Get Over the Overwhelm of the Holiday

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Ah, the most wonderful time of the year. That time where that last herculean push to tie up all loose ends for the year collides with a  crazed calendar of holiday parties—burning your energy up from both ends of the proverbial candle. Then, you wrap it up with a  tension-triggered family visit and you end up feeling like a Christmas ribbon–tightly wound!

Though you enjoy the holiday hustle and bustle, your holiday spirit can be riddled with ambivalence! Ambivalence causes physical  tension and emotional stress, headaches, backaches, fatigue and an overwhelming feeling of disinterest. You want to want to–but you don’t! The stretch between professional concerns, friendship and family responsibilities exceeds your “enjoy yourself” bandwidth. You may suddenly find yourself raising a glass to good Old Mr. Scrooge (he may have been onto something)!

How do you relax and enjoy the stretch between your work, family and play?

When you feel these symptoms, rather than pushing them down, muscling through, or saying no…pause. Allow yourself to quietly and  fully feel your maxed out symptoms. It’s like luxuriating in the permission to feel bad. If you need to, lie down for a moment. The  exercise is to allow your feelings–drain their force–without letting them escalate into a verbal tirade. It sounds strange, but letting  yourself feel bad feels good! You are taking ownership of your feelings rather than blaming your feelings on someone else.

 

Once you have released the desire to hide from it all, you can respond to your desire to connect to it all. Only try it differently! This time, when you stretch yourself, use relaxed energy rather than demanding energy, and you’ll enjoy your holiday stride. Here’s how  you establish, what I call, relaxed stretch:

  • BREATHE into your low belly to connect to your center of gravity.
  • Surrender energy up through your head’s crown and down through your feet or seat. Allow your spinal column to ELONGATE by relaxing your muscles’ hold. As tension melts away from the central line of the body, it decompresses your body’s distorted alignment–it’s as if your nervous system yawns. Deliberately let your body relinquish its chase for tomorrow. Stay in the experience of stretching your energy beyond the mundane
  • Let yourself FEEL infused with your enthusiasm for living your life. Do not focus on what you do or what people want you to do, simply feel your Spirit’s connection to living your life. Stay present with the moment’s experience of surrender.

Why does this work? When you BREATHE and ELONGATE the central line of your body, that relaxed stretch aligns each of your body’s energy centers. To stretch relaxation is to allow energy to flow, to guide your life force in a specific direction without controlling its nature. It’s like drawing by number, only the numbers are energy centers that make up your central plumb line. Only when they are
all connected, energized and stretched do you see and FEEL your full potential.

Between job tasks, before arriving at a holiday gathering, and especially when preparing to head home for your holiday visit… pause. BREATH into your Center. ELONGATE your alignment. FEEL your Spirit. Step into every exchange feeling the fluid force of your strength rather than the rigid compression of your tension.

Now you’re prepared to enjoy the holidays and everyday!

Accepting Help with Grace

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We live in a culture that shuns vulnerability. We cheer for the scrappy underdog who finds a way to pull herself up by her bootstraps. We value mind over matter and adulate those who can push their bodies through anything to reach their goals.

Don’t get me wrong—self-care and self-sufficiency are vital and admirable traits! But this notion that we must do it all by ourselves in order to be strong weakens us all. In fact, the idea that we are somehow capable of thriving in isolation runs counter to all of the principles that govern the universe. There is a yin and yang, a push and a pull, to every force in the universe. And if we don’t know how to receive, we waste vital energy on resistance instead of being in flow.

Your very bones are designed to work most optimally when they work with gravity, instead of resisting it. Your posture is a reflection of that relationship. When we marvel at the grace of a dancer or martial artist, we’re really marvelling at their relationship with gravity. They’re not fighting its pull. They’re not thrown off balance by its constant tug. Their grace doesn’t come fromoverpowering—it comes from accepting gravity and other universal forces’ help.

They have acknowledged gravity’s pull and are using it to power their motions. They have transformed a feeling of weight into a sense of groundedness in their bodies and a connection to the earth. They have learned to step into sync with the universe by aligning their bodies with the gravity and the unexpected tug of the world around them. They trust gravity to keep them rooted, their bones to hold them up, and the stretch of their posture toward the sky to keep them moving forward.

       Are you asking your muscles to do your bones work in holding you up?
      Are you resisting and fighting gravity, rather than working with it?
      Are you literally trying to carry the world on your shoulders?
      Are you tensing out of fear of collapse?

When we align ourselves with gravity, we learn to accept its support instead of seeing it as a burden. When we stop fighting the natural ebbs and flows of the world—and start learning to move with them—we stop experiencing life as tumultuous and step into an ease of being. And that state of grace observed in our postural relationship with gravity teaches us to work with life, instead of resisting its ups and downs.

If you think about it, grace in the face of tragedy does not come from trying to overpower the reality of the situation through sheer power of positivity—in fact, if you’ve ever seen that reaction, it’s probably made you cringe with fear that a hard fall is headed that person’s way. When we say someone has responded with grace, intuitively what we mean is, “That person has found a way to work with the fall, and as a result, will probably experience less damage.” We worry less about them, and we usually admire them all the more for it. This way of meeting challenge is what we are practicing when we meet gravity. Good posture carries an internal and external grace.
What we practice in our bodies becomes our practice in every aspect of our lives.

There is no escaping life’s pull. We can either exhaust ourselves over a lifetime by trying to change the very nature of the universe—or we can befriend it and ask it for help.

Where in your life could you use a little more grace?
How is your body asking you for help?
What would it feel like to experience true ease?

Strengthen Your Will To Align

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“Live In Your Strength”

Lao Tzu

People suffer in jobs they hate? Relationships fail because they don’t work through discontent? Poor posture develops into chronic musculoskeletal disorders? It’s easy for people to believe they don’t have the time or the right or the permission to act as they would if they could? These are a few examples of misalignment—deviating from your true nature—and it interferes with your ability to stand in your strength.

The result of misalignment is physical tension, emotional disinterest, and mental exhaustion. And when unchanged, perpetuates fear based beliefs and causes reactive behavior. It cripples your instinct to live in your strength! Misalignment is a mind, body, Spirit breakdown; just as, strength is a mind, body, Spirit aligning.

The act of aligning is the act of loving. Loving yourself enough to align within your physical body; loving yourself and another enough to align with the shared emotional needs of intimate relationships; or, loving your purpose enough to align with the mental demands of a workforce, ask for sensitivity and strength between mind and body, and self and other. The penalty of misalignment is the deterioration of one’s will.

In other words, the Will to Align is the devotion to invest your self to uphold the integrity of someone or something. The Will to Align is the courage to make love a verb.

Being devoted to a sound mind and body is exercising the confidence to make choices and craft a life simply because it contributes to its very nature—your nature–and not because it adheres to any external pressure to be or do anything else. Giving yourself permission to care for yourself connects you to your life purpose. Devoting yourself to personal integrity positions you to be in service to that purpose.

To develop self-devotion, recognize the importance of posture. How you stand on your feet, where your shoulder blades rest, how your spine adapts to sitting—physical subtleties, when aligned mindfully, are deliberately crafting the details of your life. This is ultimately how you place yourself in a life you want. Because how you do the smallest things are how you do the biggest things. Insist on integrity. Change your posture—change your life!

Enduring misalignment, no matter how small, in mind or body, becomes a way of surviving. And if you’re not careful, the accrued tension embodied from these compromises become preferable to the strength found in alignment. The unaddressed tension in the body keeps you in familiar patterns of poor posture that undermine the will’s devotion. Integrity is lost. The essence of you becomes buried under layers of disassociating.

  • Aligning does not mean connecting to things that feel secure; it means connecting to things that feel meaningful.
  • Aligning means establishing the path of least resistance, so that emotional truth is unveiled, physical strength is upheld, and mental poise is transparent. Misalignment is anything that interferes with this.

Lao Tzu guides us by saying, “Give attention to the smallest things to simplify the complicated.” Let tension be your guide to recognize and reconcile the small misalignments and you will take ownership of your life and its condition. Any physical discomfort, mental confusion, or emotional anxiety, are signals that something is misaligned. Trust your senses, your thoughts can convince you it’s nothing!

Misaligning holding patterns are invisible to us until they cause some kind of rigid reaction, but they are not rock solid—the mind and body do let go when your response to tension is one of curiosity rather than dismissiveness. Curiosity meaning: to witness conditions and explore changes that unravel tension. Don’t wait till the elephant is the room is so big the condition is un-reconcilable.

 

Are You Aligned With Your Strength or Your Tension?

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When we work from strength we feel strong. When we work from tension we feel weak.

How do you feel today? 

Let’s say strong is a connectedness between your self and a challenge that leaves you feeling successful; and weak is a separation between your self and a challenge that leaves you feeling unsuccessful. The cause of separation in weakness is often due to the mind and body having a different perspective about what you are intending to do. Inner ambivalence exhausts your allegiance.

Your mind is motivated to workout; your body feels self conscious working out.
The result: 18% of gym members don’t show up at the gym.
Your mind wants to eat healthy; your body feels punished eating healthy.
The result: 68% of Americans are overweight or obese.

Mind body ambivalence creates tension filled patterns in your physical performance and mental response to challenge. To connect with your strength rather than your tension, first take a moment to focus inward. Recognize your mental, emotional, and physical condition. Take a breath. Widen back in your mind, release stress through the occipital hollows at the base of your skull. Breath again. Reorganize the body, relax muscular tension so you experience the bones weight. Then, surrender your mind and body into each other until you are OK with who you are now and who you are becoming. Begin connecting to your challenge from this place and an internal strength is coupled with an external expanse that inspires you into the challenge.

Strength is excavated out of tension.

Pretzel Neck Remedy

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Curling up with a good book, bingeing on favorite television episodes, and napping with your beloved for hours on end (be they a two-legged or four-legged) are all wonderful things to do on cold winter days. A few months of contorting your body into positions that resemble a pretzel, leave you feeling like a pretzel!

Here’s a quick remedy for a pretzel neck…

Place two fingers lightly on your Adam’s Apples, central in the front of your throat, and swallow. You will feel the Adam’s Apple jump. Keep your attention on your Adam’s Apple and take your hand away. Now take a deep breath and imagine your Adam’s Apple gently gliding back within the circumference of your neck as you exhale. This will be a very subtle internal movement that changes the relationship between your neck and throat. Keep relaxing back with your breath until the sensation of this adjustment leaves you pain free.

When successful in adjusting the flow of subtle energy you experience relief multidimensionally. Physically the area feels more spacious, like a yawn; mentally you feel more present, like time has slowed down or even stopped.

Use this remedy as a preventative posture any time you are entering into a stressful situation that typically triggers holding patterns in your neck, throat, or shoulders.

A Year Round Practice

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A Year Round Practice
January 2017

The wisdom of an eight year old on Christmas Eve brings to mind what is important year round. This invitation rested on dinner plates guiding each of us to our seats. She beckoned us to be with her here and now. As it turned out, we were present for her first Christmas without the childhood belief of a Santa Claus; what a right of passage in a child’s life.

She reminds us that here and now is precious and meaningful. Every moment is secretly packed with an experience of evolution, even the mundane, perhaps especially in the repetition of mundane life. All transformational life practices demonstrate that repetition creates change if you practice here and now.

A Beach Workout that works for the Boardroom

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The typical Beach Workout focuses on Abdominals, Chest and Biceps, leaving you with your belly in, chest up and arms pumped! When referencing the BodyLogos Psyche-Muscular Map you realize you are simultaneously connecting to what you intuitively know through your abdominals, what inspires your heart through your chest and what you want to pull closer to you through your biceps. What a perfect recipe for entering the boardroom the next time you have a big presentation or to prep for your next job interview. Trusting what arouses your heart and feeling inspired to pull it toward you is useful in business and social settings.

Start your workout with an Abdominal Series and focus on experiencing your body’s weight rather than producing a large movement. Slowly carry your weight with grace instead of throwing it around. Experience your strength as power and your weight as groundedness.  Be the mindful person who’s in charge of his or her own destiny.

Now that you’re connected and centered inwardly, alternate between Chest and Biceps Exercises.  Start with the big muscles of the chest. As you connect the lift of the chest to the resistance/weight feel like you are leading your life from your heart. Let your chest solidly make contact with the weight before you start moving it and allow your shoulders to relax back.  With each repetition you will feel as if your heart was literally moving forward in the body.

Maintaining this forward lift of the heart, follow the chest set with an exercise for the smaller muscles of the biceps. As the biceps meet the resistance/weight, feel the chest like a helium balloon rising upward as the biceps muscle raises the weight. As you slowly return the weight to it’s starting position, feel as though the heart was smiling. Visualize what you want to pull into your life today as you complete the set.

As you alternate between Chest and Biceps Exercises feel the intuitive knowing from your abdominals rise up through the open smile of the chest and pull the image of today’s vision inward. The quiet knowing of your abdominal center will infuse your movement and generate the belief needed to bring that vision to fruition.

The mind body relationship is always in tact and always responding to the stimuli you present to it, be it through your thoughts or your actions. BodyLogos Active Meditation brings thought and action together to create your life.

BodyLogos Fitness is a mind body approach to movement and posture. The Tao of Strength Training DVD has three half-hour mind body workouts that introduce you to Active Meditation – spiritual fitness.