Teresa Malins

You know when you're ready

I have a friend who is suffering pretty badly with back pain at the moment.  This is ongoing and it seems to cause him a huge amount of pain.  The pain, it seems, is so bad that he can't sit down on the settee for more than and hour at a time without having to get up and stretch and do anything he can to relieve the tension in his thoracic spine. 

I know my work will help him, so I told him that I'll do what I can to help if he's willing to work with me.

He said he was but seemed to think that what he feels will help him most is massage of the area, manipulation and trigger pointing.  I agreed to a certain extent, but pointed out that this is all external treatment, ie, he'd be laying on a table and someone will be acting on him rather than him actually working on himself with the help of a therapist, in this case Pilates.

We agreed we'd get started on this, and I told him that he must trust me when it comes to my work and he must be prepared to put effort into this too.  I told him it's not just about doing exercises but tapping in a little deeper than that. I told him he would have to be honest with himself. He agreed and we set a date to start.

I was happy to help and excited that he may be taking the first steps to letting go of some of his pain.

Disappointed was an understatement when I had a phonecall to cancel his first session.  It wasn't even a cancellation phonecall but an 'i didn't even realise we arranged it' call! 

It dawned on me that he wasn't ready.  He wasn't ready to let go of his pain.  Now, although his pain is very real to him and manifests itself as tension in the muscles of his thoracic spine, there is much more than just physical pain we are talking about here.   

So he bailed out on working on himself and letting me work with him, not because he didn't trust me or my work, but because he did.  I believe he knew that we would make progress and he would begin to free himself, but that was not something he was ready to do.  For what ever reason, he was not ready to let go.

This is no way a critism of my friend.  He has reasons to hold onto this pain.  Reasons that he only knows about, but at this time...right now...he needs his pain.  As silly at sounds, and he may completely disagree with me it gets him attention.  Attention that comes from the place that no matter who he's been to see about his back, no-one has been able to help him.  This, in my eyes, is because he's not ready to help himself. 

We all have things we hold onto, emotionally I mean, which, I believe manifests as pain or dis-ease in the body.  It is entirely our own prerogative whether we choose to hold on to the burdens and self limiting beliefs of our past or let go and move on to a healthy, happy, pain free and magical future.

Breathe...

Breath = life.

It's the first and the last act we will ever perform.

To be able to inhale fully is to be able to fill ourselves  with the energies of life and to be inspired.

To be able to exhale fully is to be able to let go and to open ourselves to the unknown.

But how often do we breathe fully?  Probably very rarely if at all.

If we pay attention to our breathing process, we find that what naturally happens is that our chest cavity expands and contracts. As we inhale our intercostal muscles (the muscles in between our ribs) expand and elevate our ribs, the breast plate moves up as the diagphram flattens down. During exhalation the intercostals relax, the breast plate moves down and and the diagphram relaxes upwards.

Depending on what we are doing and on our specific physcological state( angry, stressed, peaceful, relaxed) our breath can range from fast and shallow to slow and deep and can be either diaphramatic, thoracic or clavicular.  Most of us choose chest (thoracic) and clavicular breathing whilst having little experience of diaphramatic breathing, which means that we never fully breath oxygen into the deepest areas of our lungs where most of our blood awaits oxgenation. By continuing shallow breathing, we reduce the capacity of our respiratory system to only one third of its potential therefore diminishing the production of energy in our cells and increasing the dis-harmony and dis-ease in our bodies.

We know that Pilates and breathing go hand in hand and that the way in which we breathe assists us in the performance and execution of the exercises yet we still remain somewhat unaware of our breathing techniques from day to day.

So... I'll offer you a challenge of noticing your breath today.  Noticing the speed of your breath, the depth of your breath and the possibility of letting your inhalation last a little longer as you get a sense that you can allow your breath to reach the lowest lobes of your lungs before exhaling fully... Ahhhh!