Rolling head, coordinating hips, 30 min
Many clients with sciatica find this lesson a huge help. It connects the hips and head through the spine in a luxurious coordination. The precision is in the coordinating as the movement itself is uncomplicated.
Thought for February 29th: Useful discriminations
It is a common assumption that we need to strengthen muscles to improve movement. Yet, people can lift a significant amount of weight at the gym and then throw their back out lifting up their young child. That’s because repetitive muscle movements are not always incorporated functionally into our lives.
In fact, muscle fibers do not "know" how to turn exertion into movement. It is the entire nervous system that does that.
As opposed to mechanical repetition in activities like lifting weights and memorizing, useful discriminations are key to learning anything that we incorporate into the fabric of our lives.
(How many of us forgot a list of memorized items the week after our exam because it was not relevant to our life?)
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Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, in her book, The Power of Mindful Learning, makes this point again and again: making discriminations and contextualizing information creates not only better recollection, but more intelligent and creative thinking.
In one of her many studies, students asked to read a text with interest and discrimination outperformed those who memorized the same text on every type of test.
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Sorting for Relevance
What is relevant? That which applies to our lives! We will not learn anything well if it not relevant to our life. This has been proven over and over in every field. When information is relevant, when we want it, yearn for it, love it, embrace it, or find it so useful we can't help but learn it, it is more likely to be remembered.
It is the same with learning movement: the only way your nervous system will incorporate new movement is if it is relevant to you, and the only way it can become relevant is by using mindful attention to sift for what you value and prefer.
Now you can discard the rubbish of life and turn up the gold because it feels like pure gold when you hit upon what is personally relevant to you.