Easy side bending, 33 min
Side-bends get short shrift. We forget how useful they are for all human movement, especially easy standing. I love the breathing part of this lesson, where you breathe along the whole side and feel longer and longer. It changes the tone wonderfully.
Small technical note on balance:
If, in standing, we eliminate all contraction due to volitional impulses, the body will be held in tonically correct posture, true to our evolution, and then we are free to express ourselves.
Ideal standing posture is achieved not by doing something, but by doing nothing. We become more compulsive when we lose voluntary control and try to impose “standing up straight” on ourselves.
Use this side bend lesson to find neutral tone along the side of your trunk, a place where we sneak in all kinds of pernicious contractions.
(This lesson is from the human movement starter kit in the Feldenkrais® Treasury.)
Thought for May 30: Dynamic adjustments
Balance means you are free to move in and out of different situations without getting stuck.
I do not feel balanced right now. I move in one direction and have to back out, like my dog walks when out of a tight space she should not have gotten into in the first place.
Some people think power comes from contracting a single muscle more powerfully. It doesn’t. It comes from an integrated functioning of all the parts.
Balance is not an act of power, but an act of making constant dynamic adjustments in response to gravity—or a pandemic, or a new economic structure (choose your context).
Dynamic adjustments prevent us from getting stuck and rigid. They help us find a new balance. Re-learning balance can be scary because we cling to what's familiar.
I wonder, “How do I find my balance with all these new constraints?” Like the ever-sensible dog, I simply back out and try another way, remembering the phrase, “Effortlessness comes with total coordination.”
Coordination on the inside equals coordination on the outside. I truly believe that. When I am more coordinated, I will let you know. (I really am writing what I need to hear, over and over again.)
quote(s) of the week:
All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted too long, the good is close at hand.
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
“A man's work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself . . . so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe.”
― Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh