November 17th, 2021

A wet, but not rainy day.

Warmup

• Turn wrists, turn elbows, turn shoulders, use full range of motion
• Go on all fours, put little weight on the hands, push body up with the wrists. Stretch lower arms in several directions. Carefully feel into your wrists, what feels good and what not.
• Swing whole body, feel the blood pouring into your fingertips. Especially useful when the fingers are cold ;).
• Swing even more until knees touch the ground.
• Make circles with knees (around hips).
• Make circles with feet (around knees.
• Turn your ankles.

Exercises

• Play with obstacles: Try to find ways to move over and under the railings. Either one at a time or more in a row. Start slow, get used to the slippery wood. Keep moving! Repeat the “same” technique several times, try to get it more fluid. Make them your “comfort zone”. Either variate them or find new ways to jump or climb or slip over and under it.
• Balancing: Walk on the beams of the playground, get used to the slippery wood. When comfortable, make lunges or squats on the beams. Keep balancing for quite a while.
• Rope Climbing, or if this does not work, Rope Pullups. Its quite slippery today…
• Play with obstacles in state of exhaustion. Be very careful. Timing and coordination is off after the previous exercises. Try to find fallback techniques which still work for you.
• Eccentric stretching. Get your muscles into stretched positions while under medium tension (either gravity or a resistance band).
• Bathing in the pond. Put at least your bare feet into the water, more if you want. Try to be fully aware with what you feel (outside and inside) while doing it. Try to become aware of the thoughts that come with that. Just play with it, no pushing.

Tools used

• Start slow, keep going. Technique training is harder in uncomfortable conditions. Is is more difficult to enter “playing” mode. You feel clumsy, things don’t work like they used to. What can help is to start slow, with “safe” techniques, repeating them with variations. And gradually enlarge this cloud of possible movements. Important here is not to stop and think for too long. If you doubt and don’t dare what you wanted to do, do something easier. After a while you will sweat a bit, forget about the rain, have a feeling of what works and what not and just play with that.
• Balancing: Balancing (in subjective medium difficulty) is a great tool to facilitate entering and staying in a state of presence-awareness. Simply because in every other state you fall down all the time and this is annoying. Especially if you balance for a few minutes or more. I will write an article on that. For now: Balancing at the beginning of the training helps to be more focussed in the rest of the training.
• Exhaust yourself to be exhausted. We did the rope climbing/pushups/jumps with the goal to add exhaustion for later. This mindset can actually make exhaustion more joyful. Because “I can do no more” suddenly is not “ashaming” (it should never be, but often is..) but “reaching the goal”. This allows to observe the process of getting there without negative feelings. And even play with it.
• Exhausted state: Doing the same training as before, but in an exhausted state. There is no need to “be elegant” here. Just observe what are the fallback techniques that still work. Play with the state. And have fun watching yourself and others being clumsy.
• Surrender 2: Entering cold water. Cultivating the “observing what happens (without pressure)” can help build a habit of “feeling in and observing the situation” as soon as stressful situations arise, instead of panicking. The water stays cold without you doing something. You don’t have to “do” something like when running and you can fully focus on observing. And playing with the thoughts and feelings that arise.
• Stretching and tension: Disclaimer: I’m definitely not an expert here, this part should be written by somebody having more experience with Yoga! Alternating tension and stretching, Stretching while under tension. Contract while in stretched positions. All this gets you a better feel how your body moves, what it can do and how, and whats inside.