Where are you?

Are you at the beginning of your year- looking forward to the new days and new possibility?

Or are you heading toward the end of your year - looking forward to celebrations with friends and family?

Whichever group you fall into, we all can use this time as one for reflection, the beginning of a new year, and ending to the old year.

Moshe Feldenkrais said, “If you don't know what you do, you can't do what you want.”  This thought runs throughout in the Feldenkrais Method®.  We race through our busy lives, but do we really know where we are? Do we know how our current actions can cause pain, decreased balance, decreased endurance, or stiffness? 

Every lesson we do addresses this. Every Awareness Through Movement® lesson starts with what’s called a “scan” or a “check in.”  We do it at the beginning and end of each lesson so that we can know where we started and how we changed.  A scan gives us a baseline, it is  a mirror or an x-ray. The scan helps us feel our restrictions and how we limit ourselves by our patterns of holding. There cannot be a path to improvement if you don’t know what you are already doing, what your pattern of movement is.

                                                                  

If you were able to scan and assess yourself easily, you’d see yourself not only in relation to yourself, but in you would get to know yourself relative to your environment.  That’s one of the secrets of improvement: check in throughout your session from beginning to end.  This is how we know what we do…so we can do what we want.

This scan, can be done anytime.  Try it right now and feel the change in your sense of yourself………

Take a moment to sense yourself in sitting right now. 

Move your chair back from your computer.   

How do your feet touch the floor?  

Are your feet more toward your heels, your toes, the outside of your foot, the inside of your foot? How much of your foot is on the ground? 

How comfortable, or uncomfortable are you?  Where is the pressure on each buttock?  

Do you sit toward your pubic bone or backward toward your tail bone?  

Are you breathing? Where is your breath?  

Do you breathe in and out in your belly or in your chest? 

Does the surface on which you sit change with your breath? 

Let go of any judgement you have about how you are sitting right now. There is no right or wrong. 

It is simply a question of what you are doing.

How do you hold your head?  Is your right ear closer to your right shoulder than your left ear is to your left shoulder? 

Feel your breath come into your nose. Follow it throughout your chest. Where does it go?  

Are your teeth touching.

Are your lips touching? 

Allow your eyes to be soft. 

Sense how your head sits on your chest and follow your spine down from the base of your skull to your pelvis and feel your sitting bones on your seat now.  

How do you feel now?

  

You will sense a change by just this small bit of noticing.  There is no need to adjust anything.  Just your awareness will affect how you move, feel, and think. Your stress and anxiety will decrease if you can nourish yourself with this kind of sensing throughout the day  your ability to do what you want and to live the life you want will increase! How would that feel for you?  

Don't forget to ask yourself the question. "Where are you."

Go, take on your day!

Party Trick or Life Skill

Is this a party trick, or a life skill?

Do it at your next party and everyone will marvel at your flexibility...then watch them all get down on the ground and try it!  

Chances are, most will fail  because according to dictionary.com, only a mere 1 in 2,000 humans can do this:

This action is called interdigitate. 

It's a verb which means to interlock the fingers of both hands.  A feat (pun intended), according to dictionary.com, that humans cannot do with their toes.

So why, besides becoming the life of the party, would you want to do this?

My answer is: what could soft, responsive toes do for you?

Think about that for a moment.  Plantar fasciitis and painful feet are epidemic in baby boomers.  We have neglected our feet for most of our lives, taking them for granted.  We spent years wearing uncomfortable shoes with pointed toes and high heels. Now we exercise and have learned to hold ourselves our "center," over-using our hips, knees, and feet. Many of us clench our toes!  

Without realizing it, we hold our stress in our feet.  

In order to interlace your toes, you must know what you are doing with your hips, your spine, and your belly.

Having hips that are stable (yet movable) is key at any age.  Stable hips mean you can maintain a posture that works no matter what activity you choose to do.  Do you like to dance? Play tennis? Having a flexible, competent spine along with those stable hips will allow you to bend, squat, and lift.  And we must know when to contract our abdominal muscles and when to relax them because, contrary to current theory, our core muscles are not meant to be held tightly at all times. Odd as it sounds, when we are constantly clenching our abdominals, we have a tendency to overuse our feet; especially when walking.

Learning to interlace (or interdigitate) our toes is a complete exercise.  You will be surprised at the knowledge of yourself you gain as you learn to do this.  You will learn how to pay attention to parts of yourself that you may not have known were related.

I know the burning question that you are having right now:  Can I actually do this? Yes you can. You can learn to have the soft, flexible feet that you once had! 

You can learn to do this and more.  You will be amazed to discover that all it takes is learning (or re-learning) through paying attention to how your body works. (NOTE:  it's not about strength, or even flexibility.  You'll struggle if  you try too hard!)

For now it might be enough to know that you could be able to do this if you wanted to.  

Keep and open mind and keep moving.

Class starts Tuesday, September 5th. 10:30 to 11:30 for 6 weeks. Come learn something new. See how your life improves.  Feel your blind spots disappear.

Time to Declutter ?

Hello Spring will be here in a minute.  Are you like me? Are you thinking about “spring cleaning?” Don’t get confused. I said “thinking” about it. Actually, I can live in clutter. I like my "stuff." What I don't like is having a cluttered brain or body. Many people have spotless homes and offices, but their brain and bodies are still in disarray. In fact, they are even beyond cluttered. They are overloaded.

I have a question for you. Does clutter cause stress? Or does stress cause clutter? Does a cluttered home cause your brain to be stressed, or does a stressful situation cause you mind, body, and home to be cluttered?

What is stress any way? It is a reaction to anything that disturbs our equilibrium, our balance, either physically or emotionally.  In other words, it's forever a  part of life. A stressful event can trigger the “fight-or-flight” response, causing hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol to surge through the body. However, stress is not always a bad thing. Life’s pressures cause us to get out of bed in the morning. They allow us to go to work or to get our children to school.

Sometimes, we just can’t balance our life. We rush around trying to accomplish everything and nothing. We are in such a hurry that we stop paying attention to the state of our body or our mind. What does “stress” or “clutter” feel like?  This list could be very long. Often we feel some degree of instability. Or we feel angry and we don’t know why. We feel uncertain or we are in pain. We often have problems sleeping, or, breathing. Many people and modalites advocate ways to relieve stress and they are almost all good. The question becomes, how easy are they to do, to do at any given moment. How quickly do they act and relieve our state of imbalance and volatility? Are they lasting? Can we do them while we are driving, working, grocery shopping? I know the secret.  We can't necessarily change the stressors, but, we can change the way we react to them . There are answers.  We can diminish your reaction to stress quickly. The difference in my work is that you will be able to do it for yourself, anytime, whenever you need to. You won't need special clothes. You won't need to change your position. You can do it while your are walking, driving, playing, or working. If you go to my website, you will find out how to "become the expert on you."   You will see the information and how to sign up for my next workshop which just happens to be on Stress and Pain: Back, Neck, Feet. I teach workshops, weekly classes, and individual sessions. Just contact me at   beth@movementmatters.us Best regards to you until next time, Beth R

Learning to Learn

When I think back on my learning experiences, I wonder how I ever got to where I am.  I grew up in a county that was known for its school district.   “One of the best,“ they said.  I did well enough in school (especially considering that I never really tried), mostly because I learned how to take a test at a very early age.

Now, I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t have any great learning experiences.  My 5^th grade teacher, Mr. Wise (for real, that was his name!) told me that those who don’t know all the answers but ask a lot of questions were really the smartest kids in the class.  As a self-proclaimed smarty pants, that was a huge pill to swallow, but it never left me. History got a white-washing in 11^th grade when I was taught that the Civil War was about state’s rights, not slavery.  But I just loved my teacher, who was from Oklahoma and had quite the southern drawl.   My world history teacher in 12^th grade foretold that there would be a World War III and that it would start in the Middle East, not Viet Nam. And that was 1969! What a genius Mr. Bridges was…

I finished up my my BS in Physical Therapy in 1975 and figured I’d seen the last of the inside of a classroom.  Well, never say never, I did go back to school and finished my Master’s at USC in 1980. This time it was really enough.

But in 1988, I signed up for my first 5 week segment of my 4 year Feldenkrais training.  I thought it was just part of ongoing education; another tool for my toolbox.

HA! 

My life changed. My work changed. I stopped trying to fix people and set out to help them “learn to learn.”  I set out to help people identify how their habits can help them or hurt them.  I set out to create a place where people could move and question and take charge of their own body.  I set out to create a place where my becoming obsolete would mean my success, a place where people could learn to make choices.  A place where, as long as they were willing, they could always come back to learn more.

I learned that true learning happens on the inside and that it has to relate to our world in order to be relevant. I learned that listening, listening to yourself is how we find our own uniqueness and that that is way more important that a home exercise program or memorization. I learned that passing a test has absolutely nothing to do with true learning. I learned that learning does not happen in one day. I learned that even after you have learned something, there is more to learn.

And best of all:   I found out that I love learning.  I have a feeling that you will, too.  Let’s stay in touch.

To see what I will be doing for the rest of the year, go to my website

In Gratitude,
Beth

Happy Hips, Peaceful Pelvis

Do you remember sucking on your toes?  (I hate to tell you this, but I think I was able to do it until I was 12 years old.  I know.  TMI.  Really though, our hips are made to move and Maddie on the left, is proof.

I recently read an article about stretching for seniors.  The author said that as we age our muscles become shorter and lose elasticity. True, but why?  In short, too much adult-ing:  we sit more and move less, and, we have been doing it for 30, 40, 50, 60 years.

 Both of these can affect the structure of your bones and muscles.  We need to move, but the trick is to do it safely so that we can do whatever type of exercise we like.

So, what do the hips and pelvis have to do with each other?

Well, take a look at the diagram on the right. This is a picture of the pelvic floor,  which shows the muscles we tighten when we do “kegel” exercises (you know, pretend that you have to urinate and stop it.) Many of us still do the tightening now,  all the time, even though our baby is 35 years old.  So how come even though we’ve been diligently squeezing at stoplights for years we now have dribbling and pain during sex?  It’s because these muscles are now are not only weak, but tight.  What do you think would happen to your biceps if you held your elbow closed for 35 years?   

Muscle strength comes from being able to shorten a lengthened muscle.  If the muscle is already short, it can’t get any shorter or stronger.   Also, notice how close your hips are to the muscles in your pelvis:  the hip socket is above the pelvis and to the side. Some of the muscles that move your hip come from your pelvis and vice versa.  If one is tight and weak, the other is too. These muscles are not only related to your hips, but to your back, knees, and feet. If you are overusing or holding one area, chances are that you’re doing it elsewhere, too.

How many of you have been stretching your hamstrings for 25-plus years before running, walking, yoga, or dance?  Is it working?  Do your hamstrings, in the back of your hip, or your muscles in the front of your thigh, ever get longer?  No they do not. They get tighter.  There is a difference between stretching and elongating…and that’s the key difference between exercise and health.

KNOCK FIRST IS OFFERING A SPECIAL WORKSHOP FOR LADIES ONLY FEATURING

Movement Teacher, Beth Rubenstein MS, PT, Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner

Come find out how to make your pelvic muscles more effective as you age.  Discover how to guide yourself in a gentler way so you can alleviate pain and stiffness while moving with ease and joy!

Go here to sign up :

https://www.eventbrite.com/d/md--rockville/events--next-month/happy-hips-peaceful-pelvis/?mode=search

Brain Changing Class

I’m taking a Changing My Brain class! 

Some people, however, call this class TAP.

I started my tap class last April just before my 65^th birthday and I LOVE IT! I wanted to learn it when I was a little girl but my mother wouldn’t allow it (something about Vaudeville and the sketch-y underside of showbiz, I think…)

Anyway, I can’t wait to tell you about this class!  An admitted baby boomer herself, Deborah Perez is a beautiful dancer and an excellent teacher.   We do our shuffle-ball-changes at  By Your Side Dance Studio in Culver City and she is by far one of the best dance teachers I have ever had.  She is able to adjust her teaching so that it’s unique to all of her students; making each one feel as if they’re getting a private lesson.  We have former dancers, young and strong new-comers, and me: a 65-year-old, semi –coordinated, would-be dancer and gymnast. 

I’ve always loved dancing.  I love ballroom because I can turn off my brain and pretend I’m a tall, long-legged dance diva.  Not so with tap.  This style of dance requires you to tune in, turn on, and tap up!

Tapping appears to be the perfect path to fitness of body and brain.  It’s not unlike what I have experienced in my 25 years as a Feldenkrais® teacher; we like to think of ourselves as “neuroplasticians” because our work can change the way people think, feel, and act.   According to Norman Doidge in his latest book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, neuroplasticity is the “property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience. “  We used to think the brain and central nervous system was set once we reached the age of 25, but Doidge now believes that in order to  “enable neuroplasticity to happen, the approach must require the active involvement of the whole patient in his or her own care: mind, brain, and body.”

I think I am definitely in the process of transforming my mind and brain, and (with a little luck) my body.

I am tapping into the unknown; sometimes this dance can be confusing and just plain hard.  For instance, I was already aware of my toe clenching habit but you sure can’t do that in tap without developing pain almost instantly!  So it forces me to be constantly aware of where I am on my feet.  This requires the participation of my brain and muscles which in turn means constant challenges to my balance.  I have to stay upright, relax my feet, move in a circle and keep my hand aloft while slapping, spanking, shuffling, and ball stepping. 

Talk about challenging!

One of the ways we encourage neuroplasticity in the Feldenkrais Method® is by using novelty.  Awareness Through Movement lessons are full of “novel” movements.  We “wake up” the brain (and therefore new neural pathways) by bringing our awareness to parts that move together.  That’s what happens in tap!  In every lesson, we learn something novel.  I have learned the “Buffalo,” the “Irish,” the “Grapevine,” and loads more.  And then there is memory.  I can feel my brain growing as I learn the moves and then put them into a sequence. A strategy thay my teacher recommends is letting the music tell us what’s next.

Of course, all of this requires strength and endurance.  My legs are not as strong as they used to be and I don’t have the muscle fibers I once had.  As I Feldenkrais teacher I know that if I move just from my feet, I won’t last long in this vigorous dance.  I must engage my whole self.  If I don’t, I won’t get through the hour class without being debilitated.  If I do, I’ll feel invigorated!

So: awareness, novelty, strength, endurance, and memory.    Tap wakes up your brain and your body by using all of these and I have to tell you that along with my work as a Feldenkrais teacher, I feel like I have found just the right combination of body and brain exploration. I can feel those neurotransmitters transmitting!!

I have now found another love besides the gentle, lovely movement I do when I lie on the floor for an Awareness Through Movement® lesson.  My ability to tune into my movement and find another, more suitable way to do it is ingrained in my Feldenkrais® study. Both are keeping me young (and relieving my guilt about hating crossword puzzles and Sudoku!)

 

Deborah Perez of By Your Side Dance StudioBy Your Side Dance Studio and your happy, dancing Feldenkrais teacher!

“Movement is Life, without movement, life would be unthinkable.” 

M.Feldenkrais DSc

Tapping along until next time,

Beth

More on Multiple Sclerosis # 3

More but not the end......

There are four primary types of MS; relapsing-remitting, secondary-progressive, primary-progressive, and progressive relapsing.  But even though there are common factors among those with MS, everyone is an individual. That means there’s no cookie cutter approach to increasing function.

Still, there are similarities, so let’s consider them here…

In my last two posts, I touched on how we approach the issues of knowing where we are in space, spasticity, coordination, and balance.spasticity, coordination, and balance   Here, we’ll look at heat and stress, fatigue, and flexibility.

Heat can cause a temporary worsening of MS symptoms and stress and tension can raise core body temperature. With the gentle movement of a Feldenkrais® lesson, a participant can learn to release stress and tension.  This helps turn down the heat while allowing body energy to flow freely. By using attention and breath, one can learn to detect (and thereby avert) increased body temperature *before* problems begin.                    

Living with MS can mean change and stress. Stress depletes an individual both emotionally and physically and adds to fatigue to boot.  Using the Feldenkrais Method® helps those with MS learn how to function in a more relaxed state, thus quieting the sympathetic nervous system (your “fight or flight” response.) Since the movements are based on functional activities, people are given the opportunity to notice their habitual anxiety patterns and to explore more effective ways to cope. While teaching regular classes for the MS Society, we frequently met in less than optimal facilities.  There was often noise or movement in the room, but I chose not to change the location of these sessions because I knew my students needed to learn to calm and sense themselves in all surroundings.  After all, malls, noisy restaurants, and traffic jams don’t go away just because you have MS!

Fatigue can be the biggest challenge because we can create it without even knowing it.  Strain, tension, and fatigue are often the result of smaller muscles doing the work of larger ones. Learning does not occur when fatigue is present, so students are given the opportunity to modulate their own sense of fatigue.  Because participants are able to move or rest at their own pace, they gain more control over fatigue.

Flexibilty is the ability to switch and use a different part of the body for an activity.  Learning to use muscles to move rather than to support will improve range of motion and aid in increasing energy.  Initiating motion from large muscles closer to the center of our bodies also allows for more proportional distribution of movement, and that conserves energy and strength.  Those are the keys to maintaining the joint and muscle flexibility that is important for walking and other daily living activities.

Although I accommodate all ability levels and use many positions, I like lessons on the floor because it helps people feel and sense in a different way and explore what works.  This enables students to discover a new way to walk, get up from the floor, or play with a child.  I teach my student to notice what is happening. 

I ask students to do less than they can so that they can focus on learning how to be their own “inner advisor”.  Once moving becomes easier, they naturally want to do more.

Comment or ask questions here, or contact me at beth@movementmatters.us

Keep exploring and keep asking questions,

Beth          Every Day Health, Living with Multiple Sclerosis