Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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Hey there, what's your relationship with rest? Is resting a luxury? Is it a waste of time? Or is it possibly something that's human and necessary? Let's talk about it. Welcome to the expand your ability podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. Because of back pain, voice issues and anxiety, I was driven to learn about how the mind influences the body.

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and how the body influences the mind. So welcome to the show. Let's talk about rest. So rest is a big topic and I think we'll cover a little bit of it today. And this is as much for anyone else as it is for me. I definitely have a lot of conditioning that runs deep around do more do more. What's next?

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and disregarding myself as I'm doing what I do. So the conditions, the conditioning runs deep for me and I'm always catching it. I'm always taking breaks. I'm always learning to step back and see what I can do for myself. So definitely this is something that can be a challenge for anybody. So before we get started, what is rest for you?

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Do you take rest? Do you take breaks?

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Or do you gun through whatever you're doing?

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Hmm, just something to think about. So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about rest in three sections.

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I'm going to talk about rest in terms of how it's used in Feldenkrais lessons. I'm a Feldenkrais practitioner. Feldenkrais is a somatic movement practice. And in Feldenkrais we use rest often. I'll talk about rest in terms of taking what we learn in Feldenkrais practice into daily life. How can we think about rest there? And then the third section, I'm going to talk about practical kind of tips for

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playful rest at home. All right. So let's talk about rest in falling Christ. Rests are built into pretty much every single lesson in falling Christ. And why is that? It, you can't have a falling Christ lesson without some element of rest, some deliberate use of stopping. All right. That's part of the rest is that.

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we stop movement and okay, wait, wait, wait a second. So you're telling me we go to this class and part of it is not doing, right? Part of it is resting. Absolutely, right? I mean, you get a flavor of this, right? When you go work out, right? You do some repetitions and then you stop. It rests for a bit and then you do the repetitions again. Now in this type of movement work, we're not resting.

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So our muscles get a break. It's not that resting is actually for the mind, for your brain to process what you've done. Um, this type of movement is learning. It's, it's, it's a way of your, your mind interpreting the movement information as something meaningful that you can actually adopt as possible new habits, right?

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And so we go to this class and we have this intention to do this, right? We want to learn. And then we're also not doing, we're, we're part of the work is actually to stop, observe, do nothing to rest. And it's not that we're actually doing nothing. It's giving our mind the space and the time to process that information.

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It's your brain, it's your neurology, it's your nervous system, it's your biology, putting together that information.

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And in this rest.

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There's time for things to slow down. There's time for reflection, time for new ideas. Um, as we move through these, uh, movement sequences, we are turning on different movements, feeling that experience, sensing that experience and sensing how they turn off when we come to rest. And in all of that is an opening to

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Pre-association, an opening to creativity, an opening to watch what happens to our mind as we stop. What are the habitual thoughts that pop in? Oftentimes in a lesson, especially near the end, students will get very quiet. The room will be very still. And often I think that's reflective of their minds getting quieter.

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There's less habitual this or that coming through because all of that is actually a form of compulsivity. And that was something Folling Christ was really interested in helping people reduce was their compulsive need to take action, compulsive need to do this or that. And so near the end of these lessons, there's often deeper breathing, slower.

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more kind movements, their nervous system is becoming more regulated.

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And in that, right, that provides a space for creativity, for something new.

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that wasn't there before. And the newness comes because the movements take us out of our habitual compulsive mode of knowing ourselves, our way of sensing ourselves. That is so usual, so familiar that we might not even realize it's us. It's just always there. And in the rest, we have an opportunity.

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feel that melt away and that invites in something new.

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fights in insights. And that's one of my favorite parts of the work is in that space in the rest.

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The insights just kind of come forward.

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And having rested, there's another great peace. Having rested, there is the moment of starting again.

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Another element of this work in awareness through movement, the name for the Felling Christ work, the group class.

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Another element here is, how do we do what we do?

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And if we're always in the mode of being ourselves, being ourselves, we never really get a great contrast of who we are and what we do. And so when we go into the rest, and then we begin to start the movement again.

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We have the opportunity to sense how we begin, how the movement unfolds.

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An example would be if you were to do some sort of exercise where you do repetitions, right? I'm going to do 10 repetitions in a row and you kind of just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you don't stop in between, right? You're kind of on autopilot in a sense. And so to actually stop and start again, makes the movement new, makes it fresh.

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You can sense how you begin. You get a contrast that you don't get when you go boom, boom, boom, boom, over and over and over again. We can catch new moments and the rest doesn't have to be very long. You know, in a, in a awareness through movement class, the rest can be a minute, maybe even two minutes or just 30 seconds, but you can also rest for a second.

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You can stop, you can do nothing for a moment and then start again. That there is another ceasing of activity from which you can start again. Because can you really rest if you are in the activity, going through the activity?

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I'm reminded of something one of my teachers said. This is Candy Canino. She says the learning happens in the rest.

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And like, I don't know if I've actually wrapped my mind around that as fully as I can. The learning happens in the rest, right? You, you go through these movement sequences and then you stop. And, and I think it's so instinctive that like, oh, I did, I'm doing the movements. This is where I'm doing the work. This is where I'm learning. This is where I'm doing it. I got to do it. I got to do it well as I'm doing it. And then it's actually, when you stop.

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rest that the learning happens.

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And I think that's because the learning is the rewiring, the new wiring of neurologically, that is the learning. And it comes afterwards in a sense, because your mind is putting together, what did I just experience? And so, yeah, maybe in awareness and movement, maybe, maybe you don't need to work as hard.

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Cause the learning is actually kind of out of your control. I mean, it is in your control. You can influence it, but it's something that happens. A part of you that is deeper.

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uh, than your conscious control. The more of it is actually something that's a part of your animal-ness that plays out.

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that the learning is something you do as a part of your nature. And maybe, maybe we can set ourselves up for success.

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but it might not always be something.

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that efforting helps, like real hardcore willpower. Might be not that willpower does the work, but we set ourselves up for our own humaneness to learn. That's an interesting idea, I think. All right, so the next section I'd like to talk about is bridging this idea of rest into our daily life. I don't know about you, but...

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Uh, I think there's a lot of encouragement from our culture, uh, particularly in North America to go, go, go to hustle. You're on the clock. We got to make as much of our time as we can. Time is money, right? And so to rest is to cease all that productivity.

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And how could that be valuable? Well, it is, even if it's not always obviously. So I've gone through many seasons myself of, uh, seasons long and short of overworking and burning myself out or working at a pace or an intensity that just backs backfires on me. And so

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What I'm finding more and more, and it's a work in progress, but I'm finding more and more how to make work sustainable. And that might be limiting the number of hours I work on something per day. I'm working with Alice Boyd on our documentary about the Fallen Christ Method. And we're doing between two and three hours each day. And

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Like that's a good amount of time for a concentrated work effort. And I need to take a break after that. I can't just keep plowing away at it for four or five, six hours. I need to have the time to rest and come back to it. I can tell my, if I start pushing it and there's been days where it's like, okay, I want to do a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And it, and like, there's a, there's a range where it's okay. And then there's a range where I've gone too far.

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And I can't think about it. I dislike the project or like, I don't want to go back to it. All of these things play out when I kind of take it too far.

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I think this is something people are kind of picking up on more and more. This, how do we take rest? I mean, there's the hashtag self care. Um, for a long time, there's been a, the Pomodoro method where you work for 25 minutes and you take a break for five minutes.

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And that's kind of an external metric, right? Like, okay, I'll confine myself to this amount of time and then stop and this amount of time and stop. And I think that's good. I often set myself an alarm to work for a period of time. And that helps me to make sure to rest because sometimes I do get into a flow. And so it is good, but also I need to rest. But 25, I'm...

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sure there's some really good reasons for why 25 and 5, but it's also a little bit arbitrary. It's a nice, relatively minimum number, because if you're resting, you work for 5 and then rest for one minute, it's maybe, I don't know, maybe it works for someone at some point, but 5 on, 1 off is not... I don't know. It...

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might not be the best at all on all tasks. And so I think it is something where, where can we develop an internal sort of sensor for ourselves?

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What is the amount of time I can work and how much time do I need to rest? And like it's five minutes long enough for a rest. It's pretty quick. And what do you do during that rest? That's another question, which I'll get to in a little bit here.

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Um, something that happened for me, you know, years ago, um, when I was doing more video production work, I would, I had really, really bad back pain at the time. Like I was really twisted up and I'd work at the computer and I couldn't work much longer than 30 minutes.

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And I had to rest. I had to like sit back and sit down and actually lie down. That was the best thing for me. And so when, when bringing rest into our lives, I really. Recommend like lying down on the floor. And that's a lot easier when you work from home or you work remotely somehow, and you have the space to do it. Um, if your office is down for you to lie on the floor, go for it. Because.

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The floor is maximal amount of support.

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Right. You are being held by the floor by probably as much of a surface area as you can. And that's what I found.

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that.

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Resting on the floor was the biggest reset for me when I was in my early days of having all this pain that I didn't know what to do with. And then that would help me get back to the computer and I can sit again for some time, but then I would have to rest again back then. But it's still something I do now. Whether or not I'm in pain, I can kind of tell if I'm a little bit hasty. Rushing a little bit.

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uh, a little bit, uh, scattered. So I'll come to the floor and I'll rest and maybe roll around or do something that's on my mind from recent lessons that I've done.

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And so for you, what could more rest in your daily life look like? Um, when you're in front of the computer, I think it's really tough to rest quite frankly, cause there's always another red little dots, uh, notification, some beeps, some, somebody getting your attention. It's kind of tough to rest. Like I have to like close the computer or move away from it somehow.

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And so for you, what does it look like to rest? Can you get down on the floor?

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Can you sit back on the couch?

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Can you put on some music or something?

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What would make taking a rest really good for you?

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Now, I'm a little bit biased to using movement as a way of resting. And perhaps this will take us into the third section here, about some practical ideas we can play with. The benefit to movement, right? Like I could sit back and try and rest. But if I'm feeling agitated, doing some movement, I find, is really helpful.

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Right? So this is, I am now realizing I'm, I'm talking about rest in two kind of capacities, right? Okay. So if we do movement and then we rest from the movement, which is what happens in falling cries, but then there's also movement as rest as a way to rejuvenate ourselves. Okay. So it's good to distinguish that there. Because soft, gentle, slow.

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sort of back and forth movements can help us shift our musculature. And I think that's kind of one of the biggest things for rest is if we are. Agitated that that agitation is on multiple levels. It's our thinking, which might be what's next. What's next. Uh, I gotta get this right. Uh, I gotta go. I gotta go. I don't have much time. Right. There's that thinking, uh, there's.

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some sort of feeling that goes on in there, some sort of emotional response, like maybe it's fear. There's a sensation that goes on too. There's a sensation, you know, it could be in your chest, it could be in your throat, it could be the way your hands might grip or tighten, the way your jaw might tighten, who knows, right? What is true for you?

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And so there's also the movement piece. There's also the muscular tonus piece of your body. And all of that is a shape. Now as a movement pattern inside you, it's a shape. And let's just use that as a metaphor. It's across your whole body, your whole body. There's some shape you're taking in your thoughts and your feelings and your sensation and your movement.

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And so by using movement in a rejuvenative way, where you're, let's say you're rolling from side to side, if that's comfortable for you, that can shift your internal state, especially if you roll a little bit, and then you rest, you roll here and there, and then you stop. Uh, in one of my classes, it kind of came to me to frame it this way. Do.

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undo, do nothing. Right? You do. Maybe you roll to the right. You undo it. You come back to where you came from. You do nothing. Or maybe you don't undo. Maybe you do. You roll this way and at some point you do nothing. And then you do. You continue rolling and then you do nothing.

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You can be simply rolling your head too. It doesn't have to be your whole body. It could just be tilting your legs inward and outward. So if you're lying on your back and your knees are bent and your feet are standing, you can tilt your knees. Sense what that does to your pelvis. You do it, then you stop doing it. And you listen for a bit, that would be the rest. You do, and you stop doing. And you see if there's any change in your muscular trit.

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tighten some places? Do you untighten in some places? Does your breath change? And so this is what I would recommend as some sort of rest practice. And maybe it's once per hour or whenever you feel like you need it, get on the floor. Do something. That's kind of repeatable. That's somewhat easy, right? Okay, I'll tilt my legs or I'll roll this way.

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You do it, and then you do nothing. And you just watch your witness do and do nothing. And it's kind of fun if you're rolling, and you're moving in such a way that you're kind of going here and there that you rest in awkward shapes. Maybe if you roll onto your belly, and your arms are kind of folded up somehow, or.

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Then you end up on your side and your arm is under your face. Like it's an awkward shape. Great. Rest in weird ways. Or rest on your back. Rest in this weird pretzel shape. Who knows where you'll end up? Turn it on. Turn it off. That's the practice.

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All right. Well, I hope this was helpful. I hope it inspires you to rest a bit more, to appreciate the rest that you can find in your day and the rest you can find in awareness through movement. So, please let me know, how was this for you? Please go to the show notes. You can find some links there. You can find a link to reach out to me, to join the newsletter. It would be great if you did and you can join the conversation.

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You can send me an email. Love to hear from you. As always, I invite you to take these ideas in the show and talk about them with a friend, a loved one. For instance, was there something surprising or something new or something interesting in this episode that caught your attention and would you share that with someone and see what they think of it?

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Do they have a similar opinion or a different opinion to you? These conversations can help us learn by talking through the idea, help us learn by making these new associations, and then also to start a conversation and learn from someone else.

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The final question I'd like to leave with you today is...

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Yeah. What is rest to you now? Did this conversation here offer up some new idea about rest? And what can you do about that? What's one thing today perhaps that you could do to add in something new to your rest, perhaps it's to even just think about resting in the first place.

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think about somehow you can modify your rest or what you do. What would be good for you?

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Thank you for your attention. I really appreciate it.