Balance in standing: The importance of trusting your bones

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Introduction

A lack of balance feels effortful, a sensation of wasted movement. It is caused by conflicting impulses arriving at voluntary muscles. Well-coordinated, balanced movement, on the other hand, has the sensation of ease, an absence of effort.

Coordination is a voluntary act, it's making a choice and using the muscles in a way that's compatible with that choice.

Very often clients come in to see me and complain they can’t move, they’re weak, they’re exhausted, they need to strengthen their back, their legs, their arms. It’s hard to access your strength when your muscles are pulling in two directions at once. When that pattern shifts, you feel more balanced not because of more strength, but because of more available muscles.

With too many inner traffic jams, as I call them, you feel weak, tired, and unable to rest on your bones with freedom and balance. If this sounds like you, don’t worry, it’s possible to change. These lessons will help.

See my blog post, Where did my strength go? for more on this topic.

This is one of my favorite lessons. In standing, you tilt your whole self in the ankle joints, feeling the weight shift. The attention goes to the belly: are you tensing? If you are, you’ve challenged your balance too much and your system is bracing.

You learn to focus on the safety zone, moving off your center and coming back as you move your weight around in various ways. Training your sense of balance will serve you the rest of your life. (Plus, you can play with this while waiting in line to get your groceries!)

(San Francisco training year 2, from Dennis Leri)

For more like this, 16 Walking backward.

This is an exploration in feeling where your center is. How do you “know” you're in the center? What tells you? How do you find it again after being destabilized?

This lesson experiments with weight distribution using side bending to shift off center many ways. Experiment with the speed and timing of coming quickly back to center, feeling the skeletal connection through the heels as you do. Notice the contrast side to side as you clarify side bending one way and the other.

Usually we move the arms around our fixed torso. There are some interesting variables in this lesson that ask you to move the torso around the arms, reversing proximal and distal. Feel how this asks your brain to rewire some long-held assumptions.

(San Francisco training, via Dennis Leri)

Much of this lesson is imagining, sensing, and tracking distances. Right heel to left knee, left elbow to the base of the neck, and so on. As you make multiple crossings of these lines on yourself, you are asked to find the midpoint of various X’s. In this way, you become more and more clear about where you are in space.

For last third of the lesson you stand up and feel where these X’s are in standing. You shift your weight in interesting ways, tracking when you’re over one foot and the other with various center points. It’s complex, but worth experimenting with.

You’ll get better and better at sensing lines, directions, lengths, and criss-crosses. This is vital for sensing where you are in space, feeling the shape of your bones, and how you’re holding yourself at any given moment. (I am curved to the left as I write this flopped on my couch, which pushes the majority of my weight onto my right side, for example!)

(AY256)

First of all, this lesson is not IN walking. It's a preparation for walking, shifting your weight in interesting ways while standing.

I just love this lesson. You cross your legs in standing and shift the weight from heel to heel in various directions: side to side and front to back. The sense of shifting weight and landing on the bones, over and over, with different breathing patterns, informs your balance.

Sense and clarify the relationship between the head and pelvis as you shift your weight. You will learn to discriminate what standing really means, allowing the bones to support you and letting everything go.

(AY274)

Focus on the head moving in relation to the pelvis as you examine balance and weight shift.

(AY275)

This is a little bit of a puzzle lesson in how you approach the weight shift while sliding the hands down the legs many ways. I like the way you have to figure out what to do with the pelvis and the head, and when you do, the movement changes.

It is one of those lessons that makes much more sense by the end, so keep playing with it. Plus, It’s amazing how flexible you can be without stretching!

(Elementary attempts at loving oneself, Esalen workshop)

This lesson is done “standing on the wall.” Really, lie down on your back in front of a wall and put your feet on it, as if standing on the wall. Many, many clients report loving this lesson for its clear feedback and improved balance as you press the feet on the wall and play with many angles and pressures.

The idea here is to feel the pressure from the foot travel through your leg, into your pelvis, ribs, spine, and head. With each new angle of the foot, your torso will sense the force along a slightly different trajectory. The puzzle is to find the angle(s) with the clearest, easiest, lightest connection to your head. (Hint: It might be more than one.)

Do one foot as the lesson instructs, then walk around and feel the difference left to right. Your brain learns by contrasts. Plus, once you sense your own nervous system's capacity for change and growth, you have concrete confirmation that you are not stuck with one way of relating to the ground.

You can do the other leg, but do it later, or another day. It's worth feeling the differences. It benefits your learning to feel “funny” for a while and avoid grasping after the familiar. It is the familiar, after all, that can drag us down into our ruts.