Grasping the chin: Freeing the shoulders and ribs

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Introduction

The series asks you eventually to grasp the chin and roll around, which, as a prerequisite, invites an immense amount of freedom in the upper back and shoulders. As with all challenging lessons, make small experiments toward the suggested movement. Don’t expect yourself to get it in right away, and, as Moshe says:

The less you force, the faster you will go. When you try to strain, you stiffen yourself, it's just a useless waste of energy. It's not a question of stretching something, it's of organizing the body not to contradict itself. Which we have never learned, except for some things that we used to do when we were babies, and which some of us carried into life. But most of us have learned only to contradict ourselves, to do anything provided we succeed.

It's not essential to succeed, forget it. "Must" and "can" are in my mind contradictory. One is charged with hatred. “I must,” is painful, disagreeable, full of effort. “I can,” is easy, simple. See what you can do, not what you must do. Then, improve what you can do.

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This Treasury series is a compilation from multiple sources. Moshe taught it in his Esalen workshop, the 1974 San Francisco training, the Amherst, Massachusetts, training in 1980, and in London, UK, to name a few.

Many explorations of sliding the arms behind the head on the front, back, and a tricky move with lifting the elbow on the side. At one point, you roll to the side, bring your chest over the knee, and come up to sit, all with the arm behind the head. This move asks you to find a distinct sequence, timing, and weight shift of the chest and head relative to the pelvis or it doesn’t work.

In the beginning, we all think we “should” be able to do this funny thing we’ve never done in our whole life. Humans are such funny creatures that way, putting unrealistic expectations on ourselves. So let go of any “shoulds” and just play with the movement.

For more like this, see:
207 Liberate upper back, slide hand
Amphibian series

(London notes 15)

This lesson starts by lying on the front and flopping the heel in and out. It’s actually one of my favorites because I love how the awareness of what’s possible grows and grows. Slowly, you include the pelvis, spine, and ribs in the rolling of the leg, freeing the upper back more and more.

Then you play a ton with sliding the arms around the fixed head on the front, the back, and in sitting. Eventually, you creep the hand around toward the chin. It’s a little slower and more repetitive than the first one, believe it or not. The shoulders and upper back will totally reorganize…if you allow them!

(San Francisco training, 1975)

This lesson is a lot of tilting the knees in sitting and some on the back. At one point you put a hand on the floor in front of the legs in side-sitting (like lesson 97 Reaching like a cat) and feel the connection of the hand into the hips and spine many ways. Then you feel how the head might, just might, tuck under the arm.

After finding new flexibility in the ribs and upper back, you stand up and play with coming down to squat and then side-sit, then up to squat again.

Clarifying the head/pelvis counterbalance in this lesson will help you be more effective. A similar lesson where the head dives down over the feet is the last lesson in the leg over to stand series. That lesson might help you locate this weight shift pattern in a different way.

TIP: If you can learn this one thing, this counterweight of the head and the pelvis, life itself becomes easier, not to mention all of these lessons. It will help you get out of bed, get up out of a chair, get off the sofa, get on the floor, as well as walk, run, roll, and whatever else you want to do.

I had a client with two knee replacements and two hip replacements, then she cracked her kneecap on top of it all. This strategy was the only way she could get off the sofa with her walker.

For more lessons to help you learn this, see counterbalance and rolling 1 & 2, and the lying down rolling up to stand lessons.

(Amherst training, week 4, 1980)

This lesson wraps up the previous three: you do more rolling side to side, holding the chin and sweeping both arms around in a circle. The arms and shoulders are invited to move even more around the ribs as you repeat some of the other movements, like sliding the hand on the floor away from the legs in side sitting.

There are more variations on the front side: Rolling the long leg and feeling the pelvis and ribs with the head and fixed leg in different orientations.

After expanding on many of the themes in this series, you roll to the side, through side sitting, squatting, and up to stand and circle the elbow in the air.

Please play with these movements, don’t expect to do them perfectly—or at all—the first time around. I know I didn’t do this the first time I tried! Give yourself permission to explore new possibilities with kindness and curiosity.

(San Francisco training, 1975)