Dr. Ruth and me. Steve Friendman photo

How is Hutzpah Learned?

Dr. Ruth and me!

Where does your hutzpah come from?

Dr. Ruth made a documentary about her story last year. Here’s my short-story!

Years of childhood trauma taught me to be tough, and tension was its cohort. I believed strength was the capacity to endure hardship and pain––physical and emotional. And if I was tough enough the tension would subside.

I was wrong.

When the traumatic moments became greater than my capacity, I began spontaneously and unintentionally leaving my physical body. My experience of physical tension and self-denial would suddenly shape-shift. I’d experience my energy body as a flowing current precisely aligned between Earth and Sky. A posture steeped in self-regard that was tension-free and pain-free.

I experienced Relaxed Strength. A posture that is now my foundation for living strong––in my body.

My practice––the BodyLogos Method––is committed to Relaxed Strength. I know, first-hand, that self-acceptance and self-love––the gift of my childhood shape-shifting––inspired the current that aligned my strength with the life I wanted. And, that self-proving and self-betrayal are tensions that exhaust our strength.

Consciously aligning between Earth and Sky, and listening to my body’s tension-cry with interest, has offered me a bridge from fighting to healing, from being fit to being well, and from living tough to living strong.

It is my mission to pass on what I learned from Earth and Sky.

This is the hutzpah that has influenced my NEW BodyLogos Fitness App. It will launch next month! I’m so excited to offer a private experience for BodyLogos teachings.

Keep your eyes open for the launch details and the start-up 5-week Relaxed Strength Challenge!

 

Steve Friedman Photo

Tammy in Motorcycle Gear

A Weird and Wonderful NYC Motorcycle Ride

Tammy in Motorcycle GearLong summer treks out of city congestion balance my need for the open road. I’ve lived on a motorcycle in NYC traffic for 25-years.

How unusual to have open road around me when riding through midtown Manhattan. A summer trek right here on Broadway!

CoronaVirus has completely changed the landscape.

It’s an infectious landscape of silence and sirens. Fear-filled vulnerability has seeped into our soft tissues. The streets are near empty. A world is hiding to stay alive.

This feels weird. I’m used to feeling afraid of the world, even hiding from it at times. But, in this moment, there’s no immediate world to be afraid of. It’s surreal. I actually feel safer riding my motorcycle up Broadway than ever before.

As I continue up Central Park West, I hear sirens. Suddenly, I’m whipped back into the landscape I’m familiar with in NYC—traffic. But this time, I embrace the scene. Instead of people being in my way, I felt in their company.

My body feels like it’s riding into a gathering. My body isn’t fearing or dreading its environment. It’s curious about being together with people—having a shared experience.

This feels wonderful. I want to be in relationship with—in communion with—something real.

This is definitely not how I typically approach a NYC traffic jam!
This is definitely not how we feel approaching each other, masked with eyes down, since hit by this pandemic.

But, I have all my motorcycle gear on. No surgical mask necessary when wearing a full-face helmet!

I rode through familiar neighborhoods that day. Visiting a client’s courtyard who passed away from COVID-19, checking on houses of people out of town, and waving to doormen I used to see regularly. But nothing felt the same.

Usually my gear protects me from the world. On this day, it united me with it.
Usually my fear separates me from the world. On this day, it connected me to it.

How weird and wonderful to separate from my habit to fear. And for a moment, be curios about its impermanence, illusiveness and trickery.

Single-Hood Suddenly Feels Like a Life Sentence!

But, it just as suddenly can change.

My first weeks in isolation were uncharacteristic and dark. I mean, typically I’ve liked alone time.

Thoughts about how long it would be before being touched, or touching another human being, cut like a knife. Hopeless loneliness creeped into every moment.

My body was, and continues to be, starved for touch. But it’s changed.

Being single had been a choice to immerse myself in creating my dreams. But suddenly, single-hood felt like a life sentence.

I’m not single because of Coronavirus. I’m single because I cherish me-time. Coronavirus just took away my buffer. Dance and therapeutic touch satisfied the sensual grace physical connection inspires. But this artistry has distracted me, to the point of replacing, a deeper want for an intimate we.

Isolation brought me face to face with my want, and a face off in the mirror.

As I looked myself in the eye, first the right eye then the left, (Does that have some significance?) I recognized that my ambivalence about relationships has always circled around the same theme: they take more than they give. It’s not worth the effort. I’ve got more important plans!

To no surprise, my history is riddled with touch taking—stealing—what was creative in me. From childhood sexual abuse to nursing a brain-injured lover. My time and body were exhausted by their needs.

I’ve been self-isolating, limiting touch, for years.

Now I’m yearning for it!

The CoronaCrisis has cracked me open. Something in me has shifted.

At first it felt sad. I wanted to punish myself for lost time. But then something wonderful happened.

I realized something when I took in my reflection. I wasn’t running away from my past, I was running toward my future. I HAVE made an effort to be in relationship. With myself. And I’m a good partner.

I’ve given myself quiet space to create in. Uninterrupted time to dream in. Aloneness to explore in. I have given myself time to explore what is important to me. And I have successes to show for it.

My fierce love for me has protected what I’ve cherished in me—my body and creative life force—this alliance is what I live and die for. Single-hood has taught me to be a thoughtful, intuitive and independent partner.

Single-hood is a partnership between the inner and outer worlds of a self. This relationship is a gift, not lost time.

Rather than focusing on wanting touch, now I focus on how I’m available for touch. My chest is relaxed wide open, my arms and palms rotate outward in readiness, and my pelvis feels anchored under me. My availability for touch is settling into my body’s posture. Rooting it’s permission in my expression.

I am finally present with an unfulfilled want. No running away or chasing. Just in its majesty.

For today, I am touched by being open to receive.

It is worth the effort. Relationships are worth your effort, be they inward or outward.

Want can be uncomfortable, but it guides you to your next step in living free and whole. Stay awake in these times and learn what you’re yearning for.

Practice Comfort

Doubts, about our future, tug at everyone’s nerves. But there is no room for self-doubt when so many of us need to create new avenues of income, and new avenues for connection.

Some of you may feel no purpose to guide you; some of you live with no human, animal or plant that affirms your value.

What were once low-grade self-doubts can become booming self-limiting judgments.

Self-doubt is where your resistance to self-care and personal comfort lie. Care and comfort, however, are day-to-day core conditions that maintain immune strength, emotional resilience and mental clarity.

Care and comfort are not luxuries, they are essentials, when facing the atmosphere that this viral pandemic has commanded––a sudden divorce from belonging in, and unexpected isolation from, the world.

Delight lifts you out of the self-doubt that interferes with self-care and comfort. But it’s very hard to be delighted by what you’re actively judging as limited.

So, we need to learn and practice self-acceptance to realize personal potential.

To delight in self-acceptance is to enjoy: yourself, your body, and your unique way of seeing life. This authentic experience of yourself is what makes you one of a kind and elevates you to realizing the Divine in you. This best-self experience keeps you inspired to develop and share your gifts in the world, even if it must be through a computer screen during these times.

So how do you recognize your best-self?

Start by identifying something you really like about yourself. Like for me, I really like that my hair turned white rather than gray. I can count on this being a feel-good statement about myself no matter what else is happening.

Practice staying in alignment with a feel-good statement of your own. Experience self-acceptance, rather than self-judgment, when thinking about your feel-good statement.

Once you can maintain this vibration of self-acceptance, you can respond mindfully, rather than react angrily when challenged, and be your best-self.

When triggered into self-doubt, rather than succumbing to your habitual tension template, think about that feel-good statement to flip your alignment back to self-acceptance. It may have nothing to do with what’s going on, but it snaps you out of engaging with the trigger’s self-damning attack. It snaps you back into being nice to yourself.

Self-acceptance starts at home with your habits, and in your body-mind awareness. Practice makes comfort!

 

1:1 FaceTime Personal Training Available. Exercise is an immune system builder––your first priority during a viral pandemic! mindthebody@bodylogos.com

 

 

 

Unseen Things that Collapse Your Chest

 

Common Loon Opens the Silver Lining of its Heart

The heart expresses its emotions through the characteristics of your chest muscles. Like a looking glass, everything from your joy to sorrow is visible through this physical transparency.

When you cry sad tears your chest muscles collapse inward into the protection of your back. But when you cry tears of joy your chest muscles bounce outward into the world with each gasp.

While the expression of any real raw emotion is essential to experience your life fully; resilience, toward balance, is also essential to your well-being.

Sadness, by the way, is not the only thing that crushes your heart. Doubt, uncertainty and shame also shut down, what I call, your Smile of Truth. This smile across your chest embody’s more than joy, it expresses your self-worth, assurance and confidence.

To smile at the world through an open curiosity of your chest, even when it seems that the world has let you down, is to remember the silver lining. The gift left in the wake of discouragement.

Believing that the Universe is on your side is the opening that reveals your silver linings.

Workout Warriors Take Warning

Motivation Question

7AM fitness clients are high achievers! We’re warming up in the dark and seeing our day take shape before the sun comes up.

Holiday socializing may have overflowed into the work week and made these early workouts painful. One of my high achiever’s responded to feeling over-done by over-doing some more!

Did she believe that overriding her body’s exhaustion would make her stronger?

As her trainer, I had to help her decelerate and work with willingness rather than will. The willingness to listen rather than demand; and recognize that muscle failure is not the same thing as physical exhaustion. Muscle failure challenges a restored muscle to full capacity—till it fails. Physical exhaustion is an unrestored muscle.

Fitness resolutions need to abide by the same willingness; listen and discern between physical exhaustion and muscle failure!

Meet limitations anew each day by being present. Presence offers truth to your strength training that is both empowering and humbling.

Empowering because you experience your limitations from a place of respect. Meeting your limits, not beating your last performance, is the definition of self-love. Overriding your limits is the definition of self-betrayal.

Humbling because it’s a “real” exchange. Not with what you can and can’t do, but with what you’re willing or not willing to do.

My client was willing to exhaust herself further, escalate her body’s tension and beat up her self-worth over how heavy a dumbbell was and how hard she could drive herself. The question becomes, are you willing to sacrifice yourself—your wellbeing—to feed what you think “should be” versus what actually is.

Stop thinking and feel! Train for relaxed strength, and leave the tension of self-betrayal in 2019!

Woman Lying Supine

Find Your Natural Posture

Woman Lying Supine

While learning posture’s subtle balance between surrendering and aligning, a student questioned, “shouldn’t good posture be natural––balancing attention between tension and strength is hard?!”

I felt that his sentiment should be true, but my experience working with bodies showed otherwise. So I slept on it. (My go-to place when stumped!) As I laid down that evening and felt my spine unfurl into its rightness and enjoyed my muscles’ surrender from a day’s work, it struck me. He’s right!

The precision of posture is natural—when horizontal!

Since then, whenever a client expresses uncertainty about what is correct posture, I lay them horizontal and help them answer the question from a supine position.

Gravity is a blanket that guides you to your best self.

Dog with questioning head cock

Selfishness is a Good Practice

Dog with questioning head cock

I sat on the arm of a client’s couch while she took a phone call. The call was extensive; long enough to change my training plan for her.

Rather than getting agitated, I aligned my body with gravity and relaxed into a deeper experience of Self. With each breath I could feel my emotional tension patterns unraveling.

Rather than feeling my worth in question, I aligned with our separation. I relaxed in what is, instead of what I was afraid of. Being replaced doing.

My client and I were equally selfish. While she used selfishness to take care of her business with this long awaited phone call. I used selfishness to take care of me.

Selfishness is an aspect of self-care.

 

Tammy speaks about the Power of Posture

Fitness For Living

 

You workout, yet you still feel worn out by life. Every demand, expectation and responsibility adds weight to the gravity of your day.

What carries your workout vitality into your life?

Proper posture is the energy conductor that plugs you into your strength.

Posture that is relaxed and aligned wakes up your mind and muscle’s. You plug into gravity—a universal energy Source. After all, we are an energy resource—we die. The universe is an energy Source—it’s infinite!

When posture isn’t considered you use up your energy reserve quickly. You crave sleep and food to recharge, or external stimulants to keep up. Posture extends the life of your body’s battery of life force.

Listen to this 17-minute talk, broadcast from the Gary Marshall Theater in Burbank California, about the power of posture.

Story Telling Can Change the Story’s Meaning

A chameleon changing to meet her environment

I was told that telling a story while you’re still bleeding from it puts the audience in the seat of the therapist, or at least, not the receiver. And while I fully hear that and can’t disagree, I was determined to tell the story that prompted my book: The Art of Strength.

After many practice sessions through tears, my coach said I may not be ready. Maybe you should pick another aspect of your story? But he stood by me and guided me through the maze of my emotions finding the places that would anchor me.

When in my final preparations for my book’s signature talk, I passed it by a director friend of mine. His response after listening was, “Beautifully written and beautifully spoken, but I don’t think you want to be pretty. You want to have authority so people take action.” He continued with this instruction, “Underline every verb and pop those verbs whenever possible.” So, I did.

This note was incredible. Accenting the verbs changed the meaning of the story from something that happened to me to something that I owned about me. The ownership peeled back another layer of the proverbial onion of healing.

Without challenging myself to speak the story with authority, rather than as a victim/survivor, this layer would not have surfaced. The surfacing, was messy; but cathartic. In that last 24-hours of preparation I was so blocked I was forgetting the entire talk, not just lines here and there.

My body needed to scream it out of its muscle memory; cry it out of its mental beliefs; laugh it out of its heart’s survival strategies. So, I did.

I screamed, cried and laughed so hard I thought I may not have a voice left for the talk! My body let go of so much emotional tension that I literally felt transparent. As if you could have waved your hand through my body.

“One feels as if One is dissolved and merged into Nature.”
Albert Einstein

My personal tension template had become fragmented. And for the next day’s talk reorganized; and for future talks restored.

I had to own my story FOR my audience, something I had not yet been able to do for myself.

There may be more layers? In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that there are. But speaking was a prompt to heal myself for the world.

In this way, my audience was my therapist.

Thank you.