How do you feel when you walk? Think back to the last time you took a walk – were you rushing to go somewhere? Were you taking a slow stroll through the woods or on the beach? Getting up from the couch to grab a snack from the kitchen? Can you give your walk an adjective – like smooth, heavy, light, clunky? Walking upright and on two feet is a quintessential human movement, but sometimes the more experience we have in the world we start to feel like walking is not enjoyable or as easy as it could be.
When we first learn to walk as babies, we fall down, we get back up, then fall again. Learning to walk takes some trial and error to get just right. What happens to our perfect human walk when “life” happens? Our hips can get achy, our knees and ankles can start to creak, maybe our low back aches too when we’re upright at all. Why? Muscle habits and adaptation can make it seem like we’ve “forgotten” how to walk, making it uncomfortable and even painful.
A few days ago, I was walking at the park, and decided to put on different “walks”. I tip-toed, skipped, strutted, did a “runway walk”. With each one, I felt a little different inside – almost like a different person. I started to wonder “what if I tried walking like that person over there?”, like walking in someone else’s shoes, but walking in someone else’s WALK? What would happen if you saw someone who you thought had a great walk, and you tried to walk just like them? I’m really curious if you try that, and then go back to your own walk, does it change anything for you?
Walking with Ease, 4 week lessons start this Thursday:
For the month of October, we’re going to focus on walking, the most essential human movement. As babies, we figure out how to walk by falling down & getting back up over & over again. Somewhere along the line, we get stuck in habits that can cause us to “forget” what we learned as kids. In these weeks, we’ll break down how we walk, and work to smooth out any kinks & bumps that may be holding us back from free & easy walking.
Here is the link for this week’s class: Walking with Ease, Lesson 1 – tomorrow, Thursday at 12pm noon eastern time. Register here for class.
Classes run 35-45 minutes. Make sure you have a yoga mat sized space for the practice. Your video and audio will be off when you first get in the “room”, you have the option to turn both on. I’d love to *see* you, but feel free to remain off if you’re more comfortable that way 🙂
Something that has comforted me over the past 7 months is that we are all in this together. The whole world. Everyone. However this global pandemic has touched your life personally, every single person has been touched by it in some way. Whether you yourself or a loved one has gotten sick, or you’ve been affected financially, or simply not been able to go about your daily life as “usual”, things have changed, we have all had to adjust in some way. And that can be stressful – emotionally and physically.
Anxiety sits in the body in lots of different ways – you probably know where that is in your own body. Sometimes we get pain in the lower back because we are trying to stay ready to jump into action. At other times we can feel like withdrawing from the world, caving in our shoulders, unable to take a full, deep breath (and leading to more anxious feelings). The first step to getting through stress and anxiety is to recognize where it lands in the body – that gives you the power to choose a different path. Then, the fun part is to pick a new path (or stay with the same – you get the choice!) to see what comes up in a new movement pattern. The other thing about changing a movement pattern caused by stress is that it offers you more range to handle the same stress in a fuller way. The more contracted we get into a particular stress response, the less range we have to react to it in a healthy way – we have our choices taken away! WE are the ones taking away the freedom to choose how to move in the world. And WE are the ones who can gain it back.
Here we are now, all in this together, but in our own personal ways. I invite you to talk about & share how your own stress & anxiety shows up in your body. I also invite you to listen to someone else talk about their stress as a curious observer. We are all on this path (we always have been! But now it’s even more highlighted), why not share and explore together?
This fourth week of the first 4-weeks will be focused on Unraveling Neck & Shoulder Tension (my personal favorite!). Like many people, I hold my stress & tension in my neck. That tension leads to all sorts of fun (not so much) like headaches, migraines, pinched nerves, & herniated discs, to name a few. We will learn how to recognize the onset of neck pain, and use gentle movements to alleviate it before it can get us.
Here is the link for this week’s class: Somatics: Unraveling Neck & Shoulder Tension, Week 4 – tomorrow, Thursday at 12pm noon eastern time. Register here for class.
Classes run 35-45 minutes. Make sure you have a yoga mat sized space for the practice. Your video and audio will be off when you first get in the “room”, you have the option to turn both on. I’d love to *see* you, but feel free to remain off if you’re more comfortable that way 🙂
**NEW** Fall Workshops:
Somatics & Empathy: Self-Care, Self-Regard, and How to Change the World Monday, October 5, 8-9:30 $35 Link to register here. This is a very important topic to me! As a whole-being-experiencing the world in life, there are so many ways for our systems to be highjacked. Input from media, weather, pressures from our jobs or family can all create that “fight/flight/freeze” reaction from the stress of it all. We cannot act from a place of reason or ease when we are highjacked, and that seems to be the way the whole world is functioning right now! When we slow down, use our “noticer brain”, and realize that it is our nervous system that is leading the way, we have the opportunity to change. A Somatic movement practice helps train us to notice those patterns so we can step back and make healthier choices for ourselves, those close to us, and the WORLD. Once you see how a strong nervous system allows more freedom and ease, you start to influence those around you by being calm. And that, my friends, is how we change the world. One nervous system at the time. So – in this workshop, we’ll do some talking about this philosophy, and put it to use in movement as well.
Fitting Somatics into Your Daily Life Monday, November 16, 8-9:30 $35 (Link to come in a couple weeks) A Somatic movement practice doesn’t have to be something that you have to carve out of your busy daily schedule, like a chore. You don’t always have time to roll out the yoga mat, make sure the kids and animals are out of the room, and tune everything out for an hour-long practice rolling on the floor. Somatics best serves you when you need it most – in those moments of stress and hectic-ness. So how does that work? In this 90-workshop, we’ll go over ways that you can fit in Somatic movement into your day – whether that’s sitting at a computer for hours, sitting behind the wheel of a car, or running around on your feet all day. A Somatic movement practice is just as much about mindset and daily movement as it is about making time to get on the floor to slow down those patterns.
The “noticer” brain is like the Third Eye, located right in the front of your brain.
Ever notice the voices inside your head that wonder “oh hey! I’m doing that thing again”, and then maybe some guilt or scolding “why did I do that AGAIN?!”? That is the part of your brain called the medial frontal cortex (in coordination with a couple other structures in your brain) – it’s the “noticer brain” that helps you become more aware of your habits. What’s so frickin cool about the noticer brain is that it’s the first step to CHANGE. When we put attention on our actions from an observer (or witness) perspective, our brain is able to pull that action up to the front of the brain (the frontal/executive cortex) for the possibility to create a new habits and reaction to that same stimulus. How cool is that?!
Witness –> Awareness –> Change!
In the past few months, I’ve been noticing my inner witness quite a bit. It can be frustrating at first (and for a while after that), to keep noticing that you are having the same reaction over & over to a similar situation. I can get angry at myself – “why do I keep doing that?!!” But I have to also remind myself that I am noticing that reaction faster & faster each time. Slowly, but surely, I get closer to being able to change the reaction, and respond. Sometimes the response can be the same as the reaction, but that response feels more empowered because it was a choice.
This same principle can be applied to movement habits & reactions, as well as emotional habits & reactions. When you feel an ache or pain, see if you can identify how you just moved. Were you walking? Standing? Sitting for a long time? Reaching up above your head? If you can’t make any connection in that moment, just the act of being curious activates the “noticer brain”, so that you can grow that awareness, and get even closer to great changes.
This second week of the first 4-weeks will be focused on Unraveling Neck & Shoulder Tension (my personal favorite!). Like many people, I hold my stress & tension in my neck. That tension leads to all sorts of fun (not so much) like headaches, migraines, pinched nerves, & herniated discs, to name a few. We will learn how to recognize the onset of neck pain, and use gentle movements to alleviate it before it can get us.
Here is the link for this week’s class: Somatics: Unraveling Neck & Shoulder Tension, Week 1– tomorrow, Thursday at 12pm noon eastern time. Payment is not required to register, please consider supporting my teaching if you can at this time. Thank you!
Two years ago, I drove my daughter to kindergarten. Nervous mother that I was, I hesitantly drove around the school circle for drop-off and saw a bunch of encouraging signs along the driveway. “You are awesome”, said one of them. I relaxed a little, took a few deep breaths, parked, and walked my tiny human into this great big school (where I was expected to just leave her?!!). She did great on that first day, and so did I (after a few tears).
The start of this school year looked a little different. Her walk to class was as far as the couch, where her iPad was propped up on the coffee table. She Zoomed into her first day of school to meet her second grade teacher and new class virtually. The first assignment was to take a video telling the class a little bit about yourself, and posting so they could see them. If you don’t know anything about my daughter – she is VERY introverted; hardly anyone has heard her say a word. She never speaks in front of anyone outside of a very small circle of people. A VIDEO? This wasn’t boding well for the start of the year. We talked about it, and decided that she would draw a picture of things she liked, and things she was nervous about for the year. Then we took a video of it in a certain order in silence, and posted it for the class. The teacher loved it! It was truly a thoughtful expression of HER, and I thought “wow, this is really going to serve her well in the future”: learning the “rules”, then finding a way to make them fit for HER.
What does this have to do with Somatics, you ask? Adaptation!
I believe more than ever, we are being challenged to uncover new ways of being in the world. The status quo and the way things “used to be” just don’t work for many of us. We’ve tried fitting into boxes for a long, long time, and I hear people say “when will we get back to ‘normal’?” Do we really want to? Was that “normal” really serving us? We have this amazing opportunity to shift, and create something truly beautiful, collaborate, and make life look more like we want it to. Many Somatics clients & students ask the same thing: “how long will it take to ‘get back to the way I was before (X) happened’?” I don’t believe we ever go back to exactly the way things were, but that could be a good thing! I mean, you can look at it either way I suppose, but it’s easier to look for the things that help us to grow and learn – and become better. One of humans’ best traits is our ability to adapt. We’ve known “the rules” for a long time now. It’s time to make new ones.
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