Release shoulders and mid-back with a rolled blanket, 29 min
This lesson requires a rolled towel or blanket about six inches in diameter. You can play with the thickness.
I love this lesson because it softens all the tension in the spine and ribs as I adapt and balance over the blanket.
Tip: The jiggling motion should be very light and soft, with soft eyes and jaw.
(This lesson is from Unwind your neck and shoulders in the Seven Best Series in the Feldenkrais® Treasury.)
Thought for June 6: tricking myself to connect
Movement is life, life is movement.
If we are still, we are no longer alive. Stillness is what prompts kids to poke a snake to see if it will move. Imagine the stillness of a rabbit, which is called thanatosis, or playing dead.
Remember playing possum? Another word for it is tonic immobility. It can be induced in sharks, baby birds, snakes, and frogs. Humans also use it as an extreme version of freezing while undergoing intense trauma.
I don’t know about you, but I feel thrown off balance at the moment.
The courage to face our experience is crucial because so many of us are, on some level, dissociated, disembodied, and disconnected from our felt sense of being alive.
Connecting to myself through movement helps me recover a sense of aliveness. I know this intellectually, but right now I don’t want to face it.
So what do I do? I trick myself, of course.
I do a lesson with bigger movements that ask me to solve a puzzle instead of just sensing how I feel (because awareness can be exhausting).
With my awareness busy tracking the bigger movements, I can finally take a breath and my wobbliness retreats, like the sun melts the fog.
quote(s) of the week:
“We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.”
― Galileo Galilei
“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”
― Isaac Newton