Finding Shoulder and Pelvic Stability to Knees Off, Up/Down Stretch following posterior chain activation choreography, all from the tops of my feet.
One of my greatest, most constant measures of my vitality has been during my morning rituals. I almost always start with a presspot of my favorite coffee beans followed by time on the mat.
Time on the mat began during my Alexander Technique training a few years back. I was still progressively losing the ability to move to do just about everything. I could barely use my hands to do much more than wash dishes or lift a pan from one stove burner to another. I certainly couldn’t handwrite for longer than a few sentences and I definitely couldn’t bring my artistic visions to life or even ride my bike for any length of time since that would require hand dexterity and hand/eye coordination I did not have.
Time on the mat is when I take stock of where my body is starting from, where can it go and what is my mind doing that is preventing or enabling it to evolve (or sometimes devolve) or maybe take a detour to something entirely new I never imagined this body or anybody’s body was meant to do!
This discovery was more of a detour away from a downward dog type movement up and out of my Alexander Technique active rest lie down – the very end of my morning time on the mat. From prone to plank to downward dog but from the tops of my feet – plantar flexed. Plantar flexion, finding it, then having it began when I broke me in 3 places and was mostly immobile. During the later weeks of my recovery, I would sometimes lie down on my mat with a yoga belt wrapped around the bottom of the ball of one foot. My leg would then extend up toward the ceiling – point and flex, point and flex. I didn’t have much tone left in just about any part of my body. And, in these moments of point and flex, I started to feel the point and flex of my foot travel all the way up my spine. It felt like my entire back was coming to life from my heel, up my calf, through the posterior side of my pelvis then up and out the top of my head. The relief I felt. The life I felt. Extraordinary.
Now, with the agency and advancing mobility taking me into all kind of shapes and movement patterns and power and grace I never knew I could have, I started to explore, more and more, how my ranges of movement in different joints were changing – especially the smallest and then the more extreme – full range. It’s the small ones – very high and very low ranges then the ones right in the middle that slowed my force because there is and was still muscles I didn’t fully utilize to their fullest capacity. As I worked and work on me…it tumbles out into what I teach, how I teach and why I teach. It gives me feedback in my own body, my discovery then application of it with my clients and how they move as a result. It gives me confidence that what gives me and my own movement practice the greatest joys in this best life, moments of joy with often lasting impacts to my clients.
Turn the page to more joy and detours toward more and more discoveries.