How to take a natural breath, 28 min
Every December I do a series on breathing and calming for the holiday season. I’ll include some of my favorite lessons from this series in the SOS.
This lesson, like many others, frees the muscles of the abdomen from the movement of the diaphragm. You’ll get good at moving the belly in and out while inhaling, and then while exhaling. It’s worth doing this to unhook the habits we all carry around in the abdominal muscles.
You’ll feel so much freer and lighter at the end, even if you think you aren’t “doing” the movement. Just asking your nervous system these questions can invite tremendous shifts.
I’ve done nearly nothing this week, with Thanksgiving yesterday and the snow storm earlier in the week. Sometimes doing nothing is what the nervous system needs. I putter around the house, rearranging things, and cooking. Sometimes I stop and think, mostly I’m in a slightly distracted state, sometimes inspired, wholly procrastinating.
That’s not a bad thing, though. There’s a whole book on the different ways people get things done that I love, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.
Or, you can watch the TED talk here: The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers.
Maybe I’m just an original thinker…
Moshe Feldenkrais on learning
Here are some of the most important paragraphs Dr. Feldenkrais ever wrote, in my humble opinion. This is from the introduction to The Potent Self (which I re-read every six months to a year or so).
“One has to set about learning to learn as is befitting for the most important business in human life; that is, with serenity but without solemnity, with patient objectivity and without compulsive seriousness. Clenching the fists, tensing the eyebrows, tightening the jaw are expressions of impotent effort.
It is possible to succeed in spite of these faults only at the expense of truly healthy joy of living.
Learning must be undertaken and is really profitable when the whole frame is held in a state where smiling can turn into laughter without interference, naturally, spontaneously.
The cumulative effect of compulsive teaching has brought about the notion that as long as one can do a thing without sensation of effort, it is not good enough.
From early childhood, we are taught to strain ourselves…This habit becomes so ingrained in us that when we do something and it comes off as it should—just like that!—we do generally feel it was just a fluke—it should not be that easy—as if the world were not meant to be easy.
And we then even repeat the same thing, to make sure this time we strain ourselves in the usual way, so that we feel we really have accomplished something.
This sort of habit is very difficult to eliminate, as the cultural environment is there to sustain it. It is even glorified as a sign of great willpower. But willpower is necessary only where ability to do is lacking.
Learning, as I see it, is not the training of willpower but the acquisition of the skill to inhibit parasitic action and the ability to direct clear motivations as a result of self-knowledge.”
More lessons:
This lesson is from Responsive Breathing in the Feldenkrais Treasury.
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Quote of the week:
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”