Practice Comfort

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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! [email protected]

 

 

 

Unseen Things that Collapse Your Chest

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Do You Want to be Tough or Strong?

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Chase the Carrot or Eat the Carrot

The choice between being tough or strong is a conversation about what you want running your life, tension or strength.

I’ve come to realize that tough is protective gear masquerading as strength. So, when training folks, I work to keep it honest. Challenge their strength’s potential AND learn its limitations.

When a client was failing in his workout due to exhaustion, not muscle failure, he averted his gaze.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You’ll be mad if I tell you,” he replied.

He was in the middle of a digital fitness challenge where he had to have his heart rate elevated for a certain number of minutes within a month’s time. He was over-training. Rejuvenation time was shelved until the challenge was over.

It was clear he was disheartened. His tension pooled in his chest muscles; broadening the protective shield of his back.

Looking at the floor he mumbled, “I’ll be fine. I’ll just walk everywhere today instead of my peloton run.”

Can you see yourself in this?

Use minutes to meditate was my advice. Use the time for active restoration versus active progression. But the digital minute-counter shutoff when his heart rate stabilized.

Penalized for self-care. Hmmm?!

  • We look away when we know in our body that we’re hurting ourselves, but in our mind, we have an insatiable need to progress.
  • We look away when we believe that we would lose our strength––be traumatized––if we didn’t triumph over a challenge.
  • We look away, when we know, deep down, that some nonsensical belief has triggered our tension into the driver’s seat.

What is our tension chasing?

Survival––Survival of the fittest! (richest, skinniest, smartest…)
We’re chasing a carrot on a string. That carrot is the belief that we’re not the fittest.

Here’s the truth of it. Chasing will never change the belief. In fact, the tension that keeps the belief running is getting stronger by the act of chasing it.

Stop being strung along and eat the carrot!

We feel most balanced when we can look life straight in the eye. Balance asks us to look in both directions. What if we stopped chasing? What if we just dropped into our bone’s stillness and reevaluated our habitual chase to prove ourselves?

What is in our body’s stillness?

Neutral Attention––Neutral to life’s flow. (truth, unfolding, evolution…)
When we eat the carrot, we reassess what we want to align with. An outside expectation or an inside truth. A distorted judgment or good sense. A past trauma or your present realness.

“Trauma is a fact of life, but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.”
Peter Levine, PhD & author, Waking the Tiger

Trauma is a physical experience. Any level of trauma––disappointment, judgment, expectation––lives in the body as tension until it’s resolved.

The mind forms beliefs to make sense out of the body’s sudden invasion of tension. Very often, self-damning beliefs that are mis-taken.

The body’s tension template and the mind’s twisted beliefs are locked in with each other, until the body’s tension can surrender its grip.

When we bump into this chase, we feel like a wimp and feel we need to toughen up!

But what if I were to say, when we bump into this chase, we need to feel into its vulnerability––experience our inner-wimp––until we are introduced to our strength.

  • Experience your body as a wimp. Don’t focus on your mind’s judgments or your emotional reactions. Feel for your bone’s perspective. What is under your judgment and reactivity?
  • What are your bones hungry for? What does your inner-wimp need, to feel cared for?
  • Be that care-giver.

This is self-care not self-indulgence. You know this because you’re not perpetuating Self-denial (with a capital “S”), nor are you ignoring the chase. You are reassessing who you are, and what you need, to feel aligned with your deepest, richest, wisest Self.

When we chase the carrot on a string, we lose our selves. When we eat the carrot, we find ourselves. This is strength.

 

Please share this with anyone you feel could use its message. Thank you.

When You’re Aligned, You’re Never Alone

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Search For Nothing and Find Everything

 

Do you experience your body as a spiritual instrument or a mechanical frame?

If we recognize “spiritual” as a connection with the greater whole––Creation––and the body’s relationship with gravity as a connection with the Universe, then our physical relationship with gravity is a spiritual practice. Our physical posture is a part of Nature’s spiritual artistry.

This has been my experience since childhood. When I’m aligned I’m never alone.

As a young girl I was traumatized regularly and would regularly disassociate—leave my reality without warning—into an altered-reality. I would find my self rescued from my tension-filled curled up body and suddenly be ease-fully stretched between Earth and Sky. I experienced myself as an energy-body, bones in a relaxed stretch and muscles surrendered to accommodate this stretch.

This altered-reality felt safe, connected and relevant. So, when I realized chasing those feeling in my reality was futile, I set out to find them through my body’s ease-filled stretch between Earth and Sky.

Embodying, what I now call, Neutral Alignment became my life’s mission.

Alignment asks our bones to be neutral—central—in our muscles’ intricate cocoon. Neutral by definition is resistant-free and the absence of resistance is sensation-free. Because of this we experience Neutral Alignment as nothingness.

But in this nothingness there is an energetic exchange that makes us whole.

Our bones, when aligned with gravity, become an energy antenna that channel’s gravity’s force through its structure, conserving and strengthening our energy’s flow. This channel of force is Source energy that recharges our resources––our mind and body––and it connects us to all that is.

This energy exchange is the REAL World Wide Web!

This energy exchange introduced me to a spiritual life without setting out on a spiritual quest.

Strength training has been the most influential game-changer in establishing Neutral Alignment. Even more than ballet class! I witness how my physical relationship with an outside resistance mirrors what I emotionally resist in my life story. This emotional resistance being the root of my body’s tension and misalignment.

For example:
• When I catch myself trying to dominate resistance in the gym, I realize I’m trying to trump uncomfortable feelings with physical aggression, in the hopes of restoring my self-worth or rightness. I may be able to dominate a dumbbell, but I’ve lost myself in the process!

So instead:
• I connect to resistance like a handshake. Rather than focusing my attention on dominating the challenge, my primary concern is to align my bones ease-fully between Earth and Sky. This connects me to me first! Then, to maintain my alignment through a challenge, I connect with the outside resistance with equal degrees of muscular contraction and muscular release. The places I struggle to release muscularly make me aware of the places I’m reactive, so I can break the pattern. Strength training challenges become tension releasing opportunities.

Weakness is not the opposite of strength, tension is.

Strength is a willingness to feel into the tension that obscures your body’s posture, and to trust the inherent wisdom urging you to surrender it. Strength training is using as much conviction to connect with resistance, as you have strove to dominate resistance.

To dominate—to value only our end goal—is to miss out on what could be learned from our vulnerability. This curiosity about vulnerability is the undercurrent of our strength and unravels the tension causing our pain.

Neutral Alignment introduces me to the resilience and wonder of my strength. It unmasks underlying beliefs so I can consider them and create positive change.

This is why we feel better when we workout. It’s not just about endorphins and oxygenation of red blood cells. It’s about shifting the tension template of our life story into greater alignment with our present lives.

Your workouts can teach you to be competitive and tough; or they can give meaning to your life.

 

Learn more about alignment and strength in The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind

 

Pain is Wisdom’s Cry

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Find love, freedom & compassion through pain.

Let’s face it, pain S-U-C-K-S! It robs us of our vitality.

But I trust my body’s wisdom. And pain is it’s only way of letting me know I’m out of alignment. It’s my body asking me to listen to its message. And I’ve learned it will continue to escalate until I face it’s insistence.

Trauma, overexertion and tension are the culprits of my pain. While trauma requires therapy and overexertion requires rest, tension requires that I listen.

What you may not consider when listening to your tension is, it’s often rooted in another time and is multidimensional in its nature. It simmers unnoticed until something triggers it into expressing; and when it does, your mind and body unite in its tantrum.

On the day I gathered my courage and composure to utter for the first time about dad’s nighttime visits in my bedroom, mom’s reply was, “It’s not MY fault, I didn’t know!” My body had been holding onto this sexual abuse story in silence for 25 years!

The anger, fear, confusion and sadness that plagued my body as tension, was trying to find a pathway out by voicing my longstanding secret. But the pathway out was blocked, so now every cell became engorged with rage! I felt like I was being annihilated by electrical shock waves. My body shook as my mind ranted! “It’s still all about you and your needs––I don’t really matter?!” From my view at the time, I wasn’t worth protecting, I wasn’t lovable, not then and not now.

Sometimes it’s just too painful to listen to our feelings, so our mind steps in to reason with the pain—blame it away. But we can’t think (or blame) our way out of tension, we have to feel our way out. And here’s the clincher, allowing the body to feel goes far beyond its physical tweaks, it’s crying out our emotional wounds.

Here’s how the mind and body relate:

  • The body’s soft tissues (muscles, sinews, organs) archive every emotion you experience, while the mind remembers the details around the emotion. Your body feels; your mind thinks.
  • When a disappointment or trauma happens your body’s soft tissues tense up and your mind creates a belief to help you make sense out of the happening or survive its immediate danger.
  • This belief, though useful at the time, was made under duress and its usefulness is likely short-lived. But there you are unknowingly operating under a misaligned belief well after the incident. At least until you’re triggered back into it, like a time warp!
  • The physical tension and emotional distress that lives in the body reactivates. Its painful grip is either out of per portion with real time events or creeps in as a low grade persistent whine. Meanwhile the mind spouts its misaligned belief with so much certainty that you miss its lie.
  • Anger, worry, sorrow, fear plague your body causing dis-ease. Pain in the form of poor posture, emotional distress and sickness follow, until the mind’s belief and body’s tension change the story—together creating a new experience.

It took another 15-years to address my nighttime story again out load. Mom went into denial, forgetting what I had shared, and I set out to unravel my body’s tension and mind’s unlovable belief using posture and movement, and changing my relationship with resistance inside and out.

I found ease through mind-body alignment.

I listened to the layers of trauma when challenged, experienced as tension’s pain. I then decreased the challenge intensity to where the pain wasn’t triggered. This gave my tension space to expand, express and exhale. As the tension disentangled itself, my strength was renewed and redefined.

Strength is now an alignment between my inherent innocence––mental curiosity—and my wisdom––emotional/physical truth––keeping me genuinely interested in each moment of connection and discernment. It is a posture of wonder.

Once we recognize our body carry’s our emotional baggage, our pain becomes our teacher. What we feel, physically and emotionally, becomes meaningful to our future and we are inspired to listen.

Our body’s posture is our first defender against chronic tension; and, it’s crucial to being proactive in our search for happiness and well-being.

As we deliberately improve our posture we learn to distinguish between our strength and our tension. And we unravel our tension and unlock the misaligned beliefs that hold us hostage to the pain of our past.

 

Click for a FREE Video to Surrender Tension in 8-Minutes!