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Class 1 Lab

1.Assessment

Start by simply standing with your arms at your side. Make sure your feet are a hip's width apart and facing straight forward. Make sure your knees are straight, but not locked. Just stand there and breath for about a minute. How labored is your breath. How stable are you on your feet? How heavy do you feel within gravity? Are you naturally balanced between the balls and heels of your feet? Do you stand more on one foot than the other? Just make a complete assessment of how your body feels before you begin reorganizing it with stretches.

Make sure your feet are a hip's width apart. With each hand, grab onto the elbow of the opposite arm. Bend your trunk forward and hang for five minutes. This way we are able to lengthen the entire posterior chain at once. Remember the posterior chain encompasses the entire back side of your body at once. Take a look at the picture of the muscles of the back. See if you can't feel these muscles as you're stretching. How aware can you be of exactly what is happening in your back and legs as you do this stretch? With every breath you can feel your spine letting go more and more. If you hold this for five minutes, the last minute may be particularly intense. Do you remember how we said that it takes connective tissue four minutes to release in a stretch? Well that is what you are feeling. This should never cross the line into pain. There may be a mild twine here and there as connective tissue is pulling itself off a nerve or a mild burning itching tingling sensation as it is separating underneath the skin. The burning is the collagen fiber peeling away from the hardened ground substance. The itching and tingling is often cause by nerve endings receiving blood and relaxing

Spread your feet about three feet apart. Strongly reach your arms out to the side. Never stop reaching even for a second. Continuing your reach, bring your right  arm up over your head reaching towards your left while simultaneously bending your trunk to the left. Brace yourself by placing your left hand on your left leg and bending the left elbow. Reach out feeling your stretch all the way down your arm to your low back.  Hold your most intense stretch for a count of 20. Then perform the stretch to the opposite side for a count of 20. Perform this three times on each side.

Before we begin, I need to give you a word of caution. These are neck rolls and they must be performed very carefully and very slowly. You must be very aware of any pain you may feel while slowly rotating your neck especially when you are bending it backwards. There is no reason to injure yourself unless you are careless. When you bend your neck backwards, it is imperative that you keep your mouth shut and your teeth together! With that said, let's begin.

Sit down on the floor or in a chair so that your spine is relatively straight. Allow your head to drop forward and hang for a slow count of 10. Remember to breathe releasing your head more and more with every breath. Then slowly rotate your head to the left and allow it to hang for a slow count of 10. It is very important here that you actually achieve a curvature of the cervical spine (the neck part of the spine) to the left. See if you can achieve a greater, more balanced curve of the cervical spine every day that you do this exercise. After counting slowly to 10, carefully rotate your head backwards making sure to KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT. Slowly count to 10 and the carefully rotate your head to the right. Again make sure you are achieving a nice curve of the cervical spine. Slowly count to 10 and then rotate your head down and allow it to hang forward for a count of 10. Then come back the way you came. Slowly rotate the head to the right. Hold for ten. Keeping your mouth closed, slowly rotate your head backwards and hold for 10. Carefully rotate it to the left and hold for 10. Then rotate it down and allow it to hang forward and hold it for 10.

The above paragraph constitutes one repetition of the neck stretch. Ideally I would like you to do four repetitions per day. As you are rotating your head, if you find that there are places of tension that lie between your destinations of forward, right, left, and back, feel free to stay on those spots and stretch them out too. If you stick with this your neck will feel great and your face will start to look more youthful!

This next exercise is a very powerful way to oxygenate the blood, relax the body, expand the ribcage and sharpen the mind.

Inhale on a count of 7. This means that by the time you get to 7, your lungs are filled to their absolute maximum capacity.

Hold this air in for a count of 28. Holding it this long allows you to maximally absorb the oxygen you have taken in. Usually when we breathe, a great deal of our oxygen is exhaled before we can even assimilate it. This exercise will actually increase your red blood cell count!

Exhale the air slowly on a count of 14. Taking this long to release the air actually allows toxins to be expelled in the form of gas from your lungs.

That is one repetition of the Power Breath. Do no less than 10 of these per day. Ideally you should do 30 of these per day. Find a place with nice scenery to look at as you hold your breath. It's a great way to start your morning or wake up if your afternoon is starting to drag.

Now that you have spent time reorganizing your body, return to your origional standing position and feel how these basic stretches have changed you. How do your feet feel on the floor. How heavy do you feel? How does your abdomen feel. How do your legs feel. Take a full assessment every day when you are done and be witness to the changes you are affecting I your body.

Palpation

To learn manual palpation one must acquire complete patience and an ability to be in the present moment feeling the tissues of the body. Over time, your hands will become like eyes into your body and you will unmistakably be able to tell what is going on just through your skilled touch. In the beginning, however, you may feel a bit clueless. Stick with it. It will happen. The idea is that all you must do is sit with the tissue and listen with your hands. If the tissue begins to move, follow it. Enter your palpation session with a sense of curiosity and patience. Practicing palpation should be relaxing and meditative. There are many layers to your body. There are layers of connective tissue covering underneath the skin before you ever even get to the musculature. When you realize how truly three dimensional your body is, you’ll realize you have a vast territory to explore under your skin. Let’s begin today using your forearm as a jumping off point. Our only goal here is to explore palpation and refine our sense of touch.

You will learn to palpate with your whole hands and even your elbows when you get good at it. For now, however, it is best to start out with the thumbs. Your thumbs have the most nerve endings of any of your other fingers so you’ll be able to feel more. I will give you some cues, but then I will leave you to explore. What you learn on your own will be far more helpful than anything I could tell you. Now bear in mind that regardless of whether or not you feel anything, the very fact that you have your hands patiently in the tissue of your arms will change the nature of the tissue somewhat. In the beginning, a lot of my students say they can’t really feel anything and have no idea whether they’re doing it right, but can feel that the tissue has released when they are done. If you can feel that, that’s good enough for now.

Place your right thumb lightly on the skin of your left forearm. This is the jumping off point. We will be exploring everything under the skin layer by layer. Use enough pressure to press your thumb just barely past the skin level. You are not so deep that you are feeling muscle, but deep enough to feel the superficial connective tissue that covers underneath the skin of the forearm. What does this area feel like to you? What does it feel it would look like if you could see it with your eyes. Is it taut or squishy? Does it give your fingers any resistance? If it does, just by patiently staying at that level, the resistance (hardened ground substance) will start to melt away. and you will better be able to feel the next level. Stay there as long as you need to and then slowly move down one level deeper. You will most likely encounter something that feels like a thicker layer of connective tissue. It feels shiny and maybe a little slippery. This is the fascia (connective tissue) that covers the muscles. If you have had tight muscles in your forearm, it will be thicker and harder than if you have always has relaxed forearms. Often it will feel like there’s gristle covering the muscles. By gently touching this hardened gristle and waiting, you will be able to feel it melt away. If your fingers find themselves gently influenced to move with the tissue, you want to allow this. They will feel just a gentle influence to slide in a direction. This happens as the ground substance begins to melt and the collagen fibers become free to move back to there original relaxed positions. Sometimes, your skin will literally crawl from one place to another. You may feel warmth or tingle near the site you are working on or sometimes even far away from the site. Remember there is nothing you could do to the connective tissue at the top of your head that would have an effect on the bottoms of your feet. As you feel the resistance of this level give way, you can work one level deeper. Please only move one tiny level at a time. If you do this, the release will be more complete and you’ll learn more. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t feel the individual muscles. Often they are all glued together by connective tissue making it impossible for them to even function independently let alone be felt as anything more than a sticky mass of tissue. Keep at it and write to me with your questions. Don’t be afraid to work too deeply. A good rule of thumb is that it should never hurt and if you feel a pulse, get off it! No need to cut off your blood flow. Remember you are gently exploring. You don’t have to try to release anything. The tissue will release just by your touching it and paying attention to it. Allow the releases. Don’t force them. Have fun!!!  Next week, I will teach you everything you need to know to restructure your feet and lower legs. To do this you will need the palpation skills you learned in this class.  In the mean time, check every day to hear the new "Today's Focus" which is updated every day. Enjoy!!!

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