Day Forty-nine: More spine, more "acture"

Why do conductors live longer? Raising the arms to joy, intention and music could have something to do with it?

More spine, more "acture"

Here’s the deal today: stand up when you stand up. Sit down when you sit down.

Be something like in “acture” when you are standing. Be something like in “acture” when you are sitting.

Remember acture. It’s the word Moshe Feldenkrais, physicist, judo master, scientific explorer of brain based learning, invented for the state of being ready to move easily in all directions.

So when you stand, hop up and down on your heels in sets of three or four. Plop, plop, plop, plop. Leave your toes on the floor, raise your heels and drop down to the floor. Feel as you do this, as if you could jump to the right and the left and forward and back equally easy from this “on your toes” way of standing. Also, at other times, do the plop, plop practice to feel / sense from your legs and feet all the way up to your head, feeling the spine in between.

Good.

In sitting, spend some time with your bottom near the front of the chair, so you could plop, plop your bottom right and left a little bit, hopping up just ever so slightly and then landing a bit to the right and a bit to the left.

Enjoy this.

See if you can feel how this plop, plopping requires that you sit leaning a little bit forward from “straight up.”

And experiment as you sit, let your belly sag in and head hold forward, and do the curling into yourself thing we’ve do a number of times.

Then unfurl and push out your belly a bit and arch your spine just a little and rotate your pelvis just a little and feel your back holding your head up. Experiment.

Find a Feldenkrais® practitioner, or an Anat Baniel Method practitioner and join in their group or private lessons, if they are in your area. Whether that can happen or not, play and learn and discover about standing and sitting today.