Gentle pressing and rolling

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With these lessons you can feel upright and long, take a breath as your ribs expand, and learn to trust the bones again.

This lesson is slow and gentle and helps alleviate the hidden tightness in the ribs, jaw, belly, and neck. Use this lesson to unravel your tight hips and low back as you shift your mental state back into the calm parasympathetic state and out of the tense, contracted, non-breathing, fight-or-flight, hyper-vigilant sympathetic state.

Tip: If you’re not comfortable with the arms behind your back, put a rolled towel there and place your hands on your belly.

For more lessons with the arms behind, see: 
68 Arms behind #1
72 Arms behind #2
74 Arms behind #3
18 Rolling pelvis over arms to soften low back and ribs

This is an amazing lesson, unraveling years of tension in the back and shoulders. It is slow, detailed, and informative. The variations deconstruct the relationship of the arms to the torso, bone by bone. If you truly do it slowly, as indicated, you can sense the possibility of the chest responding to the arms.

I find the more I’m a bit lazy about it, the more my system learns. So play with it, flop around, let the bones move. It is tempting to add tension by trying too hard to do it perfectly. Make it imperfect, wiggly, and fun.

(This is a deconstructed version of the Errol Flynn lesson, AY68, Rolling Fists.)

Here is another slow, gentle lesson rolling across the back, sensing the gentle weight shift of the ribs side to side.

Chest tension is what you can let go of, but what you gain is a sense of coordination through the torso that points to fundamental human locomotion: walking. Like the previous one, this lesson has clear indicators for noticing when your skeleton is moving and when it’s not, and what might be inhibiting movement.

Awareness of where we’re holding is what I call “good data.” It helps us check in with ourselves during the day, and it creates a benchmark for ease and comfort when we let it go. I love doing this lesson when I don’t feel like doing too much, perhaps before bed, or after a hike. Can you tell that this lesson is about coordinating the torso for walking? Imagine the natural flow of human movement along the diagonal and you can detect the pattern.

The gentle wave at the end is a favorite of many clients.

This lesson is very quiet with remarkable results. Here you imagine, draw, play the movie of, pretend, think, or move so tiny that no one can see you do it. The imagination, or, more technically, motor control imagery, is a deeply powerful tool for smoothing out tensions. After all, in your imagination you move perfectly. Who imagines themselves moving with difficulty? 

Surrender to the process and treat it like a meditation. Your shoulders will let go of all that unconscious activity that you hold onto.

For lessons similar to this with more movement, see:
120 Hip and shoulder circles
201 Connect the shoulders with lines and arcs
206 Hip and shoulder circles
4 Release the neck and shoulders
44 Loosening up to run

This lesson helps you clarify pressure across the back many ways, including by breathing into your inner volume with imaginary tubes running along the diagonals, which I just love. The flattening out of the back is like “cookie dough in the oven,” as one of my clients says.

With a more precise use of the musculature of the torso, the source of your strength becomes clear. And the whole lessons invites you to notice unnecessary tension in the neck, eyes and jaw, which we often add when something feels complex, as if more tension helps.

Clarity is in the brain, not the muscles. When that clarity bubbles to the surface, life gets easier.

Similar lessons with gentle folding:
121 Magic back lesson, coordinate hips and shoulders
338 Gentle folding to increase choices
344 Lifting four corners

(A version of the four corners/lifting diagonals lesson: Amherst week 3, 3 July diagonal pressing)

This is a slow lesson that tilts the head and pelvis, linking it with the eyes, breath, and chest. Then, of course, you vary the pattern in different ways, for example, eye by eye. I give this lesson to many of my anxious and stressed clients. It takes you right out of your ruminating and worrying. It's also good before bed. You can chunk it down and do a few minutes at a time.

As you return again and again to the inner space and the image of action you have constructed for yourself, you start to feel a sense of connection from the head to the pelvis. The result is improved balance, weight shift, and ease in standing.

You don’t have to think very much here. Just make small, simple movements and follow along as your jaw lets go, your breathing settles, and your pelvis once again talks to the head. This is a smoothing-out-the-tension lesson. Most of this lesson is on the back, then the movements are done in sitting to allow the spine, neck, and eyes to re-set.

This is a lovely lesson to play with at the end of a long day. Often I just play a lesson with absolutely no intention to do it. I just lie there and listen. Then, part way through, I get interested and start to lift a leg or an arm because I'm curious. But I don't come at it like, “I am going to get this lesson done and check it off my list.” I just lie down and see how I feel.

For more gentle pelvis rocking lessons, see:
30 Clarify hips with circles of the pelvis
217 Roll chest, point elbows, lengthen spine

For a wonderful complement to this rocking movement, do this breathing lesson:
268 Breathe into lower belly, free the diaphragm