Slow tilting of the knees with arms behind, 33 min

 

This lesson is good for unwinding tension. It’s slow and gentle and helps the hidden tightness in the ribs, jaw, belly, and neck start to soften.

Every response for every person is different. Find out what this is like for you.

In light of the total cognitive overload these days, here’s a list. You can:

  • soften the ribs

  • free the neck

  • stand more upright

  • reduce low back pain

  • take a free breath

  • unravel tight hips

  • shift your mental state

(This is from the Calm and Destress section in the FeldenkraisTREASURY.)

 
 

Thought for June 13: Attentional overload

This week, the New Yorker magazine cover was a vignette of the city upside-down. It mirrored how I feel. These last couple weeks have been a rough ride. I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted from the news cycle, the disruptive and repetitive shut-down, and the vigilance of an uncertain re-opening.

So, I am re-learning to reach out and reach in: Reaching out to friends and reaching in to myself, both with courage and transparency.

The courage to connect with our experience is crucial because so many of us are, on some level, dissociated, disembodied, and disconnected from our felt sense of being alive.

How do we embody our own aliveness when life can be so overwhelming?

Attention is a huge mental resource. Over-taxing it with too much stimuli can cause the system to freeze to save itself. I know that’s what mine does.

According to one source, the processing capacity of our conscious mind is 120 bits per second. But our sense perceptions receive 11 million bits per second, which are then filtered and sifted for relevance before they even reach the conscious mind.

For me, paying attention through movement is a welcome respite from the bombardment of cognitive information. (“Paying attention” even implies it comes at a cost!)

Put another way, when I invest in slowing down and sensing, even if it’s just the movement of my breath while turning the leg in the hip, that momentary focus reminds me that the composite parts make up a whole, that I am still a whole being and not sand-blasted into a million pieces from the rush of information coming at me.

That reminder, one I’ve known more than half my life but still need every day, is such a relief: Sensory feedback integrates our experience on deeper and deeper levels so we can come back to home base, our felt sense of inner wholeness, aliveness, and vitality.

 

For for more on attentional capacity, check out:

 
 
SOSzoe birchspine, posture, arms, ribsComment