Happy Holidays!

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah,  a Wonderful Winter Solstice, a Sumptuous Shabe Chelle, a Peaceful Pancha Ganapati and a Happy New Year!

Frances Wessels A Portrait of 89 Years from Jason Akira Somma on Vimeo.

(Image found here)

Freedom.

However liberating something may have previously been for you, cling to it and it's just another dead end, a hollow belief or rigid posture.

Keep questioning.

Keep researching.

Only stick with the dogma is it's truly serving you.

And have fun!

 

Happy Holidays

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah,  a Wonderful Winter Solstice, a Sumptuous Shabe Chelle, a Peaceful Pancha Ganapati and a Happy New Year!

Frances Wessels A Portrait of 89 Years from Jason Akira Somma on Vimeo.

(Image found here)

MovNat

"We’re a mess. So the question has to be why, and the simple answer is that we live in a time and a place where we no longer need to use our bodies in order to make sure we are fed, clothed, and sheltered. Instead we live in a time and a place where we earn money to buy what we need, work primarily in static positions (hey look! I’m doing it right now!), and segregate our movement only to the small portion of time we may spend exercising. This lack of natural human movement is causing a plague of chronic pain and physical dysfunction, as well as contributing hugely to the disease processes of contemporary. culture. In short: it’s a big problem."

-- Brooke Thomas (BreakingMuscle)

Founder of MovNat, Erwan Le Corre's  passion for re-establishing healthy movement habits and building natural strength based on our innate human abilities is contagious. Or at least it is for me. After reading multiple interviews and following along with the workouts that come on a weekly newsletter (sign-up here), I decided a MovNat workshop is on my list of things to do for 2015! 

The following is a list of the basic principles and skills and if that floats your boat then I would recommend getting a copy of the Exploring Functional Movement DVD Erwan has created with Gray Cook of Functional Movement Systems.

The 10 principles that underlie the MovNat approach:

1. 
   Evolutionary
2. Instinctual
3. Universal
4. Practical
5. Vital
6. Unspecialized
7. Efficient
8. Adaptive
9. Cooperative
10. Environmental

The 13 movement skills are:

1. Running
2. Balancing
3. Jumping
4. Crawling and Rolling
5. Climbing
6. Lifting
7. Carrying
8. Catching
9. Walking
10. Swimming
11. Throwing
12. Grappling
13. Striking

I think I'm only regularly ticking 9 of those boxes so far...

Dr Andreo Spina

This guy because he talks ALOT of sense and researches and practices with this in mind...

Check out Andreo's instagram, youtube and blog feed for snippets. It will get you thinking.

"Flexibility and stretching does not decrease the chance of injury.  Flexibility is the ability of an articulation to achieve a range of motion passively.  For example, if you are passively doing the splits or passively sitting in a stretch, just because you can passively achieve a range of motion in a joint or articulation doesn't mean it will translate into an ability to utilize that range of motion in a functional movement pattern or a particular sport oriented movement... Mobility is flexibility plus strength and control...Just holding a static position doesn't get you to a point where you are strengthening the ranges of motion."

About reasons to be a mover

Older bodies that inspire me...

"I think that one of the reasons I got involved in dance
is to finish my movement development.
Because I have a hunger to find,
and to finish,
and to explore,
to do essentially what babies do when they begin to move.
A hunger to find out more of what movement is or can be.
I think it provides a service to keep the search alive
in a culture,
which has engineered an environment which requires physical and sensorial suppression to exist in.
Most of the people who study dance aren’t ambitious to be dancers, in fact.
Or aren’t serious about that ambition.
I think they’re trying to complete physicality
that gets messed up by sitting for 12 years in school, or longer.
Essentially, urban civilization has cut off from movement and sensorial development which would occur in a natural environment.
I mean the sense of smell is leaving.
The sense of sight is rigidly controlled by readings,
by television,
by school,
by signage,
by words everywhere in the city.
In fact there are many kinds of of control or implicit visual message
about how to interact with the city.
Here there is more neon than nuance.
Food is advertised rather than hunted for.
Entertainment becomes divorced from ingenuity.
I’m not complaining because it is about 15,000 years too late to change direction.
I have found the cities very interesting places,
but when I return to the country I am struck by the difference in what is required by the senses.
It is appalling how we disuse the body.
Dance remind us about that.
Dance explores some of the physical possibilities.
Dance refocuses our focusing mind on very basic existence,
and time, space, gravity, open up to creativity.
This seems to me a reminder of nature, of our natures,
and as such it provides a service to us in our physical doldrums.
It is a wakeup call to deadened urbanites,
a stimulus, to work-habituated bodies,
a promise to developing children …
Even those country folk who cope with their natural environment
use their bodiies more and more often
fall into a routine and mold their bodies into tools
from which creativity has departed
dance will remind them of their feet, their spines, their reach
I think its good for us"
--About reasons to be a mover. Steve Paxton. from Emilio Rosales

Frances Wessels A Portrait of 89 Years from Jason Akira Somma on Vimeo.



My friend Maia from julia warr on Vimeo.

This is beautiful. Maia Helles, a Russian ballet dancer, turns 95 but still remains resolutely independent, healthy and as fit as a fiddle.

Ido Portal

Ido, for his philosophy;

 "Movement is big. Bigger than any specific movement discipline and it contains within it HUGE 'worlds' like the world of fitness, dance, martial arts, strength, flexibility, circus and more. Specializing is great - but beyond our specialties - we are all HUMAN first, MOVERS second and only then SPECIALISTS."

My Teachers

I trained with an incredible lady called Ruth White. She was a senior Iyengar teacher who left the school to start her own teacher training course, and although she remains very loyal to the Iyengar method, she will often bring in teachers and trainers from different yoga background's. It's through that training I discovered the work of Vanda Scaraveli (as taught by Gary Carter) and a love of feet as Ruth's husband John (who teaches the philosophy classes) makes shoes. I still use his morning foot massage to this day.

On moving to London I discovered Anna Ashby and have been attending her weekly classes ever since...that was 7 years ago...If you are ever in London stop by Triyoga and try a class with Anna. She doesn't teach a fixed method (her influences are varied) and it's this approach that has given me the tools to learn to respond intelligently to my current needs rather then developing any fixed 'style'. Anna has taught me to question. Invaluable.

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed-

I, too, am America.

--Langston Hughes.

Peter Blackaby

Intelligent Yoga: Re-educating Mind and Body by Peter Blackaby

Having been to a couple of brilliant anatomy workshops with Peter Blackaby a little while ago I knew this would be a must read when I saw it and it really is!

Peter has been greatly influenced by the work of Vanda Scaravelli (see yesterdays post) and his practice as an osteopath and this book is a thoughtful, interesting and thoroughly researched interpretation of Yoga with a focus on the enquiry you should be having with your body and your practice. 

I read a review on Amazon a while ago that described it perfectly, so i'm going to borrow... 'Blackaby has unpicked movement without fracturing it and teaches intelligent practice in the context of the known, the surmised and the lived, suggesting an approach to yoga that is rational, disciplined and fulsomely human and humane.'

Go read, and then go to a workshop...I have two booked for the New Year : )

Vanda Scaravelli

'Do not kill the instinct of the body for the glory of the pose.’
-- Vanda Scaravelli

Vanda's book Awakening The Spine is one of the most thumbed through on my 'yoga shelf'. If you haven't got a copy then you are in luck because it was reprinted earlier this year. It's been revised by Vanda’s daughter based on extensive notes left by the author. Even if you have the first edition, it’s still worth having a look at this one to see how Vanda’s ideas subtly changed.

I am interested in Vanda's work as inspiration for experimentation, trusting in YOUR yoga and allowing this stuff to be a constant evolution

Beautiful.

Images from the book ‘Awakening the Spine’ (The final one is B.K.S. Iyengar with, or rather on,  Vanda Scaravelli,)

Pierre Huyghe

space space space

(Pierre Huyghe via mariangoodman)

Jules Mitchell

Jules’work blends biomechanics with the tradition of yoga to help people move better, and while looking into the research on stretching she discovered some pretty eye-opening things. I've eagerly listened and read everything that she has put out into the world in the last 6 months or so and it has led me to question so much of what I thought I knew. I've changed a fair bit about the way I cue postures in class and think through sequences as a result. I highly recommend checking out here online classes on udaya.com, especially the Passive Restorative classes. Bliss. 

Here she is talking about her work with Brooke Thomas of Liberated Bodies.

Episode 9: Jules Mitchell: The Science of Stretching
 

And this is the video that led me to her (through much interned searching)

Space

"One of the most basic principles of every single art form has to do not with what's there - the music, the words, the movement, the dialogue, the paint - but with what isn't. In the visual arts it's called the 'negative space' - the blank parts around and between objects themselves. The negative space allows us to see the non-negative space in all its glory and gloom, its colour and mystery and light. What isn't there gives what's there meaning. IMAGINE THAT."

-- Cheryl Strayed

The Fox of Bloody Woman Island

(image found here)

My Dad

My Dad is a head-teacher and he LOVES his job. The joy, ambition and patience he has for what he does is a constant inspiration. He has taught me to persevere, to believe in my abilities, to be calm in the face of upset and the beauty of finding a space to ones own.

This just about sums up his favorite past time... 

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
― Thomas à Kempis

Sunday Tune

Sunday TUNES!

Dewey Nielsen

I Just love Dewey's videos. Movement inspiration a plenty.

Saturday Poem

contained and uncontained

Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God ... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

--Wallace Stevens

(via evencleveland)

Photos from Shilly Shally Lodge, Gatineau Park. From Library and Archives Canada, discovered via A London Salmagundi.

Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

I keep coming back to this book by Cheryl Strayed.

It is a group of letters from Strayed's advice column on The Rumpus. She writes with compassion, honesty, wisdom, humor and guts and I highly recommend it. I actually give copies to friends and if they don't like it i question our friendship...jokes...kind of ; )

Some of the bits I like to re-read every now and again...

Don't

“You give a lot of great advice about what to do. Do you have any advice of what not to do?

Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs. I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do—have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.”

Sister Ship

"...You'll never know the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."

Love details

"love is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. it can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. it can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and loaded with promises that we may or may not want to keep. the best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love. and, honey bun, on this front, i think you have some work to do."

 

Space

"One of the basic principles of every single art form has to do not with what's there- the music, the words, the movement, the dialogue, the paint - but with what isn't.  In the visual arts it's called the 'negative space' - the blank parts around and between objects, which is, ofcourse, every bit as crucial as the objects themselves. The negative space allows us to see the non-negative space in all its glory and gloom, its colour and mystery and light. What isn't there gives what's there meaning. IMAGINE THAT. "

 

 

Jill Miller

Jill Miller is the creator of Yoga Tune Up, a fitness therapy that combines conscious corrective exercise with precise self-myofascial release using therapy balls and I am a big fan of her work. Jill is insatiably curious about the human body, deeply thoughtful and heartfelt about what she has to offer and incredibly well-educated.

Short of taking Jill miller home with you to reset your scapular, there is no better guide out there for step-by-step self massage and care then this book (not that i have come across anyway...please do say if you think I'm wrong!).

I also LOVED what Matthew Remski had to say about the images of herself in Yoga poses she had chosen to use in the book. he makes a very important and valid point.

"You might have heard of Jill Miller. Her new book, The Roll Model, is the culmination of years of yoga practice, injury, biomechanics research, massage experimentation, and recovery. There’s a lot to say about the book, but I’d like to close by focusing on a few out-of-the-way captions she writes beneath images of herself demonstrating difficult postures. The captions put talent in its place.
In the first (Kindle loc. 5707), she stands on two blocks in a forward fold so deep that she can flatten her palms onto the floor. The caption reads:

I am demonstrating a fairly extreme range of motion in this forward bend. Please do not try to force yourself into this shape. I use this image to make it obvious that this sequence aims to open the entire back of your body.

In the second (loc. 5762), she’s in a mesmerizing expression of revolved side-angle. The caption:

I am demonstrating an extreme range of motion in this twisted side bend. Please do not try to force yourself into this shape. I use this image to make it obvious that this sequence targets the sides of your body.

Finally, loc. 6494 shows her in three advanced postures, including padmasana. Here’s the best caption of all:

Just because you can do a pose does not mean that you should. These are poses that I have retired from my repertoire. Retired. They made my hips, knees, and spine click and pop and are not suitable for my body.

I might be wrong, but I believe this is the first time in the history of yoga instructional literature in which a teacher/presenter has disclaimed images of their own achievements with the warning “Do not try at home.” It’s like the caption in the sports car commercials: “Closed track. Professional driver. Do not attempt.”

Here’s someone who has the courage to demonstrate a unique skill — a talent — that was maladaptive to her, and that she knows would be toxic for others to mimic. In a way, Miller is sneaking a paraphrase of Krishna’s key teaching in through the backdoor of a biomechanics manual: “It is far better to follow one’s own dharma poorly than someone else’s dharma well.” (Gita 3.35) Don’t imitate, says the avatar."

-- Matthew Remski

Go and put it  (and some yoga tune up balls) on your Xmas list.  

Movement is Life

'in a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists'

— jhumpa lahiri, the lowland

Carl Andre

Carl Andre

(gif found here)

Kelly Starrett

Kelly Starrett is a physical therapist best known for his mobility project MobilityWOD, and for his book Supple Leopard and it was his youtube posts that introduced me to Jill Miller, a BIG INSPIRATION of mine (see tomorrows post). I have a lot of time for his work and love the philosophy behind what he puts out there.

Check him out!

Matthew Remski

Teacher Matthew Remski's project What Are We Actually Doing in Asana? (WAWADIA), which looks at injuries related to asana is a must read if you teach or practice yoga and are interested in self-refection.  It will eventually become a book, but in the process, Remski is posting some of his findings in a series on his blog. 

The posts have lead me down (a pleasing) rabbit warren of ideas, challenges and questions and fueled a fair bit of research myself. I can't wait for the book! If you haven't come across his work please do have a look...here is a little back-ground and an excerpt from the latest article...

"Everyone has a beautiful practice when they’re practicing. And everyone can take selfies. But only a few of those selfies can go viral. Maybe talent makes the difference.

In Yogaland, the valorization of talent happens beneath the surface, because every reason for everything has a hidden esoteric default. Kino, Mr. Iyengar, Cameron Shayne — they all have that something special that shows up in their practice. We don’t want it to be talent. We want it to be a virtue, accessible to everyone. But if we’re honest, talent is probably all we can really claim to see on the yoga mat. If we think we see more than that, we’re getting into the weird projective territory of guessing at the internal states of others.

Using the word “talent” to describe what Kino is working with would come with a price. It would confound the democratic promise of postural learning that fuels the marketing of contemporary yoga. It sounds deterministic, and yoga’s all about freedom, right? Explanations based upon talent or genes would seem to rob the yogi of agency. “Talent” would also reposition the desirability of the skill by obscuring an implied therapeutic benefit that everyone should have access to.

Everyone wants to have a beautiful practice. But most people understand that we are not all developing the same talents for the same reasons. Despite our traumatized, what-else-can-we-do? belief in neoliberal meritocracy, most of us know that talent itself, much like the accident of happening to express conventional ideals of beauty, is the primary engine of visual renown and influence. Nature bestows differences that can look and even feel like inequalities. Perhaps difference is its own beautiful practice.

Talent is not unlike inherited money. It’s the accumulation of beneficial cultural and genetic transactions. Unfortunately, our entire social architecture is set up to believe that it is the earned property of the individual.

On the bright side, the acknowledgement of “talent” might also demystify the process and charisma of exemplary postural yogis, and perhaps encourage more people to practice within their means — or, according to their difference."

-- Matthew Remski, WAWADIA Update #23: “Kino Has a Beautiful Practice” vs. “Kino Is Talented”

Valentina Liernur

Valentina Liernur

Stories

“You know how doctors who work with children get the children to tell stories? And they figure out from the stories what’s frightening the child, what’s worrying the child, what the child thinks? Well, a novel is just a story. You work things out in the stories you tell.”

Happy birthday, Joan Didion! Read her 1978 Art of Fiction interview and 2006 Art of Nonfiction interview.

My Mum

I've been teaching for 6 years now and I still get anxious.

"If you are nervous, it means you care" -- is the best advice my mum had for me this year. It's a mantra before I step into the teaching space.

Long may it continue!

Thanks Mum, for this and for all the other brilliant stuff you do : )

Sunday TUNES!

Transcendental Etude

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple
line of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep up with, learn by heart
what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prodigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are,
even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing
against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her
What makes a virtuoso?—Competitiveness.)
The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives
The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is reheasing in her body, hearing-out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage,
a tale only she can tell.

But there come times—perhaps this is one of them
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
we when have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowning the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.

-- Adrienne Rich
(extract from Transcendental Etude, The Dream of a Common Language)

Gary Ward

Gary Ward is the founder of Anatomy in Motion, and the author of the book I'm currently reading What the Foot?. 

His work is a new discovery for me  and it was this quote that pulled me in... 

 “You are never going to not benefit from getting more mobile and supple feet.”

I can't give you a review of the book yet, and I'm a slow reader so it might take some time, but what I have read and heard so far has been enough to convince me to sign up to the Anatomy in Motion course next year. CUE MAJOR EXCITEMENT. Have a listen, and massage your feet and then go for a walk.

 

Dr Chelsea A. Jackson

Dr. Chelsea A. Jackson's work explores the lived experiences of individuals across multiple communities and her most recent research utilizes the lived experiences of Black teen yoga practitioners who use yoga and storytelling as mediums for critical literacy development. Working primarily within marginalized communities, Chelsea seeks to understand the ways in which power and privilege impact lives at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

Her important research has practical implications within the community she is part of (and beyond) through trainings and educational programmes and her blog  yogis-in-the-community highlights the diversity of people practicing and teaching yoga today. Go check it out!

Rafe Kelly

Rafe's philosophy on movement really resonates with me and his the work he does in his community to implement that philosophy is really inspiring. Take a listen and check out his blog EvolveMovePlay, where he posts LOADS of great movement inspiration from all sorts of sources.

Brené Brown

Brené Brown's TED Talks are my favorite.

She studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love...and writes  (and talks) about it in a poignant, funny way.  She shares a deep, resonant insight from her research so you should share these talks with everyone you know (if you did it the first time round then do it again!).

Katy Bowman

This woman is brilliant.
Go directly to her blog to read everything she has to say, or listen to the many inspiring podcasts she is firing out, or better yet add Move Your DNA to your online bookbuying wish-list.
It is a must read if you move (i.e. if you are human). I cannot recommend it highly enough. In it Katy forms a brilliantly written, scientifically based alternative way of thinking about movement and exercise, which maybe, just maybe, will change the way you see the whole damn universe. Revolutionary and a truly beautiful thing.

 

However, there's no point in starting a revolution if you're hungry. So why not add this mighty fine cook book to your (NOT AMAZON) basket while you are at it.

with gratitude

For the next 24 days I will be curating an advent calendar of those that have inspired me most on this years movement journey, It will include a lot of the names and ideas you may have heard me waxing lyrical about in class, so hopefully a usesful guide for you to start your own research. 

I am never 100% sure about any of this yoga/movement/body stuff, no-one is (don't trust those that are!!), I am only ever confident in my current interpretation of things and the following people have provided lots for me to think about, apply and retire from my current ways of working so with out further ado, I GIVE THANKS TO...

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

Self-Portrait in Iceland

The face is featureless,
As though bound in tight gauze,
And therefore presents a mien
Of deadly restraint, and for a moment
It terrifies, this visage
Shorn of expression, the first impulse
Is to recoil from what appears
To be willful, if bloodless and unscarred,
Mutilation, but somehow
The set of the head, its angled tilt,
Imparts a liveliness to the sitter
That defies a nullity because it captures
Light from an unseen window
And reflects from an unseen radiance
A sanguine assertion of self
Drawn from tones of glacial tides
And roseate pumice stone.
The hands, extremities at rest
In the sitter’s lap just over the knees
And crossed at the wrists, are nearly convivial,
Inward-cupped, not articulated but nonetheless
Eloquent in their assured capacity
For labor, the lack of delicate modeling
Suggests a readiness
To take hold, to lend themselves
To tasks at hand, but the rudimentary
Aspect reveals no crudeness of character
In the sitter, no vulgarity, on the contrary
The hands are free from guile and coarse use,
They echo the face in elemental probity,
Holding in quick, almost offhand fashion
Gulps of sun,
Chunks of flame
In the shade of bleached volcanoes. 

 

-- Deborah Pease

Saturday Cartoon

Listen

Interesting stuff about Dr Andreo Spina's Functional Range Conditioning and his clinical thought process. If you work with bodies click play!
MS Podcast with Dr. Andreo Spina

found here

Proprioception

Proprioception is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. This sense is very important as it lets us know exactly where our body parts are, how we are positioned in space and to plan our movements. Examples of our proprioception in practice include being able to clap our hands together with our eyes closed, write with a pencil and apply with correct pressure, and navigate through a narrow space.

Balance Beam

solid moves and good music to boot...Enjoy!

Vestibular

The vestibular system explains the perception of our body in relation to gravity, movement and balance. The vestibular system measures acceleration, g-force, body movements and head position. Examples of the vestibular system in practice include knowing that you are moving when you are in an elevator, knowing whether you are lying down or sat up, and being able to walk along a balance beam.

 

Francesca Woodman

yadir quintana

Yadir Quintana

sit down, stand up

Can you get up and down off the floor without “touching” anything?

" My oldest client ever was a woman named Myrle. She was 89 when she started seeing me and we worked together for 5 years. When we first met, I asked her to get down on the floor and back up. I wanted to get a sense of her functional strength. It took her about 2 minutes to get down (with the use of a chair) and it took her 72 minutes, 4 pieces of furniture, and every one of MY muscles to get her back up again.
She was mortified and told me how the exercise brought up memories of her mother. She had cared for her mother in the end stages of her life, and when she watched her mother struggle to get off the floor, she swore “I will NEVER be like that.” Of course, most physical goals require some sort of physical practice beyond grand declarations. Myrle, like most people, didn’t get down on the floor regularly the last 20 (or 40) years and so the muscle strength necessary to do so silently slipped away..."

Read the rest of this brilliant blog post from Katy Bowman here.

Touch Tours

Matt Ducklo's pictures of museum "touch tours" where blind or partially sighted people are able to take private tours of museums so that they can touch and experience the art work.

“Touch has a memory.”

― John Keats

Touch