Tag Archive for: relaxation

Please Breathe

As my sister remains hooked up to oxygen day after day, week after week, with Covid double pneumonia, I realize the richness of each breath I take.

My sister is instructed to lye on her stomach with the oxygen mask adhered to her face to give her lungs the freedom to inflate. In tandem, bent over our legs in daily hamstrings stretches I instruct my clients to take a full expansive breath into their lungs.

With each inflation my back muscles yawn a release of tension; with each depression I relax in the trust that a next breath will follow. I feel a relaxed strength that I experience as freedom.

Each breath puts me in the moment, reminds me that I’m OK, and readies me for the next moment. I breath in and breath out, I move from one moment to the next, I feel nature’s grace.

How easy is it to forget to breathe deeply? To be fooled into thinking the stresses of our days are more important than the riches of each breath. We hold our breath, breath shallow, and breath quietly as not to disturb others.

Breathe. Please breathe deeply and fully, awake to the grace of you.

Every waking moment my sister thinks about breathing. Eating little and talking less, she focuses on the mechanics of each breath.

Be reminded every day, with every breath, that your life is only as deep as your breath.

Breathe deeply. There is nothing more important. 🧡

 

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.

Feeling the Pinch of the Holidays?

Let It Direct Your New Year’s Resolution

The NYC craft fairs are an art-filled, outdoor, community experience that gets everyone in the holiday spirit. It is a unique and wonderful holiday shopping frenzy. I find myself dashing through them between clients, at the end of my work days, or over the weekend to get all my holiday needs in order. It’s all consuming and I love it!!

The holidays, however, can make us dizzy with fatigue, unsettled by the all-consuming whirlwind, and overwhelmed with what it will take to recover our best selves to kickstart 2019!

This mayhem is the perfect setting to recognize the root of our year-round triggers.
Yes, there is an intrinsic message in our tensions expression!

When overwhelm turns into physical pain our body is trying to tell us something.

The body uses location and pain as its sentence structure to communicate. While your brain remembers an event, it’s your body that harbors the emotions that accompanied an event. Emotional tension patterns settle in the areas of the body that animate the emotion. And it can carry these emotional tension patterns around indefinitely if you don’t listen to its cry.

Unresolved emotions create tension that distort your posture. That tension then gets triggered into reactive expressions when under pressure. The emotional outbursts, physical pain, even sickness that interferes with your joy for living is actually a low-grade drain that is always under the surface!

Locations of emotional expression commonly agitated over the holidays:

  • Shoulders form the widest part of your skeletal frame, their muscles shape your posture’s horizontal integrity. For this reason, shoulders carry emotions regarding your integrity––what you value, as well as, your sense of personal value.
  • Low back muscles protect the kidneys, which from an Eastern perspective carry your fear. Their muscles tighten and surrender to the same degree your fear rises and falls.
  • Hip flexors/Iliopsoas muscles balance your torso over your legs. Too often however, they are used to power your legs direction. This overuse of a relatively small muscle is over controlling the larger leg muscle groups. Control is carried in the iliopsoas muscles and its grip is felt in the fold or the center of the hip joints.

Emotional anguish around social pressures and family gatherings at holiday time are undeniable. It’s important to remember that the emotions that surface under pressure are always lying under our smiles of pleasantry. And their low-grade energy consumption can draw us further and further away from our smiles of truth.

Resolve your body’s cry in 2019! Correct your posture and consider your emotional misalignments.

  • For shoulder pain keep them physically positioned on the coronal plane––the plane between front and back planes of the body––and emotionally explore your relationship to your own value or the values you are surrounded by. Create a suitable active meditation, like: My value is always in my being.

  • For low back pain keep your low abdominal muscles supporting its physical curve and explore the emotions creating your fears. Create a suitable active meditation, like: My fears are not facts.

  • For iliopsoas pain keep your hip bones forward enough to rock your weight onto the balls of your feet and explore your emotional relationship with being controlling or controlled. Create a suitable active meditation, like: I can have control without being controlling.


High pressure holiday situations that escalate your tension into tantrum and spasm excavates the work that needs to be addressed in your life’s story. Recognize the root of your tension so you can weed them out in 2019.

Have a liberating new year!

The BodyLogos Practice helps you understand where specific emotions get trapped in your bodies’ soft tissue. Developed by me––Tammy Wise––B’way dancer turned Tao Minister. I use the emotional intelligence of posture to transform tension into strength.

In my new book/3D-video learning system, The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the mind. I walk you through mind-body techniques that will help you release tension and build strength simultaneously.

Learn more…

Peaceful Duck

THE UNIVERSAL LAW OF PAUSE

Peaceful Duck

When We Stop Chasing It––We Experience It.

Allowing myself to sleep in past 6AM, a gesture that I don’t often make to myself, I listened to my two cats scampering about in a determined crazy-cat frenzy. If you’re a cat owner, you know that untamed state that possesses our sweet kitties and then mutates them into wild beasts?

I indulged in a mattress belly flop, half awake and half asleep, in that magical subconscious paradigm.

“Do that which is not done by doing.
Make that which is not made by making.
Taste that which cannot be distinguished by taste.
Hold the same regard for the few and the many.
Requite the unkind with kindness…”

As I listened to their industrious pitter-patter for a long luxurious moment, I handed over my current labor-intensive chase to create my perfect world, to their obvious commitment to do the same. At this particular time in my life the culmination of life altering events were coming to fruition at once.

I was involved in the last days of the last editorial read of my first book’s deadline. I had just adopted an Amazon Parrot to join my already befriended Conure of 18 years. Both had been in the works for years.

The pressure to finesse the perfect book and the perfect birdhouse were both rooted in creating alignment in the world. The book’s focus being alignment between mind and body, the bird focus being alignment between adversaries––cats and birds.

When I finally decided to get up and face my day’s demands, what I found gave me pause.
I had created my dream! It had arrived!

A tiny sparrow was motionless on my kitchen floor. One of the cats had clearly captured it and brought it in from the terrace. I know this because, though I sleep with the terrace door open the curtain is closed, so the bird did not fly in.

Startled, of course, I tried to access the situation. Was the bird hurt?

I had heard that handling the bird would ostracise the sparrow from its’ flock. For that reason I placed a clean dish towel over it, swiped it up from the floor, and brought it to a pot of dirt back out on the terrace to offer a safe and familiar resting place.

As my towel was raised from the sparrow, it quickly flew away. All was well in the world. In fact, it was perfect.

All that ruckus I had listened to in my hesitancy to get up and start my daily dream chase, was the innocent witnessing of my dream being realized.

My cats had plenty of time to annihilate the bird, (I know this because they’re great mousers) but they didn’t. They choose to play with the sparrow (it was that sparrows lucky day!). Much like their mama—me—plays with the parrots.

When I reflected back on my mattress belly flop I recalled how open my pelvis was to the bed and how my quadriceps extended in a relaxed surrender away from the determination that fuels my gut’s passion. I was in a state of what Tao calls “non-doing” receptivity. I allowed the cats to be at the helm of the household’s direction.

“… Thus, one of integral virtue desires what is not connected with desire,
Sets no value on the rare goods of the world,
Learns what is not learned through learning,
And induces people to return to that which they have overlooked.”
Tao te Ching

It was a moment of trust.

So accustomed to using my quadriceps to drive my passions forward, this incident reminded me that, yes my quadriceps’ actions produce my future forward, but my quadriceps’ release recognizes that yesterday’s future is now.

Balance giving and receiving to move forward tirelessly.

 

Learn to release tension on purpose and find pause in your life with this FREE Release Tension in 8-minutes Video!

Sob Your Head Off It’s Good For You

Human face cloaked in mesh

Human face under a cloak of confusion

Expand your capacity to love!

You know those moments where no words can express or console your feelings; a deep guttural cry is the only way to pacify the hurt. It offers complete submersion into your feelings–separate from thinking–bringing solace to heartache. It’s as if, physically shedding tears makes room for mental resolution. And it is actually true–sobbing is a physical exorcism.

The deep muscular heave of a sob loosens the emotional grip of deep-seated beliefs trapped in your soft tissues. Beliefs misaligned with the present situation; beliefs that make you question love. (Yes, the body feels! The mind thinks.)

Even tears motivated by happiness, such as your daughter’s wedding day, there is a misaligned undercurrent belief causing the tears: you may have worried that she would not find a partner and be lonely her whole life; or on a more personal note, you may believe you’ll never attract the bliss of new love again in your life. Underlying beliefs are not always conscious.

The emotional undercurrent of mental beliefs runs through your body like a current that tumbles gracefully down the river. Misaligned beliefs create tensions that interfere with this emotional current, like a bend or jutting rock in the riverbed that creates a whirlpool. Physical holding patterns develop into pockets of tension that I refer to as psyche-muscular holding patterns. To release the pattern adjust your belief.

Easy right… just change your mind!

Not quite. First you need to release the physical tension holding the pattern in place!

Sobbing naturally creates that opportunity.

To create new beliefs, old beliefs need to first be released. A deep cry makes room for underlying feelings to surface, feelings you couldn’t access while holding yourself together. You begin to let go of the protective reason of thinking–the defensive self-talk that distances you from feeling love or loved. Your body’s feeling sense takes over and your mind is in a position to listen. This is a role reversal from how most of us operate in the world.

Think of it like this, attention is finite.

When your attention particles are all filled to the brim with excess thinking because nothing is making sense: life is overwhelmed with worry and doubt, or pent up fears are dominating your experience, there is nothing you can do but un-fill, undo, unwind–sob your head off! Thinking turns to feeling and you have a chance to consider if what you believe is actually so?

Keep this in mind the next time you’re sobbing your head off:

  •      Direct your attention to the essence of your feelings rather than the other person or your present situation.
  •      Allow your body to fully experience the physical wail–reclaim the child in you–and let go of needing to know all the answers.
  •      Keep it real–synthesize the heart’s joy and the lung’s sadness–allow them to coexist.

The hardwiring of beliefs around love comes down to the antagonistic emotional relationship between the heart and lungs. (Like people, every organ has its own personality!) Eastern healing principles recognize sobbing as an expression of sadness that lives in your lungs and the upheaval of joy that lives in your heart. What happens when we hold these emotions in is, we compress the chest muscles–the blanket that expresses the emotional condition of our heart and lungs. For this reason I call the chest muscles your Smile of Truth.

Signs that your Smile of Truth is becoming compromised:

  •      Concave chest & shallow breathing
  •      Protruding chest & rapid breathing
  •      Insecure sense of self

The release of tension that a good cry, meditation, stretching and relaxation all offer creates an “I don’t know” internal space where the certainty of our worries, doubts and fears once lived. Free attention can feel restorative or lonely and scary. Since tension is by nature character divulging, letting it go feels like letting a bit of you go. You revert to the innocence of your inner child and feel dependent on someone else’s wisdom to fill the “I don’t know” void. But that’s the great thing about being an adult. You have the wisdom to navigate through the “I don’t know” abyss. One thing is for sure, when you feel “I don’t know,” you can bet that you are in the midst of creating positive change.