Release tension with three short movements
These short sequences can be done sitting in your chair wherever you are. Ideally find a hard, flat chair. If you don’t have one, sit at the edge of the best chair you can find.
I love these short tips for bringing awareness to each place in the spine. Consider using your awareness to map your sensations, not just “doing” the movement.
Notes on resilience for the holidays:
Here is a sentence from Moshe Feldenkrais that has deeply affected me over the years:
All habitual muscular patterns and attitudes are developed to bring safety and abate anxiety.
What does that mean? It means we are sensibly protecting ourselves all the time.
Physiologically, fear is contraction. If an infant loses altitude, they contract and curl to protect the organs. As adults, we all withdrawal from fearful stimulus. But then we override the withdrawal and force ourselves to tough it out.
Toughing it out means we adapt to the neuromuscular pattern of contraction, because that’s what it takes to get through life sometimes.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It brings safety.
However, the contraction can become our new baseline and we can get stuck being sympathetic-dominant, always “on,” and hyper-vigilant.
Dr. Feldenkrais calls this, “simultaneous inhibition of the anti-gravity muscles.” That’s the fancy phrase for forcing ourselves to tough it out.
This sympathetic-dominant experience starts to influence our sensations. It soon becomes an emotional experience, a psychological experience, and everything in life is colored by the hue of contraction.
That’s one way to be in the world, but it’s not the only way. To shift, we need a muscle pattern that feels equally safe. One that is not based on contraction, and that allows us to trust our skeleton so we can let go.
In short, we need a different survival strategy. I always tell my students, “When we feel supported, then we can let go,” in every part of life: relationships, work, finances, emotions, etc.
When we feel safe on our bones, we return to homeostasis. We can choose to inhabit a different state, what the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky calls, “doing the hard thing in the frontal cortex.”
Luckily, Feldenkrais movements are a ‘cheat sheet’ for inhabiting a different state.
The process of becoming skeletal changes how we use our muscles. It changes our fundamental relationship to gravity.
It helps us find the clear support that brings safety and abates anxiety.
More lessons:
These tips are from Tips and Tricks in the Feldenkrais Treasury.
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Quote of the week:
“For every thought supported by feeling, there is a muscle change. Primary muscle patterns being the biological heritage of man, and man’s whole body records his emotional thinking.”