Contact!!! Vol. 3
Welcome to the third - but not last - instalment of Contact!!!!!!!!: The Series. I sincerely hope that with each of these articles, you take the time to do the exercises I describe. I try to make them as deadly simple as I can and they should only take about 5 minutes of quiet (now THAT’S a lovely caveat eh????). These exercises are designed to help you hone your Sense of Feeling and build Poise. They’re devilishly simple and worth the time investment!
The purpose of today’s post is to help you assess how your daily lie downs are progressing. When we lie down, we make a tremendous amount of contact with the floor, the book under the head, and the feet on the floor. If you have not read my post on lying down, please please read it so that you have context for today’s article!!!
When you lie down, it is important to take your time to feel each and every fibre of yourself making contact with the surface you are resting on. You do not need to press yourself into a “good” shape. This will create unwanted pockets of stiff and dead weight. Simply put on your Sherlock hat and collect information.
Here are the major landmarks that you should feel:
The head on the book
The left and right shoulder blade
The left and right hip
The upper arm and elbow
If you have your knees up and feet on the ground, feel the feet.
If you have cushions propping up the legs, feel that contact.
You may or may not be able to feel these simultaneously. It is possible to feel multiple landmarks simultaneously. This is a skill that should be practiced. Do not force yourself to feel this with extraneous effort. Simply ask yourself the question, “Can I feel the left and right shoulder blades at the same time?”. Wait. And see if the sensation comes to you.
If this does not happen, that’s ok! Don’t get frustrated! Training senses takes time!
You may have unwittingly selected two points of contact that are tricky for you to feel simultaneously. Rather than repeat this exercise ad nauseam. Select two other landmarks and have a go at sensing that….quietly!!!
I am confident that if you continue exploring…iterating through different combinations of landmarks…you will begin to feel more and more of them until you’ve got ‘em all.
Why Do I Ask You Do This?
By taking the time to build up this sense of feeling, you will then be in a position to feel if there’s a difference between the right and left side of your back. If you can feel the head contact and the left and right shoulder contact, you will be in a great position to feel subtle differences between the left and right portions of the spine and neck. You may not yet be able to assess if one pocket is dead weight or stiff weight, but you will feel something is different!
As we are looking to add length, width, and suppleness to our entire self, these contact points are the foundation of volume while lying down. Not only is feeling your foundation while lying down critical, but as you transition back to standing or sitting, you will have a better sense of how to feel these portions of the back/arms/legs/neck/whatever while you are going about your day.
And that’s a great skill to have!
What Will Block Me From Feeling This?
The short answer to this question is, I don’t know. There are a few things that will block you from sensing these things, but the big big big blockage is an inability to bring yourself to a FULL STOP. Mentally. Physically. Emotionally. However you want to slice it, stopping is stopping.
Stopping is challenging but wonderful.
But rather than me harp on about stopping (I’ll do that later). I can suggest that if you are exhausted, the exercise I’ve described above could be tough. Give yourself a break and rest as best you can.
One of the other big big blockers to feeling this is excessive exercise. Sometimes, I will have a student come for a lesson following a big weight lifting session. They have the typical feeling of dead weight as their muscles are attempting to recover from too much work. In my experience, excessive weight lifting will block the student’s ability to feel subtle sensations. There must be sufficient recovery time to feel at the level that I’m describing.
This is not to say that I believe weight lifting is bad. The exact same phenomenon will occur from typing for excessively long hours or doing pretty much anything to excess. One of the beautiful things you will learn from your study of the Alexander Technique is how to better pace your energy from moment to moment. Let this exercise give you yet another way to check in on HOW you are so that you can have a very honest assessment of your whole self.
That’s plenty of homework for this week! I hope you take a little time to try this game out. Please let me know if you have any questions or success trying it out! You can comment on the post or message me directly. You’ll never know if you don’t try it! :)