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Dear Friends, Take a break and enjoy moving your body........... http://www.axess.com/feld/feldenn.html While sitting at your computer... A few hints and a little exercise to make things safer as you sit before your screen. * Position the screen below eye level, * Keep the keyboard as low as comfortable, * Repeat each of the following movements three or four times in a way that feels good! * The whole sequence takes less than a minute 1. Move back on your chair, turn to the side and look away. 2. Rub your hands together, softly and clap gently a few times. 3. Hold your palms together, fingers up, and press the thumbs to your chest as you stretch the elbows forward. Move your head around at the same time. 4. Same position, rotate the wrists to point the fingers to the floor and then to the ceiling. 5. Shift hands and arms right and left, keeping the upper body in place. 6. Now move upper body with the hands. 7. Repeat while keeping the weight equally distributed on BOTH buttocks. 8. Move hands and elbows to right, shoulders to left, then reverse. 9. Squeeze the knees together, then spread them apart. 10. Continue, using your hands to resist the movement of the knees: repeat several times with each hand on the same knee, 11. Then with each hand on the opposite knee continue to resist, knees coming apart and together. Notice how much better you feel, improvise, have fun and find a better way still. Stress... Stress is said to be the major cause of disease in our society, yet do you know what it is, or where the problem lies? When asked to define stress, people are usually at a loss, or they mention tension, fatigue, pressure, noise, hectic city life, and so on. What is needed is a clear sense of where the problem lies, and effective ways of coping with whatever it is. Hans Selye defined stress as the effect of change on the organism. He distinguished good and bad stress, namely eu-stress and dis-(s)tress. A new job, getting fired, a raise, loss of a loved one, winning the lottery, in Selye's terms, all these events cause stress, some good, some bad. Therefore should one spend a lifetime seeking one and avoiding the other? Not very practical. We live surrounded by stress: it is just another name for the forces that keep us alive and moving. It is interesting to examine the technical definition of the term. To the engineer, such as myself, stress is simply a pressure acting upon an object to displace or deform it. The object resists with internal forces called tensions and thus maintains its integrity. Translate this to the human context and we have a much clearer picture: the cause, stress, the effect, tension. In these terms, change itself is a stress. Hunger, a good joke, a car honking, are all stresses. The tensions they cause in us put us into action, and we eat, laugh, jump out of the way, in other words, survive. The problem then becomes manageable, it is how we respond: how we act, or don't act, that determines how well we survive, how we manage the stress. Stress is part of life and as necessary to it as water is to a ship. If you fall overboard, the problem is not the water, but whether or not you know how to swim! Problems occur when we are no longer able to respond appropriately to a situation. We stop! The tension stays because it does not develop into effective action. This leads to the usual symptoms associated with stress: head aches, back aches, anxiety, depression, etc... The Feldenkrais Method literally gets you moving. You develop the instinct to seek new responses in any situation. 5 minute morning wake-up... Get-up and feel great * While still in bed, move whatever moves. * Gently at first, a toe, an elbow, then wiggle a bit faster, all the time doing it in a way that feels good. * Roll to sit on the side of the bed. * Do this by extending your lower legs over the edge and swinging your feet to the floor by pushing up on your elbow. * Move the upper body to the right and to the left. * Sitting on the side of the bed, leaning hands on bed. Gradually continue without bending the elbows, letting the waist do the movement. * Rock forwards and backwards. * Same way as previous movement, letting first the shoulders, then the waist move. * Slide the RIGHT hand down the outside of the Right leg towards the floor. * Turn to look to the LEFT as you slide the hand down. Allow hand to discover texture of calf muscle. Enjoy. Make the movement soft and easy. Notice any areas of strain and organize yourself to avoid effort. Repeat the movement 4 times slowly, resting each time you come up. * Repeat the same sequence on the LEFT side, looking to the RIGHT as you go down. * Alternate, once to the right, once to the left. * Slide both hands down. * Slide both hands down sides of legs, same quality of lightness. Rest in this position if comfortable. * Keeping L hand on floor, swing R arm towards ceiling. * Repeat on other side. Easily, intelligently, avoiding strain. * Lean forearms across thighs, move the shoulders right and left. * Spread your knees and feet apart, lean your elbows on your thighs just above the knees, clasp the fingers together. As you go to the right, look over your right shoulder at your right hip, as you move to the left, look at your left hip. Reverse this, when to left, look at right hip and so on. * hip and so on. * Rock forwards and backwards. * Still leaning the elbows on the knees: as you become more adept (ie flexible), notice that the lower back and the pelvis rock in an interesting and differentiated way. When this happens, the lower back moves in and out. * STAND. * Let the arms drop, look up, let yourself lean forward almost falling to trigger the reflex to stand effortlessly. * Remember, these are NOT exercises! These are movement sequences designed to develop your sensitivity, and increase your feeling of vitality by awakening unused areas of yourself. Recovering flexibility and full use of the body is like unravelling a tangle of knots. When trying to release a single thread, you gain nothing by forceful pulling. Blind obedience to prescribed exercise without creative exploration will only leave you in an endless struggle. Margaret ******************************************************************* Today’s donations for PRO-Seed Grants lead to a PD free tomorrow! ******************************************************************* Parkinson Alliance Margaret Tuchman 1250 24th Street, NW [log in to unmask] Suite 300 Princeton, NJ Washington, DC 20037 609.921.1696