Archive for Brain Fitness
Stress Relief
Posted by: | CommentsWe have at our disposal the ability to have stress relief in an instant.
Each day our muscles respond to the demands or lack of demand we impose upon the muscles, even if we aren’t exercising.
Stress Relief, Use it or Stress
If your walking and crossing a street, you body will react to the hurtling speeding objects of a car by raising your shoulders up. Next time you go on a walk, feel if this happens. It may be a slight or imperceptible sense, yet this is how stress in our muscles add up.
Little by little, day by day, our muscles respond and add up frequent stress user points. Now if only we had a credit card which would take these stressful moments into account, we could all fly around the world many times over.
Yet with all the stress we accumulate, how often do we give ourself stress relief measures?
Stress Relief Made Easy
Instead of waiting till later, we can use a simple brain process the way healthy animals naturally take care of stress. After all, they have to deal with being eaten or work very hard to eat. Imagine how stressful that is.
Well animals use a stress relief method called a pandiculation. When our muscles tighten up and accumulate stress, we feel the associated stiffness and other noxious signals that comes with the territory of modern day living.
Vertebrate animals know how to bring muscles back to length, not by stretching as we once thought, they go about it by pandiculating their way to health.
They make stress relief look easy since they have to keep their muscles ready to be used in case they need to instantly flee.
We can use our brain and do the very act animals do to keep our muscles and feelings of tension and tightness at bay.
Stress relief is like a lost art. Did you know that most of us actually did this very animal act in our mother’s womb? Somewhere on the way to becoming an adult, we lost this healthy sense and process yet we can get it back on track with a little practice.
Stress Relief Online Class
Somatics exercises are used successfully to give us the ability to stress relief ourself at will.
When we feel the accumulation of stress, all we need to do is apply our lost sense and use our muscles in a way which will instantly create chemicals of relaxation.
This kind of stress relief is our natural way to self-adjust the overworked, stressed out muscles.
To remember how easy this is to do, please join us for an online stress relief class.
Stress relief is natural using the brain’s cortex so we can rest easy, rev up and relieve our ourself, again and again.
Mindfulness Exercises
Posted by: | CommentsMindfulness exercises such as somatics exercises allow the brain to change how muscles behave.
When we change the brain, we can create good feelings in how our muscles feel.
A movement practice of mindfulness exercises relates to 9 pre-frontal cortex functions.
You can improve how you regulate your heart and lungs for instance. You can affect how well your body’s regulation system works.
The nervous system changes from what’s called the parasympathetic system which is a relaxed place to a more driven one called the sympathetic system.
Mindfulness exercises gives us a window as to how we can sense the shift between the two systems.
As we sense the shift, we grow fibers in the brain.
The two separate areas of the brain, the right and left side, integrate more fully with mindfulness exercises.
We can watch our self in an entirely new manner.
Being observant of how we move by slowing down our movements rather than the traditional manner of activating muscles and increasing the blood flow gives us a different perspective.
Mindfulness exercises teach us how to use brain’s inhibitory process.
When you gain better control at the cortex by inhibiting muscles it’s like squirting a little neurotransmitter substance of relaxation down below. This will help us be more emotionally balanced.
It’s ok to freak out, just as long as you can regain your senses. The flip side being you can feel dejected yet have the ability to bounce back too.
Since mindfulness exercises give us a practice in pausing. We may be able to translate that to the idea of response flexibility where we can calm our self down.
By tuning inwards rather than outwards in goal oriented exercises, we work with our sensory system and learn to trust our feeling and sensations. The more “I” can feel, then it’s more likely I’ll know how others feel.
Mindfulness exercises can bring us towards resonance with others in states of empathy. People who lack it, can learn it if they choose.
Another pre-frontal function is being in touch with your own intuition. This awareness
happens when you heed the quiet wisdom of the body.
Reflecting mindfully can be achieved with mindfulness exercises.
When we realize how to be nonjudgmental in our movements, then we gain insight and the brain grows again and improves its function.
To modulate fear happens when we use mindfulness exercises to explore parts of our self which may reveal past or present fears. It can be quite surprising and revealing what essentially a simple, slow, and easy movement can show.
Join us online this Friday, June 24th from 1-2pm to learn how simple somatics exercises are delightful mindfulness exercises.
When we gain this insight, this shift of perspective and improve along the other 8 pre-frontal cortex functions, then all 9 of these provide us with the resilience to free ourselves. We can learn this simply from mindfulness exercises.
Fibromyalgia “It” sucks…
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13 years or 39 years later depending on your viewpoint, I finally have the cap.
Fibromyalgia, FM for short, is a chronic pain condition, disease, syndrome or something which doesn’t exist, depending on your point of view. Some 5 million people have been diagnosed with pains which don’t seem to go away nor can be fully understood.
While I’m no expert on the subject, having been diagnosed with FM and successfully overcoming it… I can talk about a useful way to use our brains to change how our muscles feel and respond.
First, I’m going to talk about pain as an “it”. Like playing that game of tag, you know when you’re “it” and you wanted to get rid of “it” as soon as possible even though we were laughing, huffing and puffing trying to give “it” away to someone else.
Merely mentioning the word pain is sometimes too painful for people to even think about “it”.
Instead of talking about the aches, constant soreness, dullness, lethargy, burning, sore to touch, and tension which has you tied up in knots… see that might already be working for some of you.
I’d rather talk about “it” to take some of the edge away.
One of the most powerful lessons I learned along my way to a full recovery out of fibromyalgia. Yes, let me repeat that. I don’t have “it” nor got “it” anymore, nor am in remission, “it” isn’t coming back to take me down or out.
How can I say that?
Living pain free for the past 13 years is like a day and night experience. The night was like living in “it” in my 20′s and 30′s, where now… I am free, comfortable and no longer binded with any chronic discomforts.
Sure, there are occasional bumps in the road, yet in fact, it’s getting easier to move as I age. 50 is a good thing.
Life used to be too “it”-ful to even mention “it”.
During the period of recovery, I didn’t like to think of “it” as it seemed to rekindle more memories of “it”. Memories I wasn’t trying to repress, merely memories to learn from and let go of… saying goodbye to an “it”-ful friend and identity wasn’t easy… yet when that happens, you may be able to appreciate how not going there is necessary for that time being.
Yet life goes on, and “it” happens even when we’re living as healthy beings. Now all I have to do is tap into that resourceful brain of ours and feel the self-correction take place. We can self-regulate our self once we know how to wield the inherent powers of our brain/body.
Having been told “it” was all in my head… was actually pretty close to what some of the research is pointing towards… that the invisible fibromyalgia is a condition of the central nervous system.
If this is so, if “it” and you know “it” if you experience “it” enough… Would the possibility exist to change “it” from the inside, from inside our brain.
When we experience “it”… I knew “it” as body wide, moving here or there, zapping me, clouding my thoughts… making sometimes s-l-o-w and foggy decisions… at times often mis-understanding whatever verbal instructions over and over and over again… since I was about to forget them just as soon anyway.
Whew… too much work even if repetition is the mother of learning… and learning with a nervous system in jeopardy made it all the more frustrating at times. So if I ever met you and forgot your name… well that was par for the course and a person with fm was being a “normal” fm’er.
Now back to the brain… which can be changed doing simple movements.
The “tricky” part for people in chronic pain is to un-do patterns of movement which no longer serve us and re-establish new patterns which allow for a degree of different movement here or there.
Gradually, the brain and body learns how to un-learn what it is holding onto and remind itself of past patterns which were useful… while molding newer ones, we can move better as we age, otherwise what’s the point of going on binding ourselves over and over.
For “its” sake… something’s gotta to give.
Some of us know this state all too well and many people are looking for a way out.
The practice of somatics uses a brain process which is at the heart of somatics exercises. The exercises are more akin to un-exercise since they target a specific part of the brain to release muscles which are holding.
The downside is that it takes time to reorganize muscles yet the nervous system can be readily changed. A little bit of practice reminds the brain of how we once used it to self-correct the muscles.
The upside is easy, simple movement done with awareness… releases brain chemicals to allow the muscles to function at a better level while being tuned down to be less reactive and calmer… the binds begin to unwind.
Fibromyalgia, “it” sucks… yet with a little time re-organizing our nervous system… the brain can change and the body can feel young again, naturally, easily, and effortlessly.
Somatic Tip… the in – between game for your brain
Posted by: | CommentsOne aspect of exercise that often gets missed is how we transition our body from one exercise to the next … keeping the body fit is one part, keeping the brain fit is another.
We’re often in a rush to get ‘er done… and move onto the next exercise.
Especially if you do things like circuit training, when there’s a line of people waiting on the machine you’re on at a gym.
Switching speeds is another part of the exercise game… and it’s a brain changer too.
Most of the time when we’re exercising, we’re in our cerebellum doing learned movement so we can get to the next learned movement pattern.
Do we ever consider how we move from one exercise to the next?
What is really involved with your whole being?
How did you get there? Did the right foot lead… was your arm leading you…
Or was it your head moving first when you arose from a seated position?
Whatever you did, what does it feel like merely to get into the next exercise position?
Somatically speaking… this is the “body experienced from within”… sensing the way in between movements takes you to another part of your brain.
The brain which actually can plan a movement.
Getting in that gap… changing what your brain does… adds another aspect to exercise that we might not have considered otherwise.
Just for fun…
Do what you normally do for an exercise routine by going through the motions…
Stay more focused on what’s going on between each of your exercises.
What are your tendencies…
What are your movement habits?
How do you… do your move to next thing?
Being aware of a particular exercise is just part of how we can improve our health through movement.
People who practice somatics exercises… feel what’s going on in the un-exercise moments of movement and play the in-between game for the health of the body and the brain.
Flossed your joints lately? A little Brain Fitness will get you there.
Posted by: | CommentsJust like flossing your teeth, flossing your joints is vital, if not critical to your well-being.
Since Brain Fitness is all the rage, Joint Health is paramount to moving that brain bucket and your skeleton around in comfort, otherwise, that compensated person you know will slide quickly towards degeneration and decrepitude – ouch.
Are you aware of what to do to promote joint health using yourself effectively? Who else do you know … flosses their joints? Somatic exercises are one avenue…
Much like a car which requires the oil to be changed and the joints to be lubed, your body requires this same type of maintenance so you can remain comfortably mobile and less squeaky and creaky. While you may take certain supplements to augment your health, did you know you can provide the nourishment your joints need by effective movement using your brain as nature intended?
Your joints respond to a great deal of neurological information like relating to the positions of the bones and muscles. The information gets reported along your spinal cord so you can adjust your angle, position, and speed of how you coordinate your joints as you carry yourself.
Your joints sit in a bath of fluid to foster better movement. This affords you the ability to move fluidly in response to danger or bodily threat.
Butter with your toast?
The integrity of your skeleton is essential to your well being, maybe even more so than all the complications you deal with as you age. Staying alive is one thing but can you move those joints around to get yourself to the fridge comfortably?
The wild animal who has a slow feedback system or a lack of joint integrity may not be able to keep up with the herd and most likely will get picked off along the way. If your joints are in a vulnerable place, then your muscles can contract reflexively to protect you – sometimes a good thing, unless you live in a constant state of protection.
Your joints have to be ready for action when needed and have the intelligence toward integrity. A lack of joint integrity can lead to, compensating patterns of movement with all sorts of lousy outcomes for you.
One of these may be the possibility of a dislocation which actually serves to keep your system going. Your joints will ring the alarm bells and the response to your brain is incredibly fast. Your engine will keep running, though you’re not going anywhere fast … you are still breathing, still alive…
An interesting relationship occurs between your muscles and joints. If your muscles are tuned down, then it’s possible your joints tune up in order to ready the muscles for action.
When you’re bedridden for some time, you’ll notice how your muscles atrophy along with a loss of your flexibility. If your muscles get overworked or get tired, the ability to maintain the joints integrity is compromised.
Instead, well-rested muscles are neurologically intact. These are muscles which release accordingly so the joints are ready for action in a variety of responses.
Did you ever notice when you do some extra vigorous activity, the next day your flexibility can be diminished, unless, you took care of yourself that evening or morning? In other words, did you floss your joints to take care of yourself and ready your muscles for the next day’s work or event?
We often think about our muscles and pay little heed to the joints, until they ache and take you down. Your joints may even tighten to protect you although you feel those sore, overworked muscles. You might think, I should have stretched… but as you know… stretching shortens the muscles, so why do that?
Is the “tightness” you feel something other than short muscles? Is it possible you’re feeling your body’s response to inactivity, over use, and/or possibly weakness?
Strong muscles are not necessarily short as weak muscles are not necessarily long. When your muscles are relaxed they can shorten for the strength output you need. If your muscles remain short all the time you may experience un-desireable consequences.
Weak muscles can shorten and not have the function they normally would have until the neurological signals allow for it.
Well, what can you do about it? How about flossing those joints in a very neurological way? You accomplish this with movements that work with the central nervous system in harmony with the muscular and joint systems.
Your brain can integrate movements through a cortical process which somatic exercises provide. In other words, you’re practicing Brain Fitness. Your results will be an agile body ready to articulate itself with a variety of options thereby giving your joints a well needed maintenance and improvement option.
Somatic exercises are not exercise in the normal sense since these exercises are highly specific to foster the brain’s ability to accurately sense the information and increase the coordination of how we move our joints, muscles and bones so they can all work together cohesively in the field of gravity.
Either gravity works for you or you live with a system of working against gravity and its repercussions.
Central nervous programming, is more important than cardiovascular or strength training according to author Mel Siff of Facts and Fallacies of Fitness.
Floss for your joints?
So if we took a little time to floss our joints via cortical pathways this give you the ability to learn and adapt accordingly… you’ll change yourself towards a more cohesive, better mover, with the natural side-effects of moving and being in less physical pain. The danger signals are now mitigated and will elicit themselves accordingly since now your joints are no longer compromised. You have the function and capacity to get where you want, comfortably… and you’re less likely to be toast on the food chain.
All it takes is a little practice. Heck, as long as you remind the brain within 72 hours, you’ll still have a good chance to continue your progress and keep your brain fit. By practicing a form of brain fitness, you can change the resting levels of your muscles so your joints will delightfully bathe and have the ability to articulate accordingly.
You can always try the somatic exercises and develop this sense of flossing your joints right now, right here.
