Moving out of pain: The higher-ground lessons

When you’re in pain, you do not want to put extra demands on the system. If you are struggling with hip, back, or shoulder pain, these lessons can help.

Use these slow, luxurious, deconstructed lessons as building blocks for your nervous system to develop somatosensory awareness. In each experiment, you are invited to grow a small, simple movement into a more global action using your whole self. At no point do you move outside your range of comfort.

While these lessons point to improvement in one part of your skeletal system, a reminder that all lessons improve the use of your whole self in every movement.

Read my note on chronic pain and the higher-ground lessons.

To bring the legs to stand on the back: To stand your legs without unnecessary back strain, use the foundational movement of swiveling the legs in the hip joints. The scooping motion saves your back and invites a more natural, developmental hip movement.

It also reduces tension in the low back, leaving your spine flatter and your legs more comfortable. If you know this movement already, you can skip this one—although it’s always good to revisit!

To improve your hips: Do this slow, simple movement of tilting one knee and then the other. Add rolling the head in relationship to the knee.

The study is to clarify the timing and smoothness of the movement. If you have pain in the hips or low back, this is a wonderful lesson to give your nervous system the break it needs to calm down after gripping and struggling all day.

For more improvement in your hips: Do this follow-on lesson. Here you attend to the smoothness again, but you add complexity by moving the head and eyes in opposite directions.

Movements are always slow and small, there’s no prize for making big movements. You grow your awareness as you tilt the legs and roll the head, making more and more sensorimotor distinctions without a lot of complexity. This is a good restful, slow, down-regulating lesson.

To reduce shoulder tension: Use this lesson to explore the different planes of sliding the shoulders. The smaller you make the movements, the more your nervous system will lower the high level of excitation, jumpiness, and bound-up tension.

When you give yourself over to the lesson and let it do you, you will feel rested, flowy, and flat across your upper back and shoulders. If you try too hard to perform, the tension will remain. Give yourself permission to barely move.

For more improvement in your shoulders: This lesson adds sliding the hips. This way, you start to organize the whole torso, observing how the shoulders and hips work in tandem by moving from the middle.

Again, slow and small is your friend. Identifying the pattern is how you learn, not by force or strain. Give yourself permission to barely move and then feel how you walk!

To improve your walking: This lesson makes full circles in the hips and shoulders where you do a circle in a shoulder, then a hip, then both together, then both opposite. It grows in complexity as you go along. This helps with easy, fluid transmission of force through the whole torso. Again, feel how you walk after this!

To improve your breathing: And your posture, digestion, sleeping, and to reduce overall tension everywhere, do this lesson! Freeing the diaphragm has radical implications for relieving strain and improving your overall health. Here you expand the belly and chest in alternating movements in many different positions.

The deliberate, contrived movements of the musculature around the breathing apparatus can have profound implications for lifelong habits of holding.

To improve your low back and jaw: Do this swivel movement in the pelvis. While there are many versions of the pelvic clock in Feldenkrais, here you emphasize the relationship of the jaw to how easily you swivel the pelvis.

Your low back and ribs will thank you after this. This lesson can affect the hips, the breathing, the spine, and more, it depends on where you are at on any given day.

To flatten out your back: Do this side-bending lesson where you slide the head and shoulders to one side and the other. As you are tilted to one side, you raise and lower a hip. Then you do some light, quick ankle movements while you are bent to the side. It’s amazing for flattening out the whole back in light, easy, uncomplicated movements.

Moving the hip and ankle while you are bent to the side completely changes the tone along the spine. It’s one of those truly magical lessons where you you wake up the spine, bone by bone, all the way to the head! Feel how flat you are after this.

To reduce neck strain: Here you lift your head on the side. Gradually, using the whole torso, your head becomes lighter and lighter as you work less in the neck and distribute the work along the spine. The leg also becomes lighter using the same principle of moving from the middle.

To lengthen your upper back and spine: Use this rotation lesson. Here you lie on the side and bring the top arm toward the ceiling. You do some reaching and rotating of the long, straight arm to access the shoulder and upper ribs. Slowly, the rotation of arm toward the ceiling invites more and more vertebrae. You only move comfortably here, it’s not a stretch.

This lesson will affect different people differently on different days. It will definitely flatten out your upper back and invite more upright posture as you become taller and longer. However you feel the effects of the lesson is what you needed to learn.

To improve walking: This lesson looks at softening the tone along the foot. You bend and unbend the ankles and toes in many variations, letting go of excess tension in the calves, feet, and even the low back. As you become more supple across the foot, the low back also lets go.

To improve the neck and upper back: On the front, bend the knees and sink the feet to one side and the other with you head and neck in different positions. This unwinds tension along the spine and creates freedom in the neck. You learn to move relative to the neck in different positions. You can always modify this to suit your own needs by not turning the head very much. You’ll find the back flatter and the head freer after this.

To free the hips and low back: Here you tilt the leg bones in the hips, the you roll the hips around the legs. Gentle rolling is a very effective way to loosen tension in the spine and low back. Then you hug yourself with the arms and roll the chest back and forth, increasing the softness along the spine. As you tilt the legs again, the hips are magically like butter!

To free the upper back and shoulders: On the front, the hand is standing. You tuck the head toward the knee and the knee toward the head and curl the spine. Sliding the ribs under the shoulder and distributing the work along the spine helps your torso feel lighter and lighter. The idea of moving from the middle is elusive at first, then it makes sense!

To improve upright posture: Use extension along the spine. This is a very deconstructed, slow lesson using the back muscles to lift the head. The trick is to use the whole back, not just bits and pieces. As you clarify how each part of the spine can come to the party, the back becomes more supple. You feel “stronger,” but it’s because you are using more of your whole self in each movement.

To lengthen the spine and feel taller: Start by tapping the foot on the ground and flexing the ankle. Then you do a lot of folding in the spine, elbow to knee variations. Then you tap the foot again: As you bend the ankle, feel it into the knee, hip, and low back. You’ll be amazed at how well the legs connect to the low back after this!