Winter Yoga Session started last week, and - as you now know - we are focusing a lot of our attention on hand and wrist mobility.
Hands and wrists are super-duper important to focus on (especially if you spend your day with your hands on the keyboard), but that's just the very tip of the iceberg, the appetizer so
to speak.
If pain, fatigue, postural imbalances, illness and stress are impeding your body’s innate healing process and diminishing your capacity to live fully, then a movement practice that meets you where you are and recognizes your inherent vitality can rekindle your natural capacity to heal.
Here are our mains for this winter
session:
Relaxation
Pure movement - both bilateral and unilateral
Resiliency
Stability
Mobility
Strength
Flexibility
Let's take a closer look at each principle, while remembering that all of them must come together to form a really tasty stew.
Relaxation: we cultivate an
ability to stay alert while relaxing, and Savasana is our training ground. Are you falling asleep during Savasana? Do you get restless? All of these are indications that your nervous system is unfamiliar with the state of relaxed awareness (this is PRECISELY how we started off last week!)
Pure Movement: an ability to sense and create a movement in the joint
at play, and also feel when the movement pattern becomes a compensatory one. Speaking in Core Restore language, for example, we look for hip flexion or extension VS pelvic tilting or rib cage shifting. A whole lot of Core Restore folk discovered last week that it is much harder than it sounds!
Resiliency: an ability to connect the state of relaxed awareness
with pure movement. Resiliency takes the calm and relaxed feeling we experience in Savasana, and carries it into the postural practice. For those of us who tend to stabilize with tension - , are you one of us? - this can be a huge challenge!
Stability: an ability to utilize the muscle's capacity to provide support, to keep a joint firmly in
position, or to hold one structure of the body steady while moving another structure. In Core Restore we bounced yoga balls while standing on one foot. Wanna guess how fast things got outta hand?
Mobility: this is a joint's ability to move freely. When the body becomes injured, fatigued, or ill, the muscles that cross the
joints and connective tissue around the joints become tight, reducing the freedom of joint movement. As a result, the key joint that is not moving loses its range of motion (becomes hypo-mobile), while the joints around it that are compensating, become hyper-mobile. Now compare your ability to move well through the hip joint and the knee joint....
Strength: is the ability of a muscle to generate force. Tight muscle is always a weak muscle. The greatest strength comes from a body that is relaxed and aligned, that has proper joint mobility and stability from the core outward, and front hands and feet inward...
Flexibility: where mobility is the freedom of movement,
flexibility is the range of movement of a joint. While most modern yoga classes focus squarely on developing flexibility, we must be careful to balance those gains of flexibility with gains in strength and stability.
These 7 principles don't follow a linear path - that is, they don't begin with one, then the
next, which leads to the next. Our path here is "linear - circular," with each principle feeding off the rest.
For example, folk who are injured, ill, or fatigued - whether it is acute or chronic - need to be able to relax, to let go - and that, often, is the most challenging thing. Yet, without this relaxation, we will never be able to fully feel the ease in movement or posture, no matter how modified it is. Nor we will be able to
experience pure movement.
We may want to develop an inner strength or resiliency, but if we don't know how to "let go," there will always be an element of stiffness in the movement... and often strain in our lives...
While illness and injury do ask us to pay attention, they can also limit our perceptive
abilities. Moving with ease & comfort in a body that has felt stuck in limitations is a confidence building experience that teaches us to listen well to our body’s messages, and respond (not react!) wisely to its needs.
