If you’ve friended me on Facebook, you might be aware that I’ve been taking classes in functional movement since August, so four months now. I thought I’d post something about what it is, what I’ve been doing, and my results.
Functional movement refers to fitness and the movements we use in everyday life. As opposed to yoga, for instance. Continue reading
The book group that I’ve attended weekly for the past several years had a writing assignment for this week, to write about our last hour of life. We’ll gather tomorrow and share. Here’s mine:
I don’t really know when this is going to happen. I’d like to believe that it will happen in the distant future, at least 20 years in the future, maybe 30 or even more, but I don’t know. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen tonight! Continue reading
Need ideas for holiday gifts to give or request? Body care tools keep on giving.
When you are considering gifts to give during the holiday season (or for birthdays or special occasions year-round), here are some recommendations from a professional bodyworker. All of these relax, relieve stress, release tension, and enhance well-being. Who doesn’t want that?
First of all, please consider giving your loved ones gift certificates for massage. There are many modalities available ranging from Swedish to Ashiatsu to craniosacral to hot stones and more. This is a great way to show love — by surprising your loved one with a health-giving, rejuvenating, relaxing massage.
Your loved one will love you for it, and you’ll enjoy their relaxed, post-massage company even more!
Plus, supporting a private practitioner keeps the money in the local economy, so you’re being generous twice.
Here are my recommendations for tools that bring relief between massages:
The Therapeutica Sleeping Pillow helps side sleepers keep their heads aligned with their…View original post 839 more words
I did my 10 minute presentation on peripheral awareness yesterday. I wish we’d had more time! I’m learning how to teach this by teaching it, and one attendee asked me a great question:
What would someone get out of learning this?
Thanks, Xtevan. That seems worthy of a blog post! So here are my top reasons for learning peripheral awareness, peripheral walking, and night walking.
Some of these benefits don’t happen right away. The originator, Nelson Zink, said it takes 15-20 hours of using a peripheral training device for the eyes to become trained not to switch to focused vision and for the eyes to consistently focus where they’ve been trained to gaze without a device. (He said they always took them with them, though.)
Oh, and walking in public wearing a peripheral vision training device definitely helps keep Austin weird! That’s another good reason to do it!
No wonder the great Japanese sword fighter Musashino said in The Book of Five Rings:
It is necessary in strategy to be able to look to both sides without moving the eyeballs. You cannot master this ability quickly. Learn what is written here: use this gaze in everyday life and do not vary it whatever happens.
If you find this interesting and are in the Austin, TX, area, I teach peripheral awareness/walking for 1-3 people at a time. We walk on city trails. This is required before night walking, which can be arranged when demand is sufficient.
This post is to let you know that I’m doing a short presentation entitled “Seeing Differently” at Austin’s first Free Day of NLP tomorrow. The event will take place at Soma Vida, 1210 Rosewood in East Austin from 9 am until 4 pm. You can come and go as you desire.
I’m on at 2 pm. If you’re on Facebook and want an invitation or to see the whole schedule, send me a message!
Because I only have 10 minutes, we’ll do some exercises so attendees can experience seeing differently rather than go into the science and history of it. Afterwards, I’ll be available for questions and insights.
The basic premises are:
I believe this is what Carlos Castaneda was getting at with the following quotes:
Everybody falls prey to the mistake that seeing is done with the eyes. Seeing is not a matter of the eyes. Seeing is alignment and perception is alignment. Seeing is learned by seeing.
When you see, there are no longer familiar features in the world. Everything is new. Everything has never happened before. The world is incredible!
To perceive the energetic essence of things means that you perceive energy directly. By separating the social part of perception, you’ll perceive the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is energy, but since we can’t directly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold. This mold is the social part of perception, which you have to separate.
I first encountered peripheral awareness in my evolutionary NLP training with teacher Tom Best, who learned it from the master, Nelson Zink. Katie Raver (creator of Free Day of NLP) and I co-ran a meet-up in Austin a few years ago in which we taught people to do peripheral walking.
The way I teach it, there are three parts: peripheral awareness, peripheral walking, and night walking.
Even though I’ve had expensive chiropractic work done on my neck and have been told I need to sleep on my back, I’ve always found it difficult to do so. I feel so much more comfortable sleeping on my side and on my stomach, which really puts strain on my neck.
I’m not sure why this is. It just is. I get to sleep well, and I stay asleep well, but I toss and turn a lot trying to get comfortable.
Also, I know from experience and education that the atlanto-occipital joint and the upper cervical area where the neck and head converge is a critical juncture in the body that affects movement, including eye movement. My current chiropractor has actually helped my vision improve. She practices SOT, sacral-occipital technique, which is not mainstream chiropractic but works on the nervous system as much as on the bones.
When I mentioned my difficulty with sleep postures yesterday to Dr. Mary, she showed me a pillow especially designed to help people sleep on their backs and on either side while keeping their necks and heads properly aligned with their spines.
I took a look, read the packaging, tried it, and decided that even though I’m in a frugal phase, I couldn’t afford to not buy one. Back sleeping is so much better for the body, especially the head and neck, but also the internal organs. Not to mention preventing (more) wrinkles.
The packaging also says it helps reduce snoring by keeping critical air passages open.
For back sleeping, the pillow supports the curves of the upper back and cervical vertebrae and has an indention for the back of the head that helps keep it stable.
For side sleeping, it has blocky “wings” that keep the head aligned with the neck. It even apparently has a little “give” to it in just the right places for people who suffer from TMJ pain to sleep more comfortably.
Best of all, these wings come in different heights, depending on the width of your shoulders. Between child-size, petite, average, large, and extra large, there’s a size that fits everyone.
Average and smaller pillows fit into regular pillowcases; large and extra-large need king pillowcases.
Here’s what it looks like:
Crazy-looking, huh?
The Therapeutica sleeping pillow was designed by a chiropractor and an ergonomic designer. It currently sells for $71 on Amazon. There’s also a travel pillow without the wings that currently sells for $58 that would be good for people who only sleep on their backs.
These prices may change, of course, and if you’re on a budget, you may be able to find these selling for less through other Amazon third-party retailers.
You’re probably waiting to hear what it was like to sleep with it! I’ve only done it one night so far, but here’s my report.
I shifted from my back to each side numerous times, spending more time sleeping on my sides because it felt so darn comfortable. This is new, having my head supported at the right height.
I did sleep on my back occasionally but did not automatically become a back sleeper. I imagine that over time, I’ll become more comfortable back-sleeping.
And I’m extremely happy to say that I did not sleep on my stomach at all.
Today I can get rid of some of the many pillows I had on my bed to attempt to accommodate my various sleep postures. I am really grateful for this find.
I’m a massage therapist making sense of what I discover working on clients — the most common issues I encounter, why people have these problems, and what to do about them (massage-wise and making minor but meaningful lifestyle changes that result in more well-being).
Recently I posted about massaging the upper trapezius muscles. In that same shoulder/neck area, another muscle, levator scapula, gives some people a lot of problems.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, the upper trap issues seem to be from working with the hands out in front of the body, such as using a keyboard, cutting hair, chopping vegetables, operating a cash register, and so on.
If the bulk of your time is spent with your arms just hanging down, surrendered to gravity, you wouldn’t have issues with your upper traps.
I don’t think there are many jobs like that! Irish dancer, perhaps?
Levator scapula (sometimes called just levator) attaches to the upper inner corner of the shoulder blade and to the transverse processes of the top four neck vertebrae (the bony parts that stick out on the sides of your neck under your ears). Levator lies underneath the upper trap and other muscles.
I notice that some folks just have upper trap issues, and some have both upper trap and levator scapula issues. Trap issues come from working with the hands out in front. Levator issues come from raising the shoulders up toward the ears. In fact, levator scapula means “elevating the shoulder blade”. This is often accompanied by the “head-forward” posture.
If you rub across the top of your shoulder between your neck and shoulder joint and feel your fingers crossing over a tight but tender lump of a muscle, it’s your levator.
People who have pain in levator are raising their shoulders toward their ears, and they are most likely unaware they are doing this. They just notice the pain.
Sometimes it’s one-sided pain. The cause is often cradling a telephone receiver between the ear and shoulder to have the hands free while talking on the phone. If you work in an office and talk on the phone for much of the day, you can avoid levator pain by using speakerphone or a device that sits on your shoulder and holds the phone receiver up to your ear….
When it’s two-sided pain, the cause is usually an unconscious, habitual tension, a response to stressors of raising the shoulders toward the ears (“turtling”).
As a stress response, this would protect the vulnerable neck area, but since our modern stressors are usually not predators out to have us for dinner, the solution is to start catching yourself doing it and consciously retrain yourself to lower your shoulders. Your body will eventually catch on, and lowered shoulders will become your new habitual posture! (Also practice moving your head slightly back, if you have the “forward head” posture.)
You can lengthen the levitator muscle by standing and letting your shoulders drop downward, surrendering to gravity. You can hold a light weight — 1 or 2 pounds, or a can of soup — to help pull your arms and shoulders down and let the levator lengthen.
It also feels good to make forward and backward circles with the shoulders. Spend more time where it does the most good.
You can also stand and lower your ear to your shoulder, alternating sides. I think slow is good.
Another good practice is letting the head float up, as if it were a helium balloon. You can release all kinds of neck tension this way.
For massaging the levator, it usually feels awesome to press on the end of the muscle that attaches to the top of the shoulder blade. This is a magical point on almost every body that feels terrific to have pressed!
If you have a hard time finding that corner of the shoulder blade, put the client’s hand behind their back to make the shoulder blade pop out. You will feel that upper corner more easily. Static pressure and rubbing the corner area both feel great.
Because levator is deep to the upper trap and neck muscles, it’s difficult to knead the way you can knead the upper trap. I like to work my fingers around the inner part and bottom corner of the shoulder blade. Then, standing at the head of the table, I pull on the edge of the triangle that’s opposite that upper inner corner, leaning back and pulling it toward me. (You can also push this edge toward the head when standing at the client’s side.)
This allows levator to go slack and shorten, taking the pressure off it. I usually hold this for about 15-30 seconds.
Then I do the opposite. Standing at the head, I place both thumbs on that upper inner corner of the shoulder blade and lean into it. This gives levator a nice stretch. I hold this for 15-30 seconds too. The entire shoulder blade will have more mobility.
And yes, I can shorten and lengthen levator scapula during Ashiatsu barefoot massage sessions, using my feet!
I’m going to begin sharing some thoughts from doing massage…
The trapezius is an interesting muscle. It’s big, shaped like a kite (a trapezoid), covers a large area of the back from T12 up and out to the shoulders, and then attaches to the back of the skull.
Unlike a bicep, the belly of the trapezius is not in the middle of the muscle. The belly is in the soft part of the shoulder, between the shoulder joint and the neck. This part is nicknamed the upper trap. The rest of the muscle is rather flat.
The upper traps hold a lot of tension on most people’s bodies. It’s rare to work on someone who doesn’t have tightness there. Often the upper trap is overdeveloped or unevenly developed. Usually one side is worse than the other (and it’s often but not always related to handedness).
Now, I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that a lot of why this muscle is such a problem is because many of us work with our hands out in front of our torsos, and that muscle supports those lifted arms. I notice it on people who use a keyboard a lot. Also hairdressers, chefs, pianists, an interpreter for the deaf. Hands out in front, right?
Oh, yeah, and massage therapists.
When I do Swedish massage, I love working on the shoulders. My favorite part is the testing I do when I finish working on the first shoulder. I give both upper traps a gentle squeeze. I can really tell the difference between the shoulder that’s been massaged and the one that hasn’t. The upper trap that’s been massaged has tissue that feels lean and pliable, like a racehorse ready for a race. It seems to sparkle with energy.
The upper trap not worked on feels stiffer, more swollen, and congested.
That’s the difference that massage makes.
When I do Ashiatsu barefoot massage, I do a lot of work on the shoulders with my feet, both seated behind the client’s head and standing on the table. It makes a big difference. If you haven’t had Ashiatsu, you might be amazed at how I can work the shoulders with my feet. Loosening the shoulder blade, working the between-the-shoulder-blade area, pressing into the upper trap…
If a client needs extra attention to their shoulders (and we have time for it), after I finish the Ashiatsu, I manually work on the shoulders. Kneading is something I can do with my hands that I can’t do with my feet. Sometimes that’s the main thing the upper trap needs, to be kneaded repeatedly to really get the blood flowing throughout the upper traps. It’s that squeezing out of stale blood so it can be replaced by fresh blood bringing oxygen that changes the quality of the muscle tissue, at least in my understanding.
Wondering what to do about upper trap pain in between massages? One remedy available for office workers is to sit in a chair with arm rests that support your forearms comfortably while you use your keyboard. If you don’t use the existing armrests, then it’s not comfortable. Find out if you can adjust them to become comfortable.
That will take some of the load off the upper traps.
Also, even though putting heat on sore muscles feels good, ice is better. Too much heat for too long makes the tissue feel sluggish. If you feel like you just gotta use heat, alternate heat and cold, doing no more than 5 minutes of each. That will get your circulation going.
Don’t forget, there’s always arnica and epsom salt!
Coming soon: the levator scapula. Many people with upper trap issues also have levator scapula issues.
Katie Ford, class facilitator for Truth Be Told (a nonprofit working with incarcerated women that I’ve long supported), describes some serious truth-telling.
Katie Ford is a Talk to Me and Discovery class facilitator at the GEO Lockhart prison. She also emcees the orientation and graduations each semester. For two years, she served as the Truth Be Told program coordinator at Lockhart. The following piece is something she put together for a public reading at The Continental Gallery in Austin, where a group of musicians, poets and writers were invited to share original work on a common theme. The evening’s theme was “Safety.”
Think about the last time you sat down with a good friend, or a few good friends, and had one of those conversations in which you feel genuinely inspired by what the others are saying — and when you have something to say, you feel heard, understood — or at least accepted.
That feeling of really being connected with others.
And perhaps that conversation leaves you in awe — of…
View original post 2,039 more words
Inspired by my wonderful Ashiatsu and Ashi-Thai teacher Jeni Spring, who advertises on her scooter and has a thriving practice, I’ve decided to explore whether advertising on my vehicle will bring me more customers, as I go about my business around town. I just designed and ordered the car door magnet shown above.
I like the personal touch — people can see it and come up and talk (in parking lots), and also call, text, or check me out online — and book an appointment if they like what they see. (If I’m driving, I don’t text back until I can pull over, to be safe.)
Since I drive around anyway, I might as well leverage that to gain customers.
And when business is as busy as I want it, I can take the magnet off. Sweet.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 