Friday Book Report: Somatics

Mindful movement is something I believe in.  Thomas Hanna’s book, Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health, explores the impact of mindful movement on aging.  Hanna, in fact, contends that aging as we understand it is actually the result of unconscious patterns we build up in response to the stresses of life and that mindful movement can restore our bodies to full function.

His somatic exercises build on and complement Feldenkrais exercises.  They are simple and non-time-consuming (I was going to say “quick,” but the goal is to move slowly and mindfully.).  Whether or not the exercises are as transformative as he claims, I cannot say, but they do seem both safe and useful.

Amazing!

Last weekend, I watched some amazing dancers.  It was inspiring to see how beautifully bodies can move.

Most of us don’t move quite so beautifully.  Know what?  That’s okay.  Dancers, like other professional athletes, train at levels the rest of us can’t sustain.  Their normal is our recipe for injury.

What we can do is emulate their attention to detail and form and their joy in their craft.  We can all find a movement we love and work to be our best at it.

Short Term Thinking, In a Good Way

Back when I used to watch football, the commentators would often compliment a player by mentioning that he had a short memory.  They did not mean that the player in question had short-term memory loss (although that’s also a possibility, given the results of concussions); they meant that when he made a mistake, he forgot about it and moved on to the next play.

We need to have a short memory sometimes when we’re working out.  We need to forget what we did ten years ago.  We need to let go of the fear from that time we got injured.  We need to have amnesia about last week’s romance with the couch.

We work out in the present, with today’s body and today’s capabilities.  When we can focus in on one rep at a time, we learn and we grow.  We can forget all that other stuff, at least for our time at the gym.