Archive for August, 2010
Somatics Exercises for Your Neck and Shoulders
Posted by: | CommentsNovel somatics exercises help you reduce your muscle stiffness the way nature intended. In nature, all healthy vertebrate animals use the process of a pandiculation to get their muscles loose and ready for the day.
As we age, most of us have forgotten this lost art of pandiculating. In fact, we all did it in our mother’s womb. If you’ve forgotten how to pandiculate, then it’s likely your muscles are getting stiffer as you age. You don’t feel as spry as you used to.
You can change all of that in an instant since this is a cortical brain response. Your brain is waiting for you to pandiculate so it can send the necessary chemicals of relaxation to the areas you target with your intention.
Brain plasticity or the ability to change your brain allows you to change the feelings of your muscles from stiffness to mobility. When you’re more mobile, you’re less likely to hold your stress… and you’ll be able to sleep even better.
Give these somatics exercises for your neck and shoulders a try and feel for yourself what all the healthy animals already know.
Letting Go of Muscle Tightness
Posted by: | CommentsA number of people have been telling me how they try to let go of their muscular tightness, discomforts or pain by either breathing into it, visualizing or using positive mantras.
These methods can be quite useful but we may not always be successful with these approaches.
Your brain is set up to use the natural process of a pandiculation by using Somatics Exercises. These unique exercises send a message from your brain’s cortex through the spinal cord and out to the muscle or muscles which need to let go.
If you practice Somatics, you may be aware how to use the simple 3 step process by actually contracting your muscles followed by the s-l-o-w release and pausing to sense the effect.
When you feel or sense the release of yourself letting go, you are in a state of learning and reminding your nervous system as to the “how to” of actually letting go.
We often try to deal with accumulated stress, tightness or pain by just breathing into it. This works “if” you already know how to let go in that particular area of your body.
Using your mind to communicate with the muscles, reminds them of their function, and serves to creates a memory pattern which reinforces the learning of how to let go.
You are actively creating and releasing the chemicals of relaxation into your body through the 3 step process of a pandiculation which you can use any time you feel the need.
In other words, you’re also creating a reservoir of the feel good chemicals of relaxation which you can bank on.
The more you practice with the 3 simple steps, the more easily you can tap into your natural resource of turning off stress, tightness, discomfort and pain.
Then once you have the hang of it, and your muscles know and remember how to let go, then breathing, visualizing and following through with your intentions and mantras will move you up a notch in realizing your healthy lifestyle.
Letting go is easy once you know how… you can join us on Saturday, August 14th for a live webinar on how to use the P word to get your muscles to let go in your legs, hips, knees, ankles and feet.
