Blog - The Curious Mover
Acts of Awareness
An act of awareness is a gentle reminder to relax tension and find organization in your bones from a repetitive habit. We all have these habits! Your focus in the world is outwards as you get cues and information from the environment. We study and analyze the external environment that we integrate in and react accordingly. For a brief moment in that navigation, try to take a turn inwards and do a quick scan of the body for tension and postural deviations. Meaning, where are you holding tension, and how your body is aligned. During exercise, there is focus on form. For the many other hours a week when we're not exercising, our form in our environment is just as important. It should be pulled forward from the back burner asking questions such as how am I sitting, standing, holding, relaxing, being? Any repetition can become a habit. So imagine sinking into one hip all day long. Turn that into weeks, months, years. And when there is hip pain, no one can help you out of it because although the habit runs deep, it may be undetectable in front of the searching eyes of a practitioner or doctor.
The Tension of Stillness
In the last two Mover’s, we talked about the Brace and the Torque, which are important concepts while in movement. But what do we do with our bodies in stillness? Sitting, standing, and lying down? Do we torque or brace 20% and hold in our abdominals? The answer is quite simple, but the pathway to get there is surprisingly challenging. It’s a strange dichotomy for stillness to be difficult, but it is a truth we can attempt to answer in many different realms of body and spirit. But one definition for stillness: we do nothing! We TRY to relax, and settle into the stacking of our bones for good posture and alignment without intentionally holding or activating at all. The hard part? We need to have the awareness of where we are holding tension and gripping. It just might be a reason for having pain!