Class 7: Explore

Welcome back. Today's daily dose is outside of the box of Pele's. Today we're going to lie down and roll around on the floor and explore what it feels like to essentially redevelop as if you were an infant. Hopefully you'll have fun with that. Um, it's important that you have a little padding. Perhaps you'll be on a carpet or you might want to mats so that you have a longer surface area. I'm actually going to use the whole width of my map, so you would just use your two mats if you need them. Okay, let's get started.

So I'm actually gonna spin around this way and lie down on my back and just settle in and be here for a moment. My arms should be spread wide or are spread wide. Yours should be as well and the legs are just bent and just relax and settle in to where you are in this moment. Feel your body on the earth, feel your pelvis, feel your ribs, feel your head, feel your arms. If at any point this isn't a comfortable arm position, feel free to bend your elbows and ground down your upper arm bones and your scapula like so. Otherwise arms can be open. And let's just start with some easy breath and moving of the hips and the spine. So here I'm swaying, my legs, sides aside, sometimes we call this like a windshield wiper.

I'm letting my hips move first meeting my thigh bones and then my pelvis rolls over and then I just kind of drag my body back. Now my abdominals are working a little bit, but I am really not thinking about my abdominals. I'm thinking about my bones. I encourage you to kind of let go of what muscles are working and to pay attention to what you feel on your body connected to the earth or what part of your body you feel connected to the earth. So one more time swaying in this easy way. Breathing when it makes sense and being aware of what you feel.

And now we'll twist again to whichever side you you're, you're on, it doesn't matter. And then the ta, the the outside leg or the top leg, you'll lift up and push down through the other hip a little bit more through the leg. In order to lift the pelvis more and perhaps stretch your spine a little more. It's important that you keep your shoulder blades grounded. Go ahead and change sides fluidly. You don't have to even wait for me to tell you to just gently roll to the other side when it makes sense to you.

Notice if you start inch warming down and that's something that I do and that's me using my lower back a little too much. So perhaps feel more connection of the bones on your back body if you start inch warming down. So just one more time like this to make it even where we pushed down through the foot and feel stretched through the spine and then come back through to center. Now lift your legs up for me and hopefully they can just rest kind of like babyish here and rock and roll a little again, if your arms need to be bent to be comfortable here, do that. So if this doesn't feel good, move much less, move slower.

But if it feels good, try just rocking and rolling without really thinking about what's moving you. But what instead think about what you feel on the back body. Be Aware and then pause. See if you're going to hold your legs or your, your ankles or even your feet and do the same movement. So in Yoga we often call this a happy baby, but you can visualize an infant doing this. That's what I want you to think about.

Actually try lifting your head up and just kind of rolling, rolling side to side without any effort and see what you feel. Good. Rest that. Hug your knees into your chest and then find that sort of passive baby position. Again, I like to have my feet kind of connected when I begin, but they don't need to be. And then place your elbows down, keeping your hands lifted like mine are and just roll again side to side. Are you able to make a connection of your thigh to the ground without lifting your shoulder blade or your arm up? If you are, place your hands flat to down.

So I do want the palms down and that helps to promote certain muscles and just see if you can put the palms down, if not be here. And if you need to put the knuckles down, that's fine. Just rolling side to side and then come back through. Changing it a little. Put your hands together, pressing firmly but not with a too much effort but keep the hands pressing together and we keep this shape and we're just going to kind of rock and roll side to side. So feel yourself, whoo. Stopping yourself with your arm and your legs.

So feel that connection arm in the leg. So now I've lifted my head up and I'm basically in a rounded shape. Okay. And I'm rolling side to side now if you feel comfortable with your head down, that would be fine. So different movement for me. It actually feels good to have my head lifted and it gives me a little more connection through my low back.

And I'm actually using the muscles on the outside of my arm and the outside of my hip to do this movement, to stop the movement and then to propel the movement. And then let's pause just on one side. Okay, straighten your arm. If you're able to rest your head on the earth, on your arm, rest your legs, rest of your body. In theory you should be able to sleep here. Press back to the other side, pushing the hands together. Stop, rest your legs, rest your hand, rest your whole job and relax and then undo it and pushed back to the other side. One more piece here, rest everything.

And then need the outside of your shoulder and the outside of the hip into the floor. So this is Kinda like foam rolling. Perhaps without a foam roll, you're just using your body and you might feel some sticky spots you might not enjoy. You can let your head rest on the earth. You can let your head be lifted a little bit. It's not wrong to use your neck muscles to hold your head a little and then undo that and go to the other side. So again, we put the arm flat. I like to use my opposite hand to push into my wrist or forearm and then need, so I'm needing in my hip, maybe needing in my shoulder, if I feel some tightness that needs to be worked through, this is the time to do it. And then we'd press back up. And here we add on.

So take the arms wide, palms down is ideal and we want both shoulder blades and both upper arms down. So if you're unable to do that, make this shape with your elbows bent. So here we take the legs to the side first and let them begin to rest the opposite arm kinda carves across the body all the way through to that same restful position. And then we undo that. We uncoil the body and we do as much as we can with the arm. And then the legs find their way back up and then go to the other side.

Legs first, and then the arms kind of carve across the heart to the opposite hand. Press into that arm. You're not just resting, you're pressing a little bit, and then you're going to undo it. The upper body first feel the ribs, the legs will lift, and then we go to the other side. So I'm really looking for my bones to come down. What do I mean by that? So I've got my whole arm bone down and as I uncoil I put the back of my shoulder, I put the back of my spine, my back ribs, and then my other shoulder blade, my arm, and then the legs. Yeah, so now you can do this with a little bit more vigor, if you will, or a little faster, or you can keep it really slow. It's up to you. I just want to show you and give you the option of the faster move.

So that's where I'm going to go and it feels good on my body. If it doesn't feel good on your body, then you won't do it. So I'm using my arm that's grounded to push and look at that. I found myself getting off center on my mat. That's not uncommon. If you found yourself creeping to one side, then something is out of balance. So here, find yourself on your back and if you need to center yourself, go for it.

That way you'll have Matt for the next piece. Lift the legs back up. Find that baby position. So we'll assume that same position. Go to the one side with the legs, curl the body over, and then now you're going to press into your bottom leg and your bottom arm and you're going to progress up to your forearm. Surprisingly, that might not be that easy to do. So you're going to come back down, rest for a moment and try again. So you're pressing into your forearm and into your outer leg and you're going to see if you can bring yourself up.

Now don't think about what muscles you need to work, but of course you're using muscles and maybe you're using muscles that feel a little stifled or a little unavailable to you. Hopefully this will help to create some availability and we'll do that just one more time. So I'm pressing into the side of my leg. I'm not even thinking about what muscles are working, but muscles are beginning to work and then we're going to uncoil so the legs lead the way the arms come around. We're here and we go to the other side and we bring the arm into a position pushing onto your forearm. We'll help many of you, you may not need to do it, but it will help push into that forearm and come up. So we're waking up muscles on the rear part of the shoulder that may have lost their way.

Perhaps see if you can come to rest each time and don't really worry too much about what your other leg is doing. Sometimes we have to kind of use the leg to hoist up a little bit. I don't see a problem with that, but know that the goal would be to not have to use that leg to get yourself up, but to feel that muscles are working on the back of the body to do so. And then we'll rest for a moment and gently uncoil. So let's do that a couple of times with a little bit of flow. Legs go first.

We come through and we press up and we press down. Legs, body, come to the other side. One more time, each side. Now certainly if you like the way this feels, I recommend practicing it a little longer than we're going to do today. But I want to offer up more things in this short daily dose. So we'll move on.

The next step comes now are you ready? Yes, you are. So the legs go, the body comes across, we come up to the forearm and the next piece here is two per press up to a quadro pet. Now if we were a baby, we as this is where we would start to crawl. So then we're going to try to practice coming down from that though. Ooh. And I fell. That's hard for me. Yeah. Try again per us up and press down.

What happens is as you practice the movement, I know it doesn't look pretty, it gets a little bit easier sometimes. Oh, showing you my hard side first and we're going to per rest down and I know I'm falling, but that's okay. Unwind. And we try the other side. So I'm going to just kind of center myself. How can we roll the legs over? Come to that same shape, totally different on this side. Piece of cake to press up. It basically highlights mind balances, piece of cake, depress up. I dunno if piece of cake is the right word, but see if you can pay attention to what feels different in your body.

So try it a couple times. Trying to find that control on the way down. And you know, you can actually practice just doing the legs, just the hip part. Or You could practice just doing the arm part if you felt the need. Again, we send her ourselves on the mat if needed because as you wiggle around, you may have scooched forward, back side, right, left. It doesn't matter. Pause for a moment. Legs are lifted. If it suits you, legs are grounded.

If they need to be, this is self care for you. Now we're going to come all the way up and crawl around. Here we go, we roll to the side, we press, we come up, we take our leg through, we take our leg back, we take our leg through, we take our leg back, we take our leg through and we crawl. Crawl, just for fun, right? Can you crawl? I know I'm silly. Maybe people in your house or maybe people at your gym or wherever you might be doing this will think that you're silly as well, but sometimes being silly as a good thing, so I'm going to come back to the same place I left off and I want to just talk a little bit about this here. We should be able to, if we have adequate flexibility from this position, even with flat hands, pull that flexed foot all the way through. That's very difficult for many of us to do.

It's difficult for me to do so practice it. I'm lifting my fingers on lifting tenting my hands. Then I'm able to do it now from here. In theory I would be able to come up, right? Yeah. That's where we'll stop this piece today though. So come down back to your knees. Let's uncoil here. So we're on this side. We're going to see if we can put the elbow down, come to the side body, bring ourselves back onto our backs and so we can do the other side.

Settle in, legs go first. Body goes second. We come all the way up and we're in our quadriped head. So now here try bringing your foot through just like we did on the other side. Notice if you have a harder side or a less hard side for me tenting my fingers like this means I can get my foot through. If you can do it with flat. Wonderful. I have quite a bit of tightness in my low back, although I'm working through it now here on your hands and knees, try crawling around a little bit and do it without a lot of effort.

Maybe you walk around the room for the sake of the picture here, I'm just walking forward and back on my mat so you can see what I'm hoping that you might do. We come back to this same angle over here. Practice that leg through again. Oh, really? Think about it. My friends. That is core work. It really is core work. Try it again if you need to practice every day, put your hands down, come back to your quadro pad and see if you can kind of uncoil yourself. So I'm going to put my hand on my mat and I'm going to kind of lean over to the side hip on coil.

And that side just is a little easier for me to do in general with the feet connected to the earth. Sway your legs side to side. Okay. And then just ground and relax for one moment here. Do you feel different? Are more of your bones grounded down, breathing in and breathing out. Choose your more challenging side, whatever that may be for you and role to that side for me, and bring yourself to an upright position and try to do so in a very non muscle kind of way. Right? Or the same way we just learned. Now have a seat and kind of lean back on your arms a little bit.

It doesn't matter where they are. I just want you to not be afraid to lean on your arms and relax a little. And honestly, this isn't plotty so you don't even have to pull your shoulders down if you don't want. Now you can let them kind of be pushed up. For me, that gives me a really nice stretch in my back. If I allow my shoulders to be pushed up, I get a beautiful stretch in my back. You can pull them down. You can do whatever you want.

It's supposed to be organic movement. Yeah. So just let your legs to sway side to side without too much effort in your arms. So what I'm doing is finding the place where my arms can be so I don't have to use them very much. Yeah. Now when I sway to one side with my legs and I opened my heart a little, I get a beautiful stretch through my pack as well through the front of my upper body and then change again. So just kind of feel that. Notice the hip movement please. The hips are moving, meaning the five bones are rolling around inside the pelvis.

Notice the pelvis movement, you're massaging your bones, your pelvis, your glutes into the earth. Here my friends, you might really appreciate a hardwood floor would feel really nice if you want some foam rolling type fields. And then let's go ahead and just do one more here and then we're going to land two. I'm just going to land on the front. It doesn't matter which side and I'm going to have you stay there for a moment. So I've pushed myself so I'm leaning into one arm. Again, this looks a little like the mermaid, but I'm not really thinking mermaid here. I'm thinking more about the stretch on the outside leg, the grounded leg.

So I'm going to need my glutes, my quad into the ground here. And then when I feel like I've got the right spot, the right spot is where it feels like a good idea. There's no answer here. I'm going to put my two hands down and I'm going to pull with my hands side bend and forward to receive a little bit of stretch in my waist. A little bit of a stretch across the outside of my hip here. And then I'm going to think about opening my heart.

But now if you opened the heart too much, it may come from the lower part of the back. So feel that kind of hollowing in here and you shouldn't feel any crunchiness or achiness in your back. And then the opening of the heart would just be like with the change of the gaze, if it makes sense. Otherwise stay here. So I'm getting a really lovely stretch here and now I want to explore that stretch. So I'm going to come out of it. Keep the one arm there and I'm going to pull forward and I'm going to come out of it and I'm going to pull forward and I just want to do that one more time.

Again, my feet, my legs are not really all that organized. Stay here, keep that little bit of flection and reach your arm forward. So this arm is going to reach forward and down. So it's like I'm going over a barrel and if you can touch your pinky finger to the floor, to the earth, I'm getting such a lovely stretch through my body. You can make it even deeper by sending that top leg straight. So you're stretching your whole back body here with a breath.

Gently bring it all back in. And let's do that same thing on the other side. So just take a couple sways side to side, just loosening up. Again, I'm not thinking about what muscles are working. Instead I'm getting the stretch or the kneading feeling that I'm desiring right now. You can play with the pleasure principle here. So take the legs to the other side and just kinda come around ground down through your leg. Okay, the one that's down and then adjust your hands so that it feels comfortable. Flex a little bit, your spine or hollow your belly inward a little bit and then pull yourself forward to feel a little bit of a stretch.

And right there I'm getting a stretch in my waist a little bit. You might be getting more stretch in your leg, doesn't matter where you feel the stretch. It's really about finding the pieces that you need to stretch here. So you might even see a open through your ribs a little bit to get a little bit more. You might round down a little bit, you might lift up a little bit. It's really about what feels good to you. Good.

Undo that a little bit and then come back to it. And we work with the lat feeling. So you're stretching the arm long and straight. You can stretch the leg back right away if you want. Or you can keep it passive like I like to reach retreats with the arm round down. Maybe touch the pinky finger down. That feels wonderful to me.

You might want to lift up and you might want to roll over really any of those movements that feel good to you. I invite you to give it a try. Now, you certainly have to use your body to be here, but what you're seeking is a feeling of stretch of release. One final move for you here. Come around to your belly so you can get there however you'd like. Just be on your belly and we'll revisit this traction for your spine here.

Fill your head resting. Feel your heart resting. Feel your belly, your abdominals light. Feel the bones of your pelvis heavy. So think about your pubic bone and your hip bones heavy. All three points. Now if you feel that it's hard to weigh down on one side, check in with that thigh and see if you can soften the flesh.

You may be able to soften the flesh by turning minis in a little bit. Softening the quadriceps a little bit. That works for me. So ground down through those three points, the hip bones, the pelvis, hollow, the belly inward, and then without thinking about how you're doing it, notice I actually lift my shoulders up because I want to be able to use my arms to pull my body forward. Now I'm basically hooking my pelvis on the mat, keeping my legs kind of light here, but not with efforts gives me a traction that allows me to feel stretch across the front of my hip into my spine and it feels just absolutely lovely. Now the more I draw my abdominals active, the more sensation I feel, and then I can allow myself to pull up a little bit.

So I mostly really pulling forward with quite a lot of effort or intention. And then I lift up just a little bit and sometimes friends, the most lovely chiropractic adjustment in my pelvis or in my spine. If I'm just a little out of whack, this can really help to set me, but again, notice I am doing this with really no effort with intention and with breath. Please let go of that softly. Bring yourself into a position of rest for me.

The child's pose or the rest pose is the perfect choice. Knees Nice and wide today. Arms out in front, forehead resting on the mat. Take three breaths. Feel free to stay in that position longer if you need to. Thank you so much for rolling around on the floor with me today.