Free your mind and the rest will follow.
En Vogue
Free Your Body - Part I
These days I am thinking about freeing the pelvis. I keep coming at the topic from different perspectives. While swimming laps today, I was stimulated to think about it in yet another way.
To have an efficient swim stroke, it needs to be relaxed. In the crawl or free style, you let the body roll when you turn the neck and face to get air. You let the spine move side to side, like a fish, when you are stroking and kicking. For a swimming novice, this may seem counterintuitive. You might think that if you hold the body in a straight line, and just turn the head and neck, it would be a more efficient way to swim. If you say "rigid" to your body, you will tend to move that way. And, if you swim that way, what you really might get is a stiff and sore neck.
When I let the body roll from the pelvis, I decrease the cranking on my neck. Today I discovered that if I pushed my face down -- again very counterintuitive -- in the roll, it further integrated my ability to roll in a unit. First, I initiated the roll from my pelvis, which I cued silently to myself as “move the pubic bone.” Then, as I began the turn of my head, I pushed my head into the water. The buoyancy of the water itself facilitated the head turn rather than using my neck muscle to lift and turn the head. It felt great.
I was able to relax into the water, to let my weight drop further into it to allow the water's buoyancy to, well, buoy me.
We can do the same thing in gravity. By pushing down into gravity through our feet, we can engage more directly with the ground reaction force, which travels in an equal and opposite direction from gravity. By pushing down through the feet and releasing the weight into gravity, we can more effortlessly stand taller. We discover buoyancy and ease in our everyday movements, like walking, standing and sitting. I will elaborate more on this topic in days to come.
Holding On vs. Letting Go
Now think about the concept of “holding the body.” When you arae learning a new movement activity, whether it be dance or tennis, there is a tendency to hold tension all over the body, using extra effort to learn the new skill. Movement cuts paths through space. Our bodies move in space. Until the motor pathways are well established in the brain, the movements tend to be inefficient and to take a lot of extra effort. With practice, practice being key here, there are well-established neuronal pathways laid down. Over time, and with lots and lots of practice, the movements become easier. You use less tension to accomplish them. You are able to do more. You have more fun.
We often think of it as kinetic or muscle memory. Really, it is that new motor pathways have been laid down in the brain. Further, if you have aptitude and a good teacher, these movements over time will be increasingly efficient and effortless. Think of the best dancers. They seem to throw away all technique and to move effortlessly.
Practice Practice Practice
After a cerebral vascular accident, also known as a stroke, we can see varying degrees of recovery. Sure the first factor is the severity of the stroke and the extent to which different areas of the brain are damaged. Another significant factor, in my experience, is that those people who had a good fitness level before the stroke did better. It is probable that because they had developed more in terms of quantity and diversity of motor pathways in the brain, that when the brain was damaged in the stroke, they had a head start on recovery. Maybe the motor pathways are deeper, cut in deeper grooves. Certainly, they are more plentiful.
Is it similar in psychological terms? The more one practices anger, say, the angrier one gets. Is this because we have deeply embedded the neuronal processes and pathways that spark anger? Is this why cognitive-behavioral therapies have such a good track record with depression, because they teach the patient how not to just keep repeating the same old patterns -- cognitively, emotionally or behaviorally -- but to establish new ways of thinking and behaving. In essence, beyond the mystical and mysterious results of seeing the changes in one’s thoughts, emotions and behaviors, are we simply establishing new neuronal pathways?
We let go of the tension to have greater freedom of thought and movement. To have greater possibility.
More to follow in days to come.
