Day Thirty Four: Happy Feet, Happy Toes, Better Backs, Comig to Now, Wow!
We walk each day, many times pressing down into the floor and Earth with our feet, and this pushes goes through us all the way up our spine. We usually don’t notice this. We have five toes on each foot. We usually don’t notice this. Today is as good a time as any to begin more and sweeter and happier noticing of these things. And more.
Lie on your back, please on a firm but comfortable surface. A lawn, a wood floor with a carpet or blanket on it, or a very firm bed. Feel your back pressing down. Feel the Earth pressing back up. Feel each leg in the sensing way, sensing the bones and muscles and blood and everything of each leg, one leg at a time.
Then sense your arms, one arm at a time, from finger tips to shoulder blades.
Now sense your spine, along the floor, where does it touch, where does it lift up? Sense the top and bottom and back side and front side of your spine.
Sense your arms and legs and spine and see if your had your toes, as part of that. If not, add them in, and your head and ribs. Sense your whole self on the floor.
Good.
Just that much, if you stay present with it, can change your life if you do it a few times a day.
And let’s do more.
Please raise one knee toward the ceiling, so that one foot is as if “standing” on the floor, sole pressing down. Pick either your left leg if you are right handed, or right leg is you are left handed, unless one leg foot toes ankle are in some sort of pain. Then pick the un-pain leg and foot, or the less pain if both don’t feel so great.
Good. Now begin to press this standing foot into the floor, and use this push to raise your pelvis on that side, so it lifts and rotates. Go slow. Only have half the pelvis coming off the floor. The side of the pelvis on the straight on the floor leg side stays down.
Do this slowly, many times, push the foot down, feel the pelvis rotate, feet your back arch.
Many times, each time with a sensing of a different part of you: toes, ankle, knee, hip joint, pelvis, spine, ribs, neck, head, arms. Feel different parts and all of you at the same time if you can.
After many times, say twenty to thirty, take a rest, let your leg down and feel the difference side to side. Rest long enough so that you feel your body and brain integrating what you learned, then raise your same foot to standing.
Throughout this lesson, if will always be this foot. At the end, you can get up and walk around, and feel some big differences and ten or twenty minutes later come back and do all this on the other side. Or right before you go to sleep is a great time to review and redo this lesson on the other side.
So stand the same foot again, and press again, first three times so the your knee falls in toward the middle as you press, and three times so that your knee head out over your foot as you press. Go back and forth three times each way, and sense how this is very different in your hip joint and in your toes.
Rest again and integrate.
Now, stand the same foot again, and from now on in the lesson, press your foot so that the knee is heading toward over the standing foot. Begin to press, and as you press, raise one side of your pelvis, rotate, arch your back, and push your belly out.
Really notice your belly going out on the pushing and arching phase of this movement. And now practice sometimes breathing in as your belly goes out, and sometimes breathing out. Feel the difference. Enjoy both ways.
Rest and integrate.
Always find pleasure and learning in each movement.
Standing your foot again, and press a number of times, knee toward over the standing foot, and belly out, and add this on: for three times, as you press, start the press as you have been all along, in your heel but now for three times, as the back arches and the knee moves a bit down toward the foot, push through the big toe of that foot. Three times. And then three times through the next toe, the index toe. And then three times through the middle toe. Then three times the ring toe. And three times the little toe.
Rest and integrate.
Stand the foot again. Always move slowly, with learning and enjoyment, and finding out about all parts of yourself, not just the toe that is pushing, say. Now, go through the previous movement, but the other way: 3 times the little toe, and so on working your way back to the big toe and sensing ribs and spine and breathing and pelvis as you press through your heel and then the selected toe.
Rest. Enjoy. Breathe. Feel yourself on the floor. Feel differences side to side. Feel differences in your general state from the beginning of this short lesson.
Roll to your side and get up and walk a bit, feeling the lopsidedness and the learning and the amazing results from going slow, from being present, from giving yourself the present of learning.
Good.
Enjoy your day, sense your toes a lot, and sometime during the day, go through this game on the other side.
Labels: backs, brain, happiness, love of now, movement lesson, relax the toes, toes
