Tag Archive for: self care

Doing Nothing Can Change Everything

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Our bags backed, goodbyes made, we wait for our ride to the airport home bound. Anthony says, “so much has changed since we got here!” I reply, “but we’ve done nothing?”

One week of not having to do the things that shape our daily lives and satisfy our ambitions. One week to relax and recline. It was an intellectual vacation filled with experiential bliss.

In reflection, I realize we didn’t do nothing we experienced non-doing. The Tao concept of Wu Wei—to align with the natural flow of life.

The primary difference between doing nothing and non-doing is, non-doing does not fall into laziness or apathy. But instead, elevates you into a state of open-mindedness and receptivity to a new reality.

The only mental activity we engaged in was choosing a restaurant for a dinner reservation. Everything else we engaged in happened for us: watching the birds, listening to the sea, tasting the salt air, feeling the breeze tickle our sun drenched skin, and seeing each other enjoy the sensually of living.

Our minds rested from our constant demands and our bodies rose to frolic in its newfound freedom.

Spontaneous happenings, orgasmic stillness, and nature’s embrace guided our days. No one or no thing directed us beyond the current of our environment. We lived life as an Active Meditation.

So much had changed…

We were transported into a state of trust. A trust, that the Universe is for us to enjoy and engage in so totally that we feel encouraged to loose our minds. No books to loose ourselves into. No expectations to satisfy a sense of value. We simply lost ourselves in living.

Letting your mind’s constant chatter stop influencing your state of being is a gift that keeps on giving. It leads you to your senses instead of your emotions. Senses that connect you to each moment as you pass through them.

Upon our return home, I find myself slowing down to sense my reality. I see the places I judge, race and push myself––away from my senses––away from being happy. Places that I can transform into a more pleasant presence that feels good.

Presence creates positive change—a flow of goodness that is under the surface of what our minds think is important, but isn’t.

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.

 

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.

Feeling the Pinch of the Holidays?

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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…

You’ll Never Look at a Pregnant Woman the Same Again

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Losing one’s center of gravity is a lost and found phenomenon.

There she is walking ahead of you, legs slightly spread causing her whole body to waddle side to side. She looks like she’s steadying herself on a sailboat but, even from behind, you know she is pregnant. You can’t help but marvel at the miracle of childbirth and the mystery of the female form, but have you ever considered her instability as Creation’s stability?

Pregnancy is an energetic phenomenon. Her mind body connection must navigate through an interruption of being, what she has come to know as, herself. A foreign state of instability overrides everything; she has no control over what is happening to her! How does this instability serve her as a mother to be? (Yikes, it’s enough to scare the rest of us off!)

When talking to my neighbor, Lorelei, mother of one and soon to be two, she said, “Being pregnant is hard, but it teaches me a lot about myself. I can give more than I realized!” She explains how being pregnant stretches her beyond what she knew of herself in every way!

But she had to lose herself to find herself.

Lorelei’s first experience of feeling lost was impressed acutely in her memory. The moment she couldn’t get out of the car on her own volition she exclaimed, “Oh My God, this is really happening!” When we looked deeper into that moment she said, “It’s a foreign state that is one sided. It affects mom not baby.”

My holistic interpretation of this lost while pregnant is:
•    Her center of gravity–the Dan Tien Energy Center–is engulfed upon.
•    The sense of self that comes from knowing her center is growing increasingly distant.
•   The abdominal muscles have split centrally to permit the fetus to grow, leaving her detached from her core strength.
Up until now, her energy and strength have been devoted to her independent desires. Now they are devoted to keeping an embryonic life incubated and emerging. Her autonomy is gradually disappearing. (This might be a good time to say, I love you mom!)

How does this instability sure up the future for nurturing a new life?

Stripped of independence, completely exposed to the world, overwhelmed with fatigue, empathy turns to sympathy toward herself. She is solely responsible for another life form, afraid of unexpected pregnancy conditions (breech, cerclage, preeclampsia), as well as the common cold. She believes that the baby isn’t fully hers to safeguard until it is born.

I liken this unstable state to jibbing, a sailing maneuver that turns the stern of the boat, so that the wind changes from one side of the sail to the other. There is a moment in the maneuver that the sail is completely disconnected from the wind, directionless, powerless; but to navigate through life changes one must jib, let go of the control, to transform values and align with new circumstances. This applies no matter what you are birthing in life!

In this personal maneuver she transforms. She cries a lot. She is no longer embarrassed to feel; she has no physical shame left! In this loss of autonomy an internal spark chases her into action. The urgency to nest has her spouting demands, and expecting others to jump. Her mind becomes insightful, sensitive to the single life force she is sharing with her baby, knowing (not guessing) what they need.

In this lost state she finds her direction. A direction that can only go forward; there is no turning back. She has jibbed successfully!

All of this to say, once the baby is born she will need to jib back into the wind to re-find her independence. And when she does she will become acutely aware of the split down her body’s center, where her baby once lived. Alone in herself again, she is forever changed. Lorelei remembers from her first pregnancy, “I felt like I was missing a body part. It took me nearly 3-years to actually be able to own my new self. It was a weird identity crisis.” She recalls that trying to go back was the wrong focus. Trying to be healthy and embody a better newfound sexy–mature, accepting, soft woman–is what completed her experience of being a human incubator. To create a stable internal environment her external standards had to weather physical and emotional instability, but as Lorelei says, “Life is more than appearances. I can’t imagine life without children.”

Entitlement isn’t to be judged in new mothers. It is founded in the fact that she is a spirited and devoted incubator for the human race. As fellow human beings we are obliged to help her! Help support the journey back to herself.

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.