I’ve decided to try a different tactic: I’m going to choose to watch him (and his henchmen) while at the same time drawing on every resource in my body awareness arsenal to sustain my space and energy.
Read MoreFor those of us who are rising, pink-hatted and furious, to the occasion(s), I caution against leaving our bones behind.
Read MoreI also know that moving stiffly--ambulating with the bare minimum of joints engaged--becomes a habit that can’t entirely be blamed on my bodily tissues. Habits take place in the brain. The more often I move stiffly, the more familiar and less optional that way of moving becomes. I can choose how I move.
Read MoreWhen we resist doing a task, part of the body is holding back. Instead of all your muscle units working together to finish the chore, a high percentage of them rebel and pull the opposite way. It’s like driving the car with the brakes on. The chore feels heavy, pressured and hurried.
Read MoreNot merely aware of the space around them, our ancestors were integrated into their surroundings. We can imagine that they viewed themselves—if they viewed themselves at all--as aspects of the tensional integrity of all life.
Read MoreI’ve been browsing through a wonderful new book about myofascial efficiency in movement. Born to Walk, by my friend, James Earls, delves into the minutia of joint mechanics and into how they are supported by the soft tissue layers. The book is exhaustively researched and elegantly illustrated. Earls considers the helical motions of the feet and pelvis, legs and spine, and for my money, gets it about as right as right can be. Body workers and somatic educators will do well to study this fine volume…
Read MoreIn my teaching, writing and manual therapy, I try to help people experience how bodily wholeness contributes to the health of mind and spirit as well as body. Two recent encounters have reminded me that “wholeness” is relative, and that no matter how integrated, coordinated, aligned and aware our bodies become, the health of the human spirit is vaster and more mysterious than mere physical perfection. My friend George has been in the online dating game for a long time…
Read MoreWalking through a natural setting, among trees and rocks, accompanied by wind sounds and bird cries, your body feels and moves differently than it does when you walk through an environment of glass, steel and straight lines, like an airport. Your emotional state, the rhythm of your gait, your sense of yourself — it’s as if your bodymind airportmirrors the terrain — the varying textures and spaces of nature, or the hard, flat surfaces of the man-made world. Your perceptions shape your posture and steer your movements…
Read MoreI love my accountant. The walls of his office display a 40-year collection of IRS cartoons, and he does everything he can to keep our yearly meeting light. But there’s nothing like an hour’s contemplation of tax code intricacies to make your head spin and put kinks in your center line. Money, when you have to part with it, compresses the body. Which is how I walked out of the office…
Read Moreあなたの姿勢を癒すために、私はいつも姿勢よりも知覚を練習するよう求めています。私はあなたの肩の姿勢や、首の位置についてアドバイスをしません。むしろ、あなたに内側のバランスの感覚や大文字の P と共にいる感覚（過去や将来の不安なしに今ここにいる状態）を発見するよう手伝おうとします。
あなたが３次元の空間でオリエンテーションを維持している間に、真に地面が下からあなたの身体を支えるのを許しているとき、いつでもこのバランスと今ここにいる経験を受け取ります。（空間というのは人々にとって省略された言葉です、ものごとやイベントが生じるところです）。もしこのことが不可解なら、私はいい本とDVDをお勧めできます！
Read MoreI recently recommended to a Skype coaching client that he read pages 131-132 in The New Rules of Posture–pages that describe what I nicknamed “skintelligence”. One of this man’s goals was to improve his ballroom dancing. His partners had commented that they felt he was holding them rigidly, so I wanted to remind him of the surprising degree to which our tactile sense influences motor coordination. I knew that turning on his skin could help him turn off excess muscle tension…
Read MoreMy bare feet go flap-flap-flap on the kitchen floor before breakfast. The sound of it rests along the back wall of my attention as I flick my mind over the tasks ahead for this day. And muse about how much nicer it would be to laze on the couch with a book instead. It’s been triple digit weather in Los Angeles for way too long, and such heat wears a body down!
Read MoreIf we can really let our bodies accept support from the ground and simultaneously widen our perspective to include our surroundings, then that balanced perceptual field automatically optimizes posture—as well as doing a lot of nice things for our mental outlook…
Read MoreIf you read between the lines, you probably sense that under the banner of “The New Rules of Posture,” I’m actually sharing a somatic practice–a physical path to self-knowledge. Here’s what I wrote in The New Rules: to improve your posture you need to 1) “create new sense memories for what feels balanced and stable…” and 2) view “your posture as an ongoing perceptual process by which you orient yourself to gravity and to your relationship with the people, objects and events in your world.” Not something you do once and forget about. It’s a practice…
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