What causes us to tilt or walk with a hitch in certain ways? How do we get out of it?
Traumas, falls and accidents can leave you whomp sided, although you will do the best you can to move as well as you can afterwards.
Even habits–such as driving a car and sliding the leg long to depress the gas pedal over and over again or the way you sit or work creates certain patterns.
Our unconscious habitual ways we stand or motion or move ourself can reinforce patterns which serve us to a point. When things become uncomfortable or we’re held in a titled or shifted manner, we’re left compensating.
The simple act of standing and feeling yourself can reveal comfort or discomfort. You can stand as you normally stand and wait. Feel whatever sensations or feelings come up as you simply stand and feel from within how you are feeling in the moment you take to check in.
When you take a moment to consider how you move your entire self or parts of yourself doing any physical activity, you might uncover certain surprises which can open both the brain and body to new possibilities and you’ll certainly learn how coordinated you are or aren’t.
For example, by driving a left hand drive or right hand drive car, you’d certainly feel a shift of a learned habit by fumbling for a moment on a new habit or physical activity to learn.
This can let you know how one sided, how predominant and how whomp sided you may have become over the years of doing a physical movement in a certain way.
There is nothing wrong with specializing a movement pattern or doing regular exercise over and over, unless we feel certain discomforts.
But what if you went inside and fine tuned your nervous system so it could respond in a different un-whomped, less cattywampus manner?
Regaining conscious voluntary control with the muscles and your movement system–a system of coordination–starting with signals from the brain to generate a movement can unlock cattywampus tendencies and patterns.
The lower brain does learned movement and acts to balance or coordinate a movement. It becomes unconscious and automatic so you don’t have to think about it.
The signals up and down the nervous system to self-adjust tension, compression, extension, rotation–mostly go un-noticed.
The sense receptors of the tendons, ligaments, joints, bones, muscles and the fascia tune in and shift to move you around.
Imagine having to pay attention to all of that on a minute to minute basis. It would almost be incomprehensible. Your descriptions of all the senses you notice could be all over the place as to the what or how this feels like to you.
The inner game or inner knowing of our internal connections is a place where many no longer visit. The price for not visiting and checking in can result in discomfort and the feelings of pain being generated.
Your inner self is waiting to be explored. The act of pandiculation is your natural birthright to self-correct. The system of somatics exercises uses the act of pandiculation to target the brain’s motor cortex. This is far different than regular exercise since the movements are done with a greater consciousness.
When you do this consciously by feeling, sensing, coordinating, exploring… you are learning and being with the process of self-evolution itself.
How you either evolve or de-evolve physically is a choice in the inner game or somatic mastery of yourself.
By not playing in the inner realm, you can lose contact with yourself, your own vitality, and your own sense of well-being. Your memory can fade and most obviously, you may not move or feel as well as you used to.
This has nothing to do with age, it is simply abdicating the inner self. The painful or discomforting signals we feel have an opposite in the pleasurable signals, feelings and sensations you can regenerate.
To be able to walk comfortably can be set up by feeling and self-adjusting your joints, the smaller muscles, and the smaller parts of walking itself. Then when you walk, you can feel at a deeper level whatever you want to tune into as you walk.
You might even feel the shifts which can occur as you walk when you quiet your internal dialogue and simply feel how your body moves and changes as you walk.
This type of inner knowledge is invaluable since it serves to keep you connected to yourself and to the earth as you navigate without walking sticks, special shoes, knee braces, taping your muscles, etc.
In other words, to move like a comfortable human animal is to fully feel the sensations of walking itself and how this grand act changes during a simple walk.
Instead of focusing on how far or how fast you walk, you could tune into the adjustments which take place when you walk on the cracks in the sidewalk, how your foot turns over a cobblestone path, or how your hips shift if the hill or slant is a bit sideways.
You can even play one of our favorite somatic games – place your fingers on your ears and close them. Then walk and listen as you walk on some pavement. Can you hear your own internal sound?
Then find the earth and listen now to how your body speaks to you.
Please join us in a different somatics exercise walking class.
You’ll begin with our normal somatic way of exploring movements on the ground. You’ll get to reset tension back to comfortable levels. Then you’ll shift to our normal upright ways and play with walking in a way you may not have for some time.
You’ll gain greater awareness and ultimately better control which you can bank on, even as you age.
You can go from cattywampus and back to somatic mastery by joining us in our online somatics exercise class which is available for immediate access.
