More healthy spine

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This is an amazing, slow, gentle lesson that softens the ribs, improves upright posture, creates more oxygen flow, and stabilizes your balance. The feet connect more and more to the ground as you fold the ribs in many ways to organize the muscles of the back.

You will test rolling up the spine many ways, then with one arm overhead, then with one leg crossed over the other. There are also lots of folding motions to clarify the angle of pressure across the back. You will feel flat as a pancake after this!

Similar lessons with gentle folding:
121 Magic back lesson, coordinate hips and shoulders (one of my favorites!)
338 Gentle folding to increase choices
344 Lifting four corners

Similar lessons with spine like a chain:
65 Spine like a chain
70 Spine like a chain with gentle lasso

Habits serve us well until they don’t. These tricky puzzle lessons invite a new kind of responsiveness when you are open and kind. This lesson places the arms behind the back and moves the back across the arms, and old habits lose their hold.

Tip: If putting the arms behind the back is a challenge, use a rolled towel instead and bring the arms out to the side.

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

A slow, gentle lesson continuing the “jiggling” pattern. Use this lesson to monitor your breathing. The more you can let the breathing be easy as you move the more upright you will feel.

Arms behind again, with a little less constraint on the back. Try doing less in this lesson. The minute you do less, the skeleton becomes more available to you and your neural pathways reorganize instead of sinking into the ruts of habit.

Tip: If putting the arms behind the back is a challenge, use a rolled towel instead and bring the arms out to the side.

A wall does not shift unless tremendous power is applied. Human stability, in contrast, means safely shifting off our base and returning. Oscillating lessons train you to use less muscular work to stay upright so you can easily shift your weight and return to center. We have what’s called a high potential energy, meaning it doesn’t take much to move our high center of gravity off our narrow base—unless we interfere with it. If we over-tense to stay upright, it takes more much more energy to shift ourselves, just like a wall!

(London notes via Mark Reese)

Coordinating the musculature in front and back is a vital human organization that most of us are dysfunctional in to varying degrees. This lesson helps everyone! It’s an iconic, foundational sequence that has versions throughout the method, it’s so effective.

If you go slower and smaller than you think is necessary, really give yourself permission to do easy, yummy movements, the muscles will unwind anyway, without you having to DO anything or work hard. Test the theory, see what you think.

(ATM book lesson 5, Dennis Leri)

The second and third parts of the coordinating lesson. It’s my go-to lesson for unraveling tension across the whole back, especially the lower lumbar. I will often flop on the floor at the end of a day and listen to it. Even if I zone out, the movements have an effect. Do only what’s comfortable and let the movements work their magic.

Other versions of flexors and extensors:
43 Tilt knees, lengthen arms
87 Tilt knees, rotate spine, fold chest
91 Tilt knees, roll chest and head
211 Eyes, neck, arms, triangle (focuses on the eyes and neck)
380 Gentle twisting with flexors and extensors