Movement & Creative Constraints
An Experiment…
I invite you to sit up and give your shoulders a good juicy roll.
With your breath, take them up on your inhale, and (aaahhh) take them back and down on the exhale. Repeat two more times.
Feel the shoulder blades move down over your ribs, knitting together and then sliding apart again as you reach the bottom of this circular movement and bring them forward.
~~~ Pause. Breathe and take note of how that felt. ~~~
What did the quality of your movement feel like? Was there ease? Strain? Smoothness? Crunchiness? A little of all of the above? Something else? Relief? Joy? Frustration? Even anger?? Boredom? Describe in your own words.
Chances are, if you work on a computer, hold a cell phone often, drive much, study, cook, style hair, do bodywork… or just live in a forward-focused society using sight as your main sense to orient yourself, your body might be habituated to a sort of forever-reaching-forward posture. If so… the simple movement of opening your chest with shoulder rolls might feel like a moment of sweet relief from the postural norm.
Chances are, if you’re like me and many of my students, you might have taken this opportunity to squeeze as much out of that shoulder roll as you could. If you felt crunchiness or strain, maybe it came from that push for a larger range of motion?
See for yourself by trying this next experiment:
Try a few shoulder rolls with your breath again. This time, try to find the path of least resistance. A way through the movement with as much ease, and as little crunching, pulling, and straining as possible (not that those are inherently bad).
Keep breathing and repeating, listening to the shoulders, and moving within the most easy range of motion you can find.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Continue for 30 seconds, or even a minute. Keep it as gentle and smooth as you can.
RELAX
Breathe, soften, release the muscles and just feel.
What’s there?? What was your experience this time? How do your shoulders feel after? What thoughts came up as you did the movement?
Here’s what I found in my experience with this second kind of movement…
This experiment is an a playful excursion within your ease-ful range of motion. Your range of motion might be be different on any given day, and while putting stress on our body and pushing its limits definitely has a place, I’m not advocating for one or the other. I am advocating for a balance and for releasing stories about what we think our bodies “should” do. I’m calling in an a abundance of moments where we take the time to savor what works in the body, what is easy, what we already have.
The fruits of this are twofold:
I believe, and current pain neuroscience research shows, that repeating gentle movement like this can help our nervous system make new pathways for movement that are less painful, more supported, and eventually more mechanistically open.
Savoring the ranges of motion we DO have, getting creative within them and taking our time with them serves as a sort of gratitude practice. We become what we practice. I personally aim to continue reminding myself to take pleasure and joy in what I do have. I want to age like Maya Angelou described in her interview with Oprah, having fun and staying present all along the way.
I hope this blog is one of the many things supporting you to be in loving relationship with your body and experience today! Let me know what it brought up for you in the comments.
Thank you!