stages of opening wide

A few days ago I had an interesting experience after my workout.  It was my first after a couple days off that I take in accordance with my hormonal cycle that just so happened to coincide with my boy needing extra tender loving care due to the presence of two staples in the back of his head.

I wasn’t expecting much because I didn’t have a lot of time and it hadn’t been the easiest couple of days off.  So I was surprised to feel such an immediate and full-body sense of lightness as I walked back from the studio.  I felt as if a heavy fog had lifted from my body and I daresay that this sort of experience is what prompts my clients to exclaim how wonderful they feel at the conclusion of a lesson.  I’ve always privately marveled at the complete conviction with which folks say that they are improved after a Pilates workout, because the effects have rarely been so dramatic for me.

I’m wondering if this is a result of MELTing.  My bodyworker has noted that my body seems to have less noise and perhaps I’ve just experienced what she means.  If indeed my body’s internal static is fading, then every input I receive will be more easily processed and likewise I will be able to sense the positive effects of all my self care projects.  I do believe that this is what getting out of chronic pain feels like.  If nothing else, it’s what hope feels like.

a lesson in gentleness

Be gentle and kind.  Those words are circling around in my head a lot these days as I am doing my best to teach our boy the many expressions of gentleness and kindness.  I trust that he’s working with the concepts in his own way when he follows the cat around the house screaming, or when he pushes over a friend that he really loves.  We’ve been following up those decidedly un-gentle and unkind acts with a lot of close and quiet conversations about how our behavior effects others.  To the point that yesterday in the car he said, “be gentle and kind.”  I was on the phone with my mother at the time and she oohed and ahhed over his sweetness – more than she would have over the acts that have prompted the frequent reminder.

Anyway, I woke up today with a really stiff back.  The kind that used to be commonplace for me.  It put me in a sour mood and demanded a good deal of my attention.  Which pulled me into a process of evaluating just how gentle and kind I am to myself.  I’ve been looking back over the past couple days because I’m currently in the thick of these various new body projects and I have the idea that perhaps I pushed myself a bit to far.  All the while trying to be gentle and kind.  I believe that it’s a pitfall of specializing in corrective exercise that one runs the risk of becoming a bit too vigilant with one’s body.  In all the efforts to make things right, there is an undertone that things are not currently so.  That seems fine enough, but for certain kinds of over-thinkers like myself, it can easily become a constant barrage of thoughts about what is wrong and what needs to be fixed.

My injuries compound these tendencies.  Twenty-three years of daily pain has definitely influenced my perception of my body.  I’ve come a long way from where I started, and yet it is still quite easy to feel downright negative about the state of me.  The only way through that is to be gentle and kind and to clean up those critical thoughts as they sweep through my mind which is also navigating pain signals, wild toddler signals, nanny signals, client signals, and all the rest that a day offers me.  It was around noon that I had some time to myself and I really noticed what a relief that quiet space was.  I needed that quiet to engage fully with my body, to tend to the aches and pains and everything else in between.  I made progress and that was a comfort.  But I believe that I’m going to be in the process of unwinding for at least a couple days here.  And I will look to gentleness and kindness as my constant guides.

tulips reaching for the light

80% of Life is Just Showing up – Woody Allen

Remember that video that I promised?  Here it is.  I will confess that I do not at all like seeing myself on screen.  All those postural imperfections, mannerisms, and flubbits in glaring clarity.  But sharing is caring, and I do care to share.  So there, self.  There.  I’ve made it something of a personal goal to improve upon those things that I don’t like about looking at myself in videos, it is one way that I plan to show up to myself in the months to come.  Because, I do have some more video ideas to manifest and aren’t they sort of an ideal way to see just how we show up in physical form?  I do believe so.

Showing up seems like something of a theme in our home in recent hours.  It started with our nanny not calling, not coming, not responding to her subsequent termination.  In more than one sense, she failed to show up.  Perhaps her mostly – she’s always been slightly unreliable but it’s not too easy to find childcare for a 8-noon shift on Sunday mornings – uncharacteristic behavior can be attributed to the start of DST, but unfortunately it makes us all the less sympathetic to whatever may be her side of the story.  Try as I am, I can only get to the point of having lost a majority of my respect for her.  I’m offended that she was so disrespectful in her method of quitting, that she left us to do the “dirty work” of ending the relationship.  And now I’m here holding the bad feelings too.  So I continue to work on it because I’m pretty sure that right now I’ve got double the load, hers and mine.  Apparently this current situation reveals something of a cultural thing.  In some places it is considered acceptable to terminate one’s term of employment with nary a word of communication.  Point taken.

I must confess that I have my own history of not showing up to my personal preferences with respect to work.  As it’s virtually impossible to erase any of our experiences completely, I must still have some remnants of an old complex around leaving, something of a reverse abandonment complex.  Back in my early twenties, I was ready to leave my waitressing job, but I had an irrational fear that when I gave the standard two weeks notice I’d be instantly terminated.  So I arranged to have all my shifts covered for two weeks and then I gave notice.  Strange, eh?  I eventually came to terms with my error in judgement and lack of consideration and apologized to my manager.  She was gracious, but explained to me precisely the pickle that my actions had put her in.  Clearly I did wrong, but I feel that I did my best to take responsibility for my negligence.  In some way, if only retrospectively, I showed up.

There’s no two ways about it, breaking up is hard to do.  But I believe that it’s worth doing with as much respect for all the people involved as possible, and that requires showing up.  Saying goodbye in person.  Facing oneself in the face of another.  Being an employer forces me to do my best to do those things, that are in no way easy for me to do.  Perhaps that is why I’m an employer, because I need to be forced to show up in order to do so.

This weekend I had an enlightening Holistic Biomechanics lesson in which I sensed my tailbone in a whole new way.  I felt so many amazingly alive sensations at the very base of my spine and afterward I felt a kind of relief that I have not had in decades.  Apart from being an exciting discovery process, it was also trying.  I noticed myself becoming impatient and irritable more than ever before in a HB class.  I had the idea that perhaps those emotions relate to the very base of the spine, indeed I’ve often noticed a correlation between the length of my fuse and the amount of discomfort that I’m experiencing in my pelvic floor.  Because I was supported in showing up to my body, I was able to work through and hopefully work out some of those emotions.  Now I’ve got more ways to tune into my tailbone and will be doing so in the coming weeks.  The prospect of truly releasing the old injury, as much as is possible, is a powerful motivator.

In my work with clients, I am the one who keeps them company when they show up to themselves, that is what they are essentially doing when they arrive at my studio.  Often, people are finally showing up to parts of themselves that they have ignored for many years.  It is incredible to witness the relief that comes from addressing those long-ignored parts of ourselves.  I get eager for more.  So much so that I have to refrain from pushing rivers.

But sometimes, I can’t keep my words to myself.  Here we are again, Daylight Savings Time has arrived and I’m gonna beat the drum of discontent.  I’m gonna proclaim:  That DST! That DST! I do not like that DST! (did you catch the Seuss reference?  I hope so!)  I’m even gonna go so far as to say that if more people were showing up to themselves regularly, we would not stand for such silliness as changing the hour twice a year.  I know, I know, people like more light at certain times of the day, work / play schedules blah blah blah.  I don’t care about that stuff.  I care about the fact that I feel like crap for a couple weeks two times a year.  I care that in the years when I was more vulnerable I would routinely get sick every spring forward.  I think that I care because I show up to myself enough to notice the effects of the time change on my body.  On this point I’m quite certain.  And I’m gonna keep banging this drum because I figure that after years of showing up to my twice-yearly frustration maybe others will see my point.  Maybe something will change for the better, maybe the saying will be proven right.  If I don’t keep showing up, I”ll never know.

A client came in today all bent over and so her first stop was to put her legs over the spine corrector.  I have a smattering of experience with hands on work and in this case I gave my client a little compression on her feet that I learned from Holistic Biomechanics.  Since some degree of mental engagement tends to enhance our physical experience I gave her a brief reminder of what I was doing (she’s also had some experience with HB).

Back in 2001 when I entered my first Pilates Certification Program, my instructors talked about imagery with respect to cueing.  I was mostly baffled with how to come up with metaphorical images.  But then, I had hardly any personal experience with Pilates.  These days, images tumble out of my mouth before I can even fully picture them and sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised with what my imagination conjures up.  Today was such a day.

I was explaining one of the simple facets of how the human nervous system functions.  Our bodies are designed to respond to external stimulus.  When I put my hands on somebody’s foot, that draws the attention of their nervous system.  Once the nervous system has tuned into that area it begins to address anything that requires improvement.  In the case of my client, she was noticing some sensations associated with the release of tension and I was noticing various fluttering movements and an increase in overall circulation under my hands.  This is a basic description of one level of our “factory installed” self-healing system.  And I’ve gotta say, isn’t it amazing?!

So, back to my metaphor.  I likened this cycle to keeping one’s house tidy.  If you’re like me, you tend to tidy up when folks are around.  Even more so if you’re going to throw an official party.  I’ve been saying for years that the key to a clean house is throwing regular parties (having a kid certainly affects this strategy, but kids are only little and all-time-consuming for a few years, right? right?!).  Anyway, a guest visits my house and I immediately start putting things in their proper place.  Little things like gathering up stuff that belongs in other rooms, hanging up coats that have been tossed on chair backs, or sorting the piles of mail that are so often right by the door.  And this is very similar to what our bodies do when we receive a visitor in the form of external stimulus.

I’ve come to trust in this process much more than I used to thanks to HB and MELTing.  My first introduction to the magic of HIgh Bounce Pinky Balls was back in 2001 but at that point I was trying to solve all my physical ailments (there were many) with direct and purposeful action.  In pretty much all cases, I had to get more nuanced in my approach to see the results I was after.  These days Pinky is still a big part of my life, but I use the ball much differently.  Rather than a lot of pressure and a hurts-so-good massage, a light touch with the intention of focussing my awareness is all I’m after.  I trust my body to do the real problem solving.  And it does!

I am often suggesting that my clients begin to care for their entire bodies via their hands and feet with a light Pinky rub.  It’s nothing so strong that it can aggravate their sensitivities, but it begins the process of rebuilding a trust in their body’s power to heal, It gives the body some useful stimulus, and it feels really good.  In nearly all cases, folks come back with good things to report, but I believe that’s partly because they know how to approach what they are doing and what to look for, hence my many metaphors.

Perhaps now I’ve shared enough here to incite your curiosity, dear reader.  I encourage you to try it, you’ll like it!

Hand meets Pinky

Foot meets Pinky

Off on a verdant adventure behind an ivy covered wall….

I haven’t completely lost my way, and I am grateful for March MATness because I have been growing concerned about my studio habits lately.  The truth is that I’ve been exploring unchartered territory in a couple areas of my life and I’ve gotten rather muddy in the brain.  But here’s the thing, I’m working on something that I think is pretty important, something that I wanted to be working on and so I’m staying the course.  Now with a daily dose of mat work, I’m even more confident that all will turn out well.

I’ve already mentioned that my chiropractor’s maternity leave gave me a welcome opportunity to get more proactive with my self care.  And indeed, I’m digging into the depths of my chronic pain in ways that I haven’t ever before.  And I’m getting somewhere, namely, to a place of less pain, more often.  It’s great.

I’m pretty jazzed about starting to practice the MELT method too.  Reading Hitzman’s book was inspiring and so exciting since she’s put together two worlds that I’ve been straddling for many years.  But the really big deal is that she’s given any of us who are receptive the tools to benefit from her discoveries and innovations.  Bravo Sue Hitzmann!  I will be reporting on my progress back here in the coming weeks.

I’m also really enthused to be digging a little deeper into my study of The Alexander Technique.  It offers me such a nuanced approach to inhabiting my body that I’m left pondering the simple words of my instructor in the days between my lessons.  I like having something to think about, especially something that enhances my physical experience.

Along with The Alexander Technique, I’m getting a little more Holistic Biomechanics input these days and it’s really fun to see how the two intersect with my Pilates practice.  I think of all three new areas of study as something that I call Body Basics.  Each in their own way offers all sorts of valuable information and support for optimal functioning of the human body.  Sure Pilates does the same, but it’s a bit more complicated in that there are layers of choreography and movement control involved.  As far as I can tell, MELT, The Alexander Technique, and Holistic Biomechanics all prime a body for a slightly more complicated endeavor such as Pilates, and in turn Pilates primes a body for a slightly more complicated endeavor such as ballet or modern dance.  There my own experiential biases are revealed.  All these techniques mean different things for different people.  But pretty universally, they mean feeling better, and feeling more fully human.

And that right there, is what I’m after because….