It's time to take your shoes off!
Now it's warmer, I've been feeling more contact with the earth and realising just how stiff and sensitive my feet have become over winter. Our feet were never meant to be covered up all the time and definitely never designed to walk on flat hard surfaces either. The consequence of this? Tight fascia and lingering inflammatory conditions like plantar fasciitis.
Movement keeps the fascia hydrated and feeling free, so dense areas of the body don't proliferate.
A YOGA PRACTICE
This simple daily wholistic practice has been found to
to reduce body pain
stimulate digestion
grounding for anxiety
corrective for structural hip problems
enlivening for depression
15 point Foot Press. I have recorded a short 3 min practice for you. All you need is a grippy surface and a tennis ball. Set aside time in morning and evening daily for best results. TIPS
hold onto a chair until you find your balance
make the movement breath centred which keeps you self aware through the practice.
check before and after sensations from the feet up to the head.
move as much of your foot as you can including toes
fascia is like a sponge. It needs squeezing and hydrating to allow those electrical impulses to run smoothly.
LEARN
Fascia is literally the biological fabric that holds us together. It keeps our 70 trillion cells in order, surrounds muscles, moves through organs, creates sinews, and acts as the base layer of skin (Myers, 2018).
Fascia is rich with sensory nerves, in fact fascia has more sensory nerves than any other tissue in the body.
Research says fascia is the foundation of the body's mind (the bodymind) and it is perhaps the intersection of thought, feeling, rationality, behavior and the potential for change.
'What the people who developed yoga recognized was that in order to change the person -- not just to change the chemistry or to change the amount of strength that you have or your readiness to dive off a diving board -- but to really change the person that you are, to change the issues in the tissues, then you really have to make a deep change in the pattern of your body'. Tom Myers
Proper functioning of this network greatly influences our health, movement abilities and communication of the bodily systems, resulting in quicker response time, sensory acuity and increased mental clarity. Somatic pioneers of last century, like Wilhelm Reich and Ida Rolf, pointed out that it's not just the mind impacting the body through biochemical pathways. The body impacts the mind as well, because we tend to hold unresolved emotional trauma in the tissues, thereby locking us permanently into certain patterns of thinking and behaving.
Fascia itself is a cell signaller. New research is pointing to inflammation and fascia ‘denseness’ as a driving factor to tumour growth and spread (Langevin et al., 2016; Schierling, 2017)
ACT
Mindfulness Yoga classes deepens this relationship with the more subtle aspects of your body mind system and empowers you to release old trauma and holding.
Book in for a Yoga Therapy Assessment for a more personalized approach or join a Yoga Class.
