in the area, on things that have worked for them and they share with the intention of helping you on your journey. However, the only data that will be really useful to you is that which you collect yourself from your own investigations. Use the examples from your teachers as a basis for your own investigations, but you need to discover what works and is true for you.

So, it’s all very well with words but, for this information to be really useful to you…

DO SOMETHING CONCRETE WITH IT: Choose your first area of investigation in your BodyMap

Choose a space in your body to observe and study this week. Keep it in mind during your workout routine, or while you walk, or during specific times you assign during the day. Put a reminder on your cell phone, or a post-it note on your laptop, to remind yourself to periodically stop and observe.

I’ll give you some suggestions and areas I work with my individual students:

• The space occupied by your bones: There are some key bony structures that are worthwhile to know where and how they are.

If you choose this challenge, I suggest you observe your sitting bones. The sitting bones are those two protuberances you feel under your bum when you sit. Try feeling them when you’re sitting and check to see if you favor one or the other, if you tend to sit with them rocking back (almost as if you’re sitting on your coxis bone… ouch!) or rocking forward (almost on your pubic bone… ouch too!). Rock on them (their shape is rather like a rocking chair) and notice what effect that has on your column. At what point in the rocking motion does your column seem to be the straightest? What happens to the contact of your sitting bones on the chair when you cross one leg over the other? Do you sit with both sitting bones on the same line or is one further forward or back? Try walking with your sitting bones and feel what that motion does to your whole torso.

• The space in your joints: A joint is the place in your body where two bones meet and the forces travelling through them can change directions (e.g. the knee, the hip, the shoulder, the elbow). For bones to move and change their orientation in space there has to be space in the joint.

If you choose this challenge, I invite you to observe your shoulder joint. The place where your humerus (the upper-arm bone) and your shoulder blade meet is actually your armpit. Learning to release the muscles that make up that space is key to creating space for the movement of that joint, and to reduce tension in your neck, shoulders and upper back. I suggest you try the box exercise I explain in this article. Do you notice any change in the tension in your neck, shoulders and upper-back? Do you notice any difference between the placement of one shoulder with respect to the other after releasing one of you armpits?

• Spatial relationships between body parts: You can think all sort of lines that relate one part of the body to another, and take note of how those spaces adjust during movements.

One possible space relationship to observe is that between your sitting bones, o between one armpit and the other (the line across your upper chest). With my students I use a whole series of lines that connect the body and allow for it to expand, release and integrate, without traces of undue muscular tension.

Take your time

Any personal change requires 2 types of time.

One of them does not depend on you. It is the chronological time in which change occurs … change is after all a movement in space-time. There exist no instantaneous changes. Therefore: give Time time for change to occur.

The second type depends solely on you. For change to occur at all you have to do something to catalyze it. The simple act of consciously observing your inner spaces will start this chain reaction that will result in a change. Therefore: take time to observe yourself to help change to occur.

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See you next week.

Victoria

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The language no one taught you but is the key to your wellbeing

Did you know that your back pain, your chronic muscle tension and your bad posture could be products of your ignorance of a key language that is being spoken non-stop all around you, but that you somehow cannot perceive because you don’t know about it?

What would you give to learn to speak this language?

I’ve been giving English language lessons for many years here in Uruguay. Generally my students are adolescents who are trying to keep up with their school’s English requirement, or who are trying to pass one of the several English language international examinations. These kids come to one hour lessons weekly, sometimes two or three times a week. Some of them don’t even like English all that much. And yet, they understand and accept that, in today’s world, it is necessary for them to know and speak English. Their parents have made that point abundantly clear to them.

What strikes me as interesting is that we all live immersed in another language of which the vast majority no nothing about: it’s the language in which body and mind speak to each other. It is not a verbal language; it is a language of neural stimuli and physiological responses, and we perceive it through our physical sensations and emotional states. However, since we have never been taught this subtle language’s grammar, structure or vocabulary, our interpretation of it, and our ability to intervene in this ongoing communication in order to achieve certain desired results, ends up being limited, when not downright counterproductive.

Not knowing how to speak this tongue is much more limiting for our wellbeing than not knowing any other language. And yet, few people know about it, and even fewer take the time and effort to study it. The results of this illiteracy are serious health problems, both physical (hernias, chronic muscle tension, joint wear and tear leading to arthritis, etc.), and emotional (uncontrolled stress responses, anxiety, stage fright, etc.), as well as general unhappiness borne from not being able to achieve our desired physical and mental outputs.

You need to learn how to listen to and understand what your body and mind are telling each other, because it is this ongoing conversation that is dictaing your phsyical form (posture). Your posture (the end result of this conversation in this language you may know nothing about) has direct effects on your physical and emotional health, as well as on how others perceive you, which in turn directly affects your relationships and social life. Being able to consciously have a say in this conversation, in order to re-direct its flow towards the results you desire, should be a priority in our education, in much the same way that we are expected to speak a second language and know how to use a computer for most jobs.

If we accept the premise that to correct your posture and improve your physical and mental performance you need to learn a new language (let us call it the Psychophysical Language), it is to be expected that you won’t be able to master it from reading a book or taking a few lessons. However, you do not need countless years of lessons to get to a fairly proficient level; after all, you used to speak this language fluently as a very young child, so it’s just a question of uncovering what you already know but forgot. As with all language, it is possible to quickly learn to recognize some key words and phrases, and to learn to communicate with them to achieve basic goals. With time, patience and commitment you could become quite fluent at it, to the point of “blending in with the natives” so to speak.

This is why I would like to teach you some of these key words and phrases, so that you can start having a dialogue with your body-mind. Your mind is already conversing with your body, but it does so at an unconscious level. We’ll try to bring some of this conversation up to a conscious level, so that you can start hearing what your mind is telling your muscles, and can decide if perhaps it wouldn’t be to everyone’s benefit if you altered the tone of their conversation.

Let us start with the feet. What are your feet telling you?

Your feet are the base of support for your whole body when you are standing and of your legs when you are sitting on a chair. They are made up of a lot of little bones (26), muscles (38), joints (40) and tendons (over 100). Given all these available structures to articulate, your feet are able to “speak the psychophysical language” with a great nuances of tone and an ample vocabulary. If we give our feet the necessary space to move freely, they are able to adapt their shape to all types of terrain and thus help you keep your balance. However, we tend to have them cramped, compressed and bound up inside shoes that do not allow them to communicate all the information they have about where and what you’re standing on. Mostly, we only listen to our feet when they scream in pain after long hours of being tortured.

In my previous blog I told you about the importance of creating a spcae and time for practice. Conscientiously practicing a little bit of self-observation every day es the equivalent of studying the grammar of this psychophysical language we’re talking about today. The more you get to know this sensorial language in which your body and your mind speak, the more you’ll be aware of it, and how it affects your performance, in your daily life. And as soon as you start to listen in on these conversations and understand their general gist, you’ll be able to join in on the dialogue and thus avoid only finding about the important things when they’re already a health problem.

So this week I invite you to start by reconnecting with your feet. I’m leaving you 3 simple practices to jumpstart your exploration. It’s best if you do them with bare feet, so take advantage of your morning or evening shower to practice them.

1.     We tend to have the soles of our feet really tense and this generates tension throughout the whole posterior musculature of your leg, all the way up to your sitting bones. To release your feet think about the space between your toes and imagine that warm water runs between each pair of toes. Be aware that your toes are way longer than you probably imagine. Although they’re covered in skin, which makes them look like one big mass, your toes actually start halfway down your foot. They need the space between them in order to move freely and adapt and mold to different surfaces  and thus help you balance.

2.     When you are standing the weight of your body should be spread equally among 3 key points on your foot: the heel, the base of the big toe, and the base of the little toe. You are in essence standing on a tripod, or a three-legged stool. Check to see which of these three points you tend to favour the most, and which foot you tend to favour the most. Play with your body weight, alternating the emphasis on each point and noting the effect that it has on your posture and the amount of muscle tension you must put on your legs and lower back to keep your balance.

3.     We can now join exercises 1 and 2. Release the soles of your feet, remembering the space between your toes, and feel the weight of your body distribute itself on the 3 points of contact: center of the heel, base of the big toe, and base of the little toe. Imagine that at each of these three points of contact you have little suction pads that adhere your feet to the ground, connecting you with the earth. Move your toes around, opening them and closing them, while keeping the sole of the foot soft and the 3 key points in easy contact with the floor.

Practice these exercises for a week and let me know what you find out about the conversations your feet are having.

See you next week with more Psychophysical Language grammar and vocabulary lessons ;)

Victoria

P.S. Alexander Technique teacher Angela Bradshaw has just published an excellent book on how to recover your body-mind balance and release unnecessary tensions, called “Be In Balance: A Simple Introduction to the Alexander Technique”. It comes with a lot of easily applicable exercises and ideas. The book is easy to read and full of great drawings, and makes for a great introduction to the concepts of the Alexander Technique for those wanting to explore it. You can get the book on Amazon.com on this link (US) or this link (UK).

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