Shoulders slide across ribs like a sphinx, 30 min
Sitting on a stool at a bar when I’m tired causes me to slump. Just like everyone, I fatigue and would rather curl into a ball. When we start curling forward while simultaneously trying to hold ourselves up, it’s called co-contraction.
Essentially it’s a lot of work.
It’s not wrong to slump over for a while, it’s just tedious. To stop doing that pattern, I get on the floor and remind myself that I can move my shoulders and ribs in other, better, more dynamic relationships.
In a similar vein, I’ve recently been telling my clients to do Feldenkrais after getting off the couch in the evening. Going straight to bed without doing fifteen or twenty minutes of movement in your spine is a recipe for disaster.
We wake up stiff and achy, or at least I do. if I do either a whole lesson or around twenty minutes before bed, my spine does not stay hunched over and “stuck” as I sleep.
One of my clients reported today that moving her spine before bed allowed her to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in a long time!
Try this lesson before bed and see what happens.
Notes on this lesson:
Sinking the spine between the shoulder blades is a lovely feeling because for many folks, the shoulders are chronically hunched forward, miles away from the spine.
Bringing the shoulders together in a functional, useful relationship to the ribs, rather than in a forced, “pull your shoulders back!” kind of way yields much better results.
This lesson invites the ribs and spine to move between and under the shoulders, and then the shoulders start sliding across the ribs as if on an ice skating rink. Check it out!
More lessons:
This lesson is from Freeing the Upper Back in the Feldenkrais Treasury.
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Quote(s) of the week:
“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”