This stretch is for people suffering from a very tight and painful lower back. Do it at your own pace and you'll feel the improvements if you are patient.
Rami's Blog
Like the Yin-Yang, Eastern Martial Arts and Western medicine are two halves of a whole. My mission is to preserve the ancient mind-body tools and pass them on to you.
The Energy Centers Meditation Routine
Some time last year we began a series of posts about meditating while visualizing your lower and upper energy centers, your energetic baton, and the energetic bubble. This will be the capstone post for the series, where we put everything together, finish up the energetic bubble, and give you a routine for practicing that you can do in less than half an hour.
The Energy Centers Meditation Routine
1. The Lower Energy Center: Sit down comfortably on the edge of a chair. Touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth and begin to visualize a glowing ball, a little smaller than your fist, sitting two inches below your naval, and two inches back from the skin, toward your spine. If it helps, picture this energy center like a calm pool of clear water. Do this for about 5 minutes and then move on.
2. The Upper Energy Center: While still visualizing the lower energy center, begin to visualize the upper energy center as well. This center is located in the middle of the brain, halfway in between the base of the skull and the nose. Don't focus on your forehead, because that is a different visualization. Instead, try being aware of the sensation of your soft palate. That should get you a lot closer. The upper center can also be visualized like a pool of water. Make sure you picture this pool on higher ground than the lower energy center. Continue these two visualizations for 5 minutes.
3: The Energetic Baton: Now it is time to connect the two visualizations into one, and cool the baton. Picture the upper energy center flowing down into the lower energy center, like a waterfall, or a stream down a hill. Focus on the sensation of moving energy from your head and shoulder girdle down to your lower abdomen. You should feel a cooling sensation as your energy settles and your brain quiets down a little. Spend another 5 minutes here.
4: The Energetic Bubble: Lastly, begin expanding your focus to just beyond the surface of your skin, about two inches, into a bubble. This bubble is your filter to pull in good energy from the world around you, and also is a shield, to protect you from negative energies. Remember that the energetic bubble reacts to the temperature around you: the colder it is, the more the bubble shrinks toward your core, the warmer it is, the more the bubble grows outward into the air. Your goal here is to visualize the bubble, identify what parts of it are weaker than others, and then visualize yourself patching those weak areas. After another 5 minutes here, you have completed your energy centers meditation routine!
And there you have it! Do this routine every other day and you will begin feeling more balanced, calm, and your energy bubble might even keep those pesky mosquitoes away! (Just kidding, but one can wish!)
Happy stretching!
Spine Rotation Using the Wall
Stretching the spine up and down is important for health, but stretching the rotator muscles in between each vertebra is also key to having a healthy back and maintaining your mobility!
A Balanced Approach to Taking Mind-Body Classes
People usually love or hate the first yoga or tai chi class they take. If they hate it, they usually blame the teacher. But very often, the reason some people have a bad experience with their first mind-body class is that they don't understand what mind-body learning entails.
The teacher cannot quiz you to see how well his or her teachings are working. Unlike, say, a math class, your job in a mind-body class is not to do your best, it is to do what gets YOU results. You don't have to do every technique exactly the same way the teacher first shows you how to. You also don't have to do techniques for as long, or in the same order, as the teacher shows. In fact, you don't have to do any technique you don't want to do.
But it is very, very important to understand why you SHOULD change your class experience, and why you SHOULDN'T.
If an exercise hurts, consider why. Is it putting stress on an injury? Should you be going slower or for less time? If so, you need to figure out what will work given your circumstances.
If an exercise is difficult because you have a lot of tissue tension, or a lack of mobility from non-use, then the exercise is probably helping you. So long as it isn't making your condition worse, you should stick to it and put in the work. Don't push yourself too hard, but challenge yourself so you can improve.
In the intimate class setting of a hospital, it is easy to get tailored treatment and personal feedback. In a large public class, the teacher can't think about each student, they have to focus on meeting all the demand for their instruction.
To get the mind-body class experience you need, make sure you pay attention to both parts of the mind-body yin-yang. The body half is about feeling how the exercise is affecting you, and adjusting so that you feel progress without pain. The mind half is about accepting the challenge that the teacher is giving you, and using your will power to keep doing the exercises even though there is a part of you (and everyone around you) that would rather lie down and just watch TV.
Half-and-Half for Hips and Groin
This is a great stretch for people who already have some flexibility in their hips and would like to progress even further.
Mentally Chunk Your Workouts
Do you get overwhelmed by the idea that you have a whole hour of exercise ahead? Does the idea of a laundry list of to-dos make you exhausted?
Modern psychological research has long since established that our short-term memory, which we use to work through our day-to-day lives, has a limit of 5 to 9 "things" or "chunks" which it can handle at once. Any greater number of details or tasks and our brain goes a little haywire. We stress out because we're worried we will mess up or forget something. It takes so much energy to remember things and mentally prepare for everything that we can't put all of our focus onto actually doing the one task at hand.
So to make your workout life (as well as the rest of your life) easier, you should chunk your workout into small parts, and focus completely on one part at a time, like hamstrings, for example.
If you have a whole-body workout you do, focus on one area of the body at a time, and don't worry about the next area, or how much time you have left, until you are completely done with the chunk you are working on.
You can also use this strategy to look at your workouts differently. Twelve exercises is a good amount, maybe even a stressful amount to think about. But four chunks of three exercises, organized by which part of the body they are used for (legs, hips, torso, etc.) might make the routine easier to handle on a mental level.
Very accomplished distance runners use this strategy to make it through long races. Just get to that next telephone pole, now get to the next one, now the next one.... Pretty soon, they've gone five miles without losing their mental resilience.
You can do the same with your life. Don't try to mentally tackle the entire challenge at once, just take each step, each chunk, as it comes. Also, don't forget to meditate to renew your energy!