psychological bodywork: Newsletter 1 - Relieving Stress & Tension from Shoulders / Michal Ron *

19^th August 2005

Shalom!

As I work with people I find and develop different short and simple exercises that I think could help and promote the well being of many of us.

After practicing those myself and teaching them to friends and clients I would like to share those with a you– so you can also benefit from them.

If you know any people who could benefit from Relieving Stress & Tension from Aching Shoulders, feel free to forward them this e-mail.

Relieving Stress & Tension from Aching Shoulders

Aching shoulders due to accumulated stress and tension is one the most common non-pathological ailments – those chronic and most common problems that make up most of our health problems, and that only alternative medicine can relieve.

Relieving that stress could be very easy, and does not need to consume more than a few minutes a day, especially if done regularly.

And here is what you can do:

1. Sit down, with both your feet on the ground. You could also sit in Lotus or half lotus posture.

2. Close your eyes.

3. Release your jaw.

4. Pay attention to both your sitting bones. Feel them rested on the chair or the floor.

5. Pay attention to your back, neck, and shoulders. Examine your sitting posture with closed eyes. Where is the tension?

6. Feel the tension in your shoulders for a few seconds.

7. Raise your shoulders up to your ears.

You can do that more or less strongly, i.e. – you can raise your shoulders most gently, or using a lot of force. See what feels better to you.

8. Leave shoulders at maximum height for a few seconds, and then drop them.

9. Don’t forget to breathe while holding your shoulders up.

10. Repeat a few times.

11. Pay attention to your shoulders and sitting posture. What is different?

Variations –

1. Instead of raising your shoulders to the maximum and then releasing, you could also go for a monotonous movement, lifting and relaxing your shoulders ca. 10 times slowly, and then stopping.

You could sample both options, see which of those you enjoy more, and practice your favorite.

2. To take the monotonous exercise one step further, you can combine it with breathing. You could either inhale while raising your shoulders, and exhale while letting go, or vice versa.

After a long day or a stressful incident, I count on this exercise to help me relax and come back to my senses fun & easy.

Devoting a few minutes daily to this exercise before going to sleep will only take a few days to start enhancing your sleeping, and can even totally solve chronic sleeping problems.

One Step Further, into Psychological Bodywork

· After finishing that short exercise, you could go one step further to enhance your well being, and observe, while sitting, what emotions come up.

Much too often we hold in our bodies feelings that we do not want to feel, and those accumulate and take the form of muscular tension. Once the tension is released, so do all of those feelings. If anything comes up – a memory, an emotion, pain in another area, or something else, just go on breathing and feel what you feel.

Don’t judge it, and don’t try to change it. Think of those emotions as tears that were held in the body in the form of tension, and now just want to be released.

· Another point to note, as we are working on our shoulders, is the connection of the tension there to taking too much responsibility, or not handling in a relaxed air responsibilities that we took upon ourselves.

Watch and see how this tension in the shoulders could be related to the issue of responsibility in your life.

What did you find out?

I will be more than happy if you write me and tell me what happened after practicing this short and simple exercise.

I would also be happy to hear what you found out about the connection between the tension in your shoulders and different issues in your life.

If you would like to ask any further questions, physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, I will be happy to discuss those in the following newsletters.

If you would like to read more of my articles, including a short articles with three such stress relieving techniques, go to:

http://psychological-bodywork.blogspot.com/

See you next time,

Michal Ron,

San Francisco.

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