Archive for May, 2008

As essential as it is for maintaining better movement, stretching doesn’t often make it into a daily routine. Most people want to…they just don’t know which stretch to do and how long and which routine to follow. Sure, getting to a yoga class can be great, but that would involve getting out of the house and at least an hour for the class. For all of those who feel lost on what to do, Flow Stretching is one of my favorite possibilities.

A friend of mine had this problem to the extreme. She had been doing yoga for years, until she found out she had cancer. With her strength fading and the pain increasing, she desperately needed to stretch. Only, she was too weak to do anything she had learned in yoga, much less make it out to a class.

She is, however, a woman of great resource. Abandoning everything she knew about specific stretches, she let her body lead the way, moving slowly, painfully, gracefully in whatever way felt the best. Steadily, her strength returned, and her movements became deeper and more flowing. She became more and more aware of what her body most needed, including a greater connection with her energy and her sensuality. Today (she believes in part to that greater awareness) her cancer is in remission.

I told that story to one of my clients who had an unfortunate encounter with West Nile and the resulting spinal meningitis. Even a year later, her hips and spine feel the effects, leaving her barely able to move some days. I encouraged her to try flow stretching, and she had similar results - including an increase in sensuality.

What a fabulous benefit! I imagine, the more you feel deeply into how your body wants to stretch, satisfying the need as you feel it, you can’t help but be more in tune with the sheer luxuriousness of the sensation. I watch my dog stretch in the morning, full out, full body stretch, his eyes closed…and then he’s ready to play for hours (pausing to stretch whenever he feels like it). I can’t help but wonder if stretching not only helps keep our muscles limber but also keeps our mind sharp, our emotions positive, our energy high and our sensual experience more delicious.

And it doesn’t have to be for an hour at a time. Even a few minutes here and there is enough, much like Meditation in a New York Minute. I often Flow Stretch between appointments, in the shower with the water pounding on my back, surreptitiously while walking the dog.

I do want to offer a couple rules of thumb while stretching - though as you stay in tune with your body, I don’t think you’ll have to worry nearly so much. These ideas are from the book Stretching by Bob Anderson (I highly recommend it).

1. Don’t bounce and Don’t stretch to the point of pain.

2. Start with an easy stretch - so you feel mild tension. Hold for 10-15 seconds. The tension should fade - if it doesn’t, then ease back.

3. Once the tension fades, move slightly deeper into a developmental stretch, to mild tension again. Hold for 10-15 seconds and let it fade again. If the tension increases at any time, you’ve gone too far!

You’re doing it anyway. Every day. Every hour. Every second. You see the colors, the movement. You hear voices, footsteps, wind. You feel the texture of your clothes or the air on your skin. Taste your saliva, the lingering flavors of your last meal. Smell flowers, food.

Your senses are active all the time, flooding you with information that is most often ignored. And sometimes, it needs to be. You need to filter those things out to allow your mind to focus. Maybe. Even as I’m writing, I notice the pads of my hands resting on the keyboard, the clack of the keys. It’s like accompaniment to the experience of writing, of being in this moment.

But for an hour every day, imagine that accompaniment as the foreground of your life. An entire hour of deep sensual experience. Perhaps do it during lunch, noticing the flavors of every morsel, the speed of your bites, the textures of voices, the temperature of your silverware.

Perhaps try it the next time you make love. Indulge in the sensations in your hands and arms and legs and feet, see the color of your lover’s eyes. Or try it on a long walk, taking everything in through the senses, letting the thoughts that usually distract you fade in favor of feeling your weight shift on your foot as you step. 

And, as you get better, try noticing in times not so obviously sensual. Like at work, or the grocery store, or watching TV. Yet, even those things, once you think about it, are filled with input from all your senses.

Simply notice. Even for 15 minutes to start. Remember: You don’t have to do anything different. This doesn’t have to take any extra time from your day. Just shift the way you perceive things for a few minutes - or an hour. And after awhile, you’ll also notice how your perception broadens, how your curiosity sharpens, how delicious every moment can be.

This is one of my favorite morning rituals…one that I have been doing on and off for over 10 years: Morning Pages.

I found it in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and I know she’s talked about it in many of her other books. Googling “morning pages” gets all kinds of great results too, and this site was full of helpful hints.

It works like this:

First thing in the morning - still in bed even - reach over and grab your ragged notebook and writing instrument (I love a good smooth pen). Start writing, three longhand pages of whatever is traveling through your mind. Don’t stop until you get to the end - 30 minutes later give or take. Try not to get interrupted.

The idea is to dump all the chaos of that morning out-of-control mind onto those pages. Just get it down and out of the way so you can really get your creative juices pumping.

When I started, I found that if I didn’t get out of bed, I’d be asleep half a page in. Sometimes a quarter. So I’d have some water and nestle in a chair. You wouldn’t believe the lively curses that I could muster some days. The boring drone of complaints and annoyances. Mostly about relationships and money and the combination thereof, interjected with heavy doses of self criticism. My dreams would come by here and there for a visit. Sometimes I’d repeat myself over and over: “I’m tired. I don’t know what to write.”

Then, something happened. Sheer inspiration. Flowing from my pen, first thing in the morning. Stories, images, ideas. I would dance as I wrote, or at least, felt like I was dancing. Creativity flowed through my body and out my pen.

I don’t know - maybe I finally dumped enough sludge from my mind that interesting things could emerge. It didn’t matter to me…I could hardly wait to get to that page to see what might come out. What possibilities it might present for my day. If I decided to act on them, that is, and there was freedom in knowing I didn’t have to.

In fact, Julia Cameron recommends that you don’t do anything with those pages. That you write and store it away for months before you read it. If you ever read it at all. I cheated at that after it got really good, transcribing my inspirations to my computer right away (and I don’t regret it). But mostly, I let the negativity lie.

Once, I did pick up one of my old notebooks. I was bemused to see that some things hadn’t really changed. Still angry about the same things. Guess I can work on that a bit harder. And I was happy to see that some of them had changed…that I’d actually forgotten how much those things used to annoy me. I closed the books and returned them to their dusty shelf. 

I have a few clients that I’ve encouraged toward the practice as well. Recently, one of them told me that after the first page of trivialities, she found herself listing all the things she was grateful for - a list that had grown substantially since she had found her joy.

I’ve heard of prayers emerging, business ideas, all kinds of inspiration. I think it comes from getting the mind out of the way and giving the deeper inner voice room to speak.

One last bit of advice before you jump in: At first, take it seriously. Do it everyday, in the morning, first thing. After that (could be a couple weeks, a couple months), don’t worry if you miss a day or two, or a few weeks. Get a feel for how it works best for you and follow that guideline instead.