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.

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.

In the recreational side of soccer, did you know that nearly 570,000 athletes were injured playing soccer in 2009?

While many athletes continue to “stretch” as a means of prevention and recovery many of their attempts are ill-fated and actually compound their problems. New research is out which you can use to benefit yourself.

As a self-proclaimed, Divorce Counselor for Stretching, there exists a more natural way to lengthen your muscles and have them functioning for your peak performance.

Your brain, if you will, is the big muscle which sends messages to your muscles to keep them contracted or relaxed at specific rates of contraction.

By pushing your muscles to lengthen, they actually re-contract.

It’s poignant to watch a calf muscle or hamstring get “pulled” in the course of a game and watch the trainers run onto the field and spray the muscles with the “secret” spray or forcefully try to lengthen the muscle in the opposite direction to gain length.

The obvious signal is the muscle is being shortened. This is what’s happening when you are experiencing a cramp or muscle spasm.

By pushing the muscle, when say your calf is cramping, you’re violating the stretch reflex. No worries… you won’t get a ticket for it. This reflex is what keeps the muscles contracting and set at certain levels. By forcing or pushing muscles into length, it actually recontracts and gets shorter afterwards. This is what they found out about back in 1936.

This protective mechanism is a good thing so your muscles don’t tear. This reflex can be readjusted by the brain instead of using force. If you push it, your muscles will be forced into length but the rate of contraction will continue and can be elevated so that your stiffness remains for longer periods of time.

Instead of trying to lengthen the muscle, the brain can be used to do what is clearly happening in the moment. The cramp is a muscle shortening to protect itself. So shortening it, is what is you can do in order for the muscle to allow itself to lengthen back and reset it’s level of contraction.

Now this may seem counterintuitive. Once you get the hang of a simple 3 step process, you’ll be able to use this natural approach which is systematized by Somatics Exercises. These types of exercises have been prescribed to successfully get people out of pain, stiffness and cramps or muscle spasms.

Your brain is showing what needs to be done but of course we normally “react” by pulling away from any pain.

Learning how to go with it, is what sets you free even though it’s counter to what we’ve been led to do.

Once you get the hang of Somatics, in which the goal, like stretching, is to lengthen the muscles, it’s simply achieved by the brain rather than than forcing a muscle.

Preventing injuries can be helped if the muscles are more relaxed in the first place. So it’s obvious, why make things tighter with brawn when you can use your brain to change how much activity and rate of contraction your muscles have to live with… it’s always easier to move if you’re less stiff, compensated, and not holding on for dear life in those exquisite moments of the mystery and misery of a cramp or muscle spasm.

10am – 1pm Pacific Coast Time.

Guarding and holding onto your muscles to keep protecting yourself is no way to live… and something you’re all too familiar with.

Using muscle relaxants, ice, heat, and other meds hasn’t solved it for you either.

• Do you have to live with it?
• Do you have to keep enduring it?
• Does it have to keep happening to you?

Come join us to unravel yourself naturally by using yourself so simply and easily that it could boggle your mind.

Find out more here.

Yes, it’s easy as 1-2-3.

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Is there a silver bullet or set of pills, muscle relaxants, or balms that’ll take the stiffness out of your muscles?

Each week I get to witness people using a variety of methods like heat, ice, and various balms, just to soothe stiff, contracted, sore muscles.

Some people even chug down ibuprofen right before kickoff.

Other people keep wearing the same brace year after year and all of them are doing the best they can to release whatever discomforts and compensations their body is holding them in.

Even traditional stretching which is now known to weaken muscles is still being used.

Nature, however, has set it up so you can achieve relaxation simply using your brain and flooding your nervous system with chemicals to change the state of your muscles.

By changing the levels your muscles are contracting at, your brain can zap out the stiffness and contracted states you feel and live with.

Merely by spending some time pandiculating yourself, you can achieve the state of calmness, serenity and being-ness with which your muscles will gladly thank you for.

What’s a pandiculation? It’s merely using your brain to change the level of stiffness or contracted-ness your muscles are currently experiencing.

All healthy vertebrate animals have this know-how. They feel their stiff and shortened muscles… then they pandiculate themselves out of it. Afterwards they are ready to move easily, freely and agilely.

So if lathering yourself with creme, popping some pills and wearing braces is working for you, by all means keep doing that…

If these interventions would give lasting relief, I’d be all over it, sadly they’re just band-aids.

Nature has the answer. We’re already set up to pandiculate to take out stiffness and feel satisfied afterwards.

Somatics Exercises, which are the complete reverse of everything else out there, uses pandiculation as the means to moving more freely. Taking out compensatory patterns which bind you and lead to the cause of your stiff, over contracting muscles… is a simple matter.

You can go ahead and keep being a stiff or use that knowledge to change the signals your brain is sending by the simple act of a pandiculation.

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While I normally comment on movement as a key to well-being. Moving to the refrigerator and in the grocery store or sitting down for a prepared meal in a restaurant is another part of a strategy to well-being.

If you’re loading yourself up on packaged foods and expect your body to move well… please try it again and see if you get the same result. I applaud the efforts of Jamie Oliver’s television show and his intent to plant seeds to improve not only how school children eat… it’s a lesson for us big kids too.

Moving well also requires you to nourish your being with food that gives you positive energy and one of the simplest of foods is merely drinking clean and healthy water.

Lack of hydration, ill nourishment and medication, both legal and illegal will take you away from moving well as nature intends, otherwise, all the pandiculators, the healthy vertebrate animals would be in a mess too. Some of them are on account of what they have access to as well as your children and the community you live in.

I know when I travel and can’t get organic food, I’m in a literal bind, which thankfully only lasts for a small duration and when I discover areas which have co-ops and healthy restaurants which I even discovered in Sin City, Las Vegas in a soccer tournament I was competing in…

My hope is that Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution will re-spark what so many have come to understand how food is delivered to children at school, what is available at the grocery store, and what we ingest as fast food.

Healthy minds thrive on good food, physical activity, great relationships and the inner feeling of connectedness. This is somatics. To move with intelligence is our birthright as is evidenced by how we pandiculated in our mother’s womb. To continue to move well is fostered by this intelligent act of pandiculation.

To eat well is a choice to wield another and further intelligence to allow us to move, think and act freely with a consciousness promoting well-being for all of us. Our health care reform moves onward when we all participate in promoting well-being and practicing it… and modeling it for all children.

It’s not always easy to take the time to prepare a good meal, move with intelligence, think clearly and act in a positive manner… but when the seed is planted and we repeat the simple practice of hygiene in all it’s varied forms, then we truly progress to living life as easy and as well as it can be.

It’s an effort that is well rewarded with feelings of pleasure, confidence, and self-actualization. Life is simple… eat well, move well, think well, be well. The paths can be varied, overlap and your somatics sense of yourself will feel and know it. It’s just practice and revolutions such as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution remind us of our greatness, our capacity to feel it, and that desire which calls us to move forward.

Related Blogs

• Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution: Keeping It Healthy
• Food Revolution with Jamie Oliver | Politicol News
• Jamie Oliver’s ‘Food Revolution’ Stirs the Pot – Kim O’Donnel – Licking Your Chops – True/Slant
• Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution | Blacknell.net

Check him out on Live with Regis and Kelly.

Did you also notice that after what appears to be a yawn… how relaxed he became? Of course you had to watch it in progress to see him show the response of relaxation.

When you’re at the top of your game or wanting to keep pace with younger talent, you’ll use any edge necessary, though in this case, Apolo is using nature’s process of a pandiculation…

And he may not even know about it, as most people don’t… but it doesn’t matter what it’s called since this is just like many natural processes we use without knowing why.

Healthy animals with spines use this little known process to remain agile, quick and strong.

They’ll practice a series of pandiculations first thing in the morning and periodically self-adjust throughout the day. This explains how well they can move and it serves notice to us what we may need to remind ourselves on a daily basis…

How well you move is up to you? Can you improve with age? I think so and though I was living in chronic pain for the better part of two decades… years later I earned only a couple of medals in my 40’s.

My secret training method… pandiculate of course. Now I’ve got some work to do to catch up with Apolo and the rest of the healthy animals.

Join us on Saturday afternoon for three hours of feeling the bliss that you can create by using your wonderful brain to move you in easy, gentle and novel ways.

Pandiculate your way to health and soar like an eagle again.

When you cross into the realm of using your cortical pathways to release brain chemicals …you produce relaxation and diminished physical pains and stress.

Instead of using techniques and methods, you can learn how to harness your awareness through a process most people have never heard of, namely the process of pandiculation via Somatics Exercises.

Can moving your self so simply and gently that it could boggle your mind be a way of out the misery? … the way out of the aches, the ongoing strains…

Your mind is very powerful and all you have to do is tap into this natural resource.

Come roll with us … Learn more here.

*Move with Less Effort*

A practice in moving easily is simply accomplished by dialing down your effort in moving.  Being more precise with your movements involves lessening your effort so your muscles work efficiently instead of shuddering with extra effort.

Noticing where you contract from or the area you are using during a movement may not initially be clear.  When you contract and shorten your muscles, take notice to the areas where your contract, the level of effort, the feeling, the sensations aroused or lack thereof.

As you contract your muscles, others are normally and naturally lengthening in response.  It’s not necessary to force the length, rather your observation of it happening, deepens your awareness and your coordination in what moves what and where and how it moves.

*Be Aware of your release*

If you can merely observe the release of your contraction, you’ll notice the resulting length is accomplished without force.

If you force the length, a signal is generated by your brain to re-contract the tissues afterwards.  Traditional forms of stretching actually produce tighter muscles according to the latest research.

To have the flexibility of a cat, the agility of a panther, and the ability to jump like a gazelle requires you to follow their lead.  Animals engage their motor cortex through the process of a series of pandiculations.

*First thing in the morning*

Since animals self-correct throughout their day, it would be wise once again to follow their lead.  When healthy, they engage the process first thing in the morning, every day.  There’s their key.

Who else is going to ready your muscles for you each new day? Animals are wise enough to do it first.  They are not checking the emails nor will you find a way to ready to yourself in your emails, unless of course, you happen to be receiving the Somatic Classes via email.

The natural process of engaging your motor cortex is always available to you… I know you have other things to attend to.  

It’s just a process and as far as I know most of us have the ability to engage in the process since it primarily activates your motor cortex, which has been called your highest learning center.

You can continue to learn and generate new brain cells.  Neurogenesis and neural plasticity perhaps becomes of interest as you age, unless you already engage the process everyday.  If you are, yoohoo, you’re way ahead of most people as the mass understanding of this process hasn’t reached them, yet!

Somatics is merely applied neurogenesis.

*Pay attention to how you move*

Practicing Somatics is a matter of paying attention to how you manipulate yourself in the field of gravity.  How you contend or float in the field of gravity is known to you by the signals your body generates.  You can become more One with the field of gravity.  No this isn’t airy fairy stuff, I mean you can continually fight gravity and keep kicking yourself in the pants, which would naturally lead to tighter hamstrings and a sore back.

*Use your self-correcting brain and mind*

The power lies in your brain to self-correct, adapt accordingly, merely by spending some time in your self.  When you practice the variety of movements which are offered in the Somatics classes or through your understanding and application of Somatics, your brain feeds off of these differentiated patterns to present you with possibilities of change in your habit of movement.

Your habitual and repetitive patterns lead to some of the negative results you encounter over and over.

*Differentiate your movements*

Differentiation provides an avenue to more integrated, more coordinated, more balanced and efficient movement itself.  You’ll know how, when, and at what speed, in order to move more cohesively.

So as I said, learning to move with greater ease isn’t easy, but it’s very simple once you get the hang of the process.  

The antidote for discomfort, pain, aches, soreness, etc, lies between your ears.

Engaging the process is not under your nose, it’s in it.