Trusting balance: Shifting weight with levers and rolling

We will explore options for mobility and stability in the human frame. Sense from the inside how you balance on your bones, leading to lightness and ease as you shift your weight with elegance and counterweight instead of force and strain.

The start to this workshop is finding softness in the back. It’s difficult to roll over a rigid surface. It’s like hauling yourself up and falling back to the floor, like a belly flop in the pool. Contrast this with a smooth, sequential lifting and pressing of each vertebra into the floor. You can see how softening the tone of the back is the first step to rolling.

Here you sit up and just begin to roll back. As the legs float away from the floor, if your back is rigid, you’ll feel your stomach muscles try to balance you instead of the natural shift of the limbs in gravity. This is just a small test of how you bend and flex, no actual rolling yet. Just sense your mass over your center of gravity and then as you shift off that center, what happens? Where do you hold, brace, or grip?

Here is a lesson to accentuate the spine’s ability to bend. Slowly, in incremental bits, you become more and more flexible and soft, which only means you have access to more of your power. Just think: If you’re not contracted all the time, how you’d feel so much less fatigued. This lesson continues the unwinding of the tone of the back.

Here we reverse the flexion pattern and start bending backward. Do this slowly, with great delicacy. Only do as much as you can do. Often in the extension lessons we repeat our habits and over-contract in the one place we know how to move. Use this lesson to wake up the other, less mobile, parts of your spine.

Now we use the extension pattern to do something fun, we swivel up to sit. It’s a lovely feeling to counter the legs behind with the head and chest rotating in front. As your eyes track the horizon, suddenly you are over the hip and sitting. Again, think of each segment of your spine coming to the swiveling party.

Here is a continuation of rolling up to sit, but from the flexion pattern instead of extension. You practice in sitting, balancing the legs forward as the center of mass rolls backward. How fast you round the back, when you lift the legs, even where your eyes are will inform how much your muscles have to work. Ideally, the muscles move almost not at all as you slowly, slowly, piece by piece, roll a little backwards and forwards with a greater sense of balance.

I love this lesson. It’s the same idea of using the legs as a counterweight to roll up to sit, but here you start from the back holding the knees. You play with what’s called “graduated flexion” where there is not one big, fast movement but a gradual increase of muscular contraction exactly calibrated to the task at hand. No over- or under-contracting, just appropriate work. It’s not an easy thing to master so take your time.

Note that it doesn’t matter whether you can “do” the movement here. Just play with the variables and note how your legs rest at the end. That is the lesson. Find for yourself “the difference that makes a difference,” as Moshe says. Whatever part of your learning changes your ability and improves your skill, that’s the right thing to do.

The second half of this lesson with the long legs providing a counterweight to the chest and head.

This lesson takes everything you learned about bending the spine and counterbalancing the legs and puts it into a larger, more demanding rolling motion. It feels amazing when each bone starts to press and lift in a coordinated way. I can’t tell you how easy it feels after you discover how to use the entire spine. This lesson flattens out my back like nothing else. Even though the middle of this lesson can be a puzzle, the whole back changes by the end.

For this lesson you do a lot of rolling up the spine so make sure your spine feels bendy and flexible, ideally from doing the previous lessons!