Arms integrate on stomach

Introduction

This is an amazing series for the neck, upper back, and shoulders, as well as eliminating “text neck” and bringing the head back to where it belongs, on top of the spine. These lessons start with the arms at right angles lying on the front.

This series includes three sets of lessons:

• Arms integrate on stomach (Amherst week 6, July 15, 1980)

• Tonic neck (Amherst week 7, July 21, 1980)

• Arms, shoulders, head turning

This is a slow, gentle exploration of lying on the front and adapting the arms, shoulders, and chest to help the head turn side to side. The movement includes lengthening the arms one up and one down while on the front side, then placing them at 90 degrees to the spine in the shoulder and again at 90 degrees at the elbow.

As you swivel to the other side, the constraint of the arms asks you to adapt in the ribs and spine to ease the turning. This lesson always softens the ribs and helps the easy turn of the head.

This continues the last movement with a lot of detailed sensing and adds a new variable of flexing the ankles at the while you turn the head and arms. Using the ankles as a barometer, you move the trunk with such lightness that the ankles don’t stop moving. It’s an awareness practice for sure. You can’t heave yourself around and make light, easy movements in the ankles.

The lesson asks you to detail awareness of the joints and how you organize to be comfortable on the belly. You also start to tilt the legs and feel the spine, shoulders, ribs, and head.

More bending the arms and rolling the head, but adding a lot of variety in the leg tilting to “scramble the pattern.” Then, when you go back to the original, it’s easier and smoother. How is the alternate tilting and bending of the arms like walking? See what you think as you walk around at the end and swing the arms and legs.

Here is a beginning of a new organization of the arms, shoulders, and chest. This lesson invites a lot of experimenting on your part. As you go through the series, the elusive becomes more and more obvious. If it’s elusive right now, now, that’s not wrong, it’s learning.

I watched the video of this lesson in Moshe’s Amherst training and hundreds of people were displaying hundreds of different variations to solve the puzzle.

If you have a current shoulder injury, this is not an optimal lesson, however you could listen to the movements and imagine doing them, using motor imagery, which will always improve your function.

You continue with the same pattern, seeking more details in how the arms connect to the back, using the legs to gain more insight. The ideas of weight shift, rolling, leveraging, and reorganizing your shape come into play here.

Much of this process is learning how to reduce strain, noticing where you are pinching, shoving, pulling, and generally fighting with yourself to “get” something to happen. Once you decide to let go of all that and just make life easy for yourself by changing up your strategy, the movement happens on its own. Test it out, don’t listen to me!

As advertised, this lesson invites more and more softening in the ribs. You start out on the back, hugging your shoulders and rolling to soften the ribs. On the belly with arms at right angles, you start to slide the arms in different directions under the ribs until you are rolling across the arms and sliding the legs in an integrated, easy way.

This lesson starts with the arms in that same right-angled position, then it moves into rolling the head in many ways with the forehead in the palm of the right hand and the left hand behind the head.

This process creates a little puzzle for the neck muscles, pulling you out of your habitual tension as the new movements require new patterns. The head and neck will be much freer after this, and the tension in the eye muscles softens.

Here we start to tilt the knees to the side and come quickly back to center, as well as refine the timing of the head and arms. The idea is to turn from the bottom (pelvis) to the top (head), so that when you go back to sliding the arms in and out of right angles and turning the head, it is no different than the feeling of resting, so smooth and yummy is your whole trunk.