You have bunions? Here are the simplest instructions I can think of right now:1. Buy “Yoga Toes”. Find them on google.2. Buy a “Theraband” and strengthen the toes one ( Big Toe) and two ( all the rest) at a time.3. See a Rolfer, and address the overall postural/gait pattern that helps perpetuate this problem.There’s more, naturally. Contact me at robmcwilliams@mac.com for more exercises and information, if you wish.
So you got out of shape. Okay..it’s time to get things moving again! You need to start with basics: balanced, released strength and flexibility. You don’t want to just tighten up some muscles without also easing them, which is what can happen from following a straight balletic regimen. Over the years, all that work in the hip muscles in the turned-out direction can really impact the health of your spine and lower back. A good way to keep in balance AND regain strength: mix together a ballet barre and a full yoga sequence. I prefer Ashtanga-style or a method that emphasizes Vinyasa, but that can be left up to you.Think of weaving the two sequences together like a braid. This is good for your brain, too! After a while, notice how nicely Sun Salutations connect with plies or how the sturdy Warrior pose can somehow balance the fluid strength of a Fondue. I prefer to alternate modalities, generally, but sometimes will get inspired to emphasize one over the other. Yoga can help you round and release those Lateral Rotators, and the balletic line can help to remind you to fully extend. Okay, so this brings up another thing: Yoga and Ballet both tend to emphasize extendedness. It’s a good idea, eventually, to balance this out with flexion. If you have some Modern Dance training, you’ll know what to do. If not, try to use some weighted qualities, deep spine, hip, knee and ankle flexion and rolling up through the spine, too. Personally, I have found that weight training can be helpful, too, to continuer to challenge your self. Once you feel confident that your ankles and knees can withstand the stresses of jumping again, that’s ideal.All the best!!
Feet got you down, so that you can’t get up? Try a couple of simple moves:1. First thing in the morning, and last thing at night, massage and loosen your feet. A five minute investment of your time can help your whole day! There are a lot of complex systems of myofascial/joint release and reflex point stimulation. You don’t have to go there. Just take the time, work vigorously to get movement where it is stiff, and only massage gently where it hurts. Make up your own moves!!2. Take a tennis ball. Use the above advice re: gentle, where it hurts, vigorous, where it is stiff. Most of us benefit from deep pressure on the outer edge of the bottom of the foot. Anatomically speaking, I mean the area between the lateral tip of the calcaneus ( heel bone) and the 5th metatarsal ( the little bump on the outside of your foot, a little ways towards the toes from the heel.) This gets tight from wearing shoes that don’t move fully when we walk, and we lose the ability to coordinate our foot fully. Getting this released helps our walking a lot!Doing one or both of these everyday can really help ease your feet. Easing your feet helps you channel better support up through your body. This, in turn, will take strain off your back!Enjoy.
What is the story of my birth? Well, my mother never really seemed to fit with my father. I think at the time, 1957, she was teaching elementary school, in Santa Maria California, after having been with him for about a year.
By all accounts, I was a happy baby/toddler. I remember climbing out of cribs a lot. I was a little performer, early, with all older siblings and their friends to entertain. A sweet, early memory is of galloping with a stick horse, cowboy hat on, around the pre-K childcare area at Santa Maria High School, where my mother was teaching at the time. I guess the climbing from cribs is the earlier memory.
I was born 10 miles from the ocean in Santa Maria, CA. It was a temperate climate, rarely getting down to freezing and rarely much over 80 degrees, and foggy sometimes. I was always comfortable in water, being likened at times to a “water sprite”. I played water polo in High School, which I gave up for acting in the HS plays, and later started dancing. Pretty much as soon as I started dancing in a formal way, I was offered scholarships and work in prestigious institutions, like the New York City Ballet School and the Oakland Ballet. I opted to train at SUNY Purchase in Purchase, New York, a conservatory-type institution in the state university system. I learned later that this was one of the top schools in the US for modern dance training (it still is.) Most of our teachers also taught at Julliard. I chose Modern dance instead of ballet because it suited my temperament and particular physicality, and did very well in the field. Once I became a full-time dance student and later professional, I gradually gave up the skiing and running that I used to love. After sustaining serious ankle injuries at 31 due to ankle bone spurs (which were supposed to be career ending) I started doing weight training to supplement the Pilates, Alexander, Dance training, swimming and water workouts that weren’t enough to get me out of bad chronic inflammation cycle. I continued working as a performer for another 15+years after that.
Weight training, wove its way into the fabric of my body then, for better or worse. Sometimes this can set up conflicts, which also result in injury. A rotator cuff injury, sustained recently while out dancing with friends definitely feels like the response of my arm/shoulder to recently received body work not setting me up to support the exaggerated speed and strength still present in my muscles/nervous system. In a twisting lateral arm motion, later snapping back to medial, while springing up into the air, I heard a “pop”. It’s swollen and painful. Sigh. I can tell that it will be better soon, though.
I’ve lived in big cities-NY, Munich and university town exurbs like Berkeley, Boulder or Norman, Oklahoma. Its great to be back here, near and among mountains. I feel good here.
My family has little bit of an uptightness tendency, physically. Some of it is just normal “shades of the old” Scottish sternness. We were not a “warm” and physical bunch, as I was growing up. Every one of us, including my mother, has been working on that, influenced by the general zeitgeist concerning individual growth.
I didn’t get to spend much time with my father. I’ve often wondered what I got from him, and once created a Dance Theatre work entitled “My Father’s Hands” which examined some of that. My hands are like my father’s, and he was very skilled with his, as an airplane mechanic and oil worker, refinery technician. My hands are strong and sensitive. I enjoy using them for piano playing, writing and Rolfing. ®
At this point, the main thing I’m remembering about my father is the time of his death, in 1990. I got the news through an answering machine message while at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate school for dance. I completely lost control for a while, weeping and falling down one moment, talking and functioning pretty normally the next. The thing was, I got the news the first day of a five-performance run. The Dean of the department asked me to tough it out and perform for the shows, as I could not be replaced, and I assented. Actually, at the time I felt that he “would have wanted this”. I’ve wondered about this, since, but that’s what we did. My stepmother put my dad on ice for those five days, so that I could attend his funeral.
My cultural attitudes about the body are heavily colored by the world of dance and theatre that I was involved in and evolved into my whole adult life. Even earlier, as a 9 year-old, I performed child roles in the professional theater in the town. Throughout my life, I have performed in work that was at times aesthetically distanced, and other times confrontational with the audience, as in “physical theater”, Performance Art or Dance Theatre. Each style has a distinct aesthetic. I received a thorough grounding in the art form, after my undergraduate training in dance, from my first main engagement, for ten years, with the Murray Louis Dance Company, based out of New York City. We learned a technique and philosophy heavily influenced by the German Modern Dance tradition, which was rooted in the theories of Rudolf von Laban. I still enjoy performing very much, and this was one of the reasons I left my most recent university position, as Assistant Professor of Modern Dance at the University of Oklahoma.
I sustained several injuries in my career as a dancer, some deeper than others. I once threw my hip all the way out of the socket on stage in New York, and that has probably helped distort my pelvis since that time. My body map includes, but is not limited to, these injuries:
bone spurs in left big toe joint that limit movement; bunion formation, both feet; large bone spurs, about 7 total, in both ankles, some limits on movement; severe ligament damage, right foot; minor knee issues, both knees; continued weakness, loss of coordination, left leg/hip, seemingly from recent back injury; x-ray-MRI revealed moderate damage to disc at S1-L5, T11-12, cervical vertebrae, too; teeth issues; moderate/severe injuries to left arm at elbow; many minor injuries to both arms/shoulders; permanent ligament damage, left shoulder; current right rotator cuff damage, hopefully not too bad.
I suffered some serious physical manifestations-perhaps, in hindsight, of a need for massive change. In the summer of 2005 I wrenched most everything in my lower back out of place, between T11 and S1, in one quick maneuver. Somehow, I had gotten it in my head that in order to relax, after a difficult semester teaching at OU, it might be nice to lie around, get ou
t of shape, then go out and do intensely difficult things. Two months of this rhythm, plus the strain of an unhappy marital relationship, caught up with me in July when I injured myself jerking fence stakes out of the ground for a few days. It wasn’t my age, it wasn’t the activity, it was my stupidity. This was the worst back injury I’ve ever had, which is something in itself. I couldn’t stand properly on one foot for about 8 months after that (the sciatic nerve was/is involved, too) and I’m still dealing with it a little. In September of 2005 my Appendix burst, and I later got a secondary infection and had to stay 7 days in the hospital. The appendix rupture, the back injury, problems at home and at work combined to create an especially traumatic time for me. In retrospect, this made me a more empathetic healer and teacher.
I am constantly learning more about increasing my sensitivity to and focus on the needs of another’s’ body. I’ve learned many things about doing that through various meditative, reflective, imaging and somatic practices. I admit that some times it takes a crisis, unfortunately, to get me to meditate regularly. Among several disciplines, I use Yoga stretching and breath work, TM, journaling, and creative imagination work. Ideokinesis, which uses vivid imagery for imagined movement training, is also a deep practice, for me. Some times I source creative ideas through meditation, and some times I restrict that to working before resting. I usually engage in some sort of contemplative activity, in movement, writing or music, playing the piano by ear when I can find one. I am actively pursuing more in-depth education in Contact Improvisation, Continuum and psychology at this time.
Now, dealing with the life choices I’ve made, I am feeling “older” all the time. This isn’t so terrible, really. The acute edge of the age issue for me is this: I can’t get a job performing in a company that pays enough to live on anymore, for the most part. This is good in that it also allows me to spend more time creating stability, even if I have lost some of the “highs and lows’ of my professional dancer youth. Because of this, I am more available, now, to my listening, receptive, more feminine side
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I’m sitting in a cafe, writing a post about our sedentary lifestyle. While I write, I remind myself to add micro-movements to neck, thorax, pelvis, knees, toes. I let breathing ripple through me like a tide; some ripples large, some small, never symmetrical, each breath a unique moment in time. I remember the experience of driving in to town from my home, applying micro-motion to help stay alive as I drive. I remember noticing that allowing a fluid focus keeps my response time up rather than down, by allowing me to respond gently and appropriately to traffic rather than bearing down.There are ads on TV encouraging people to walk farther to their cars, to lose their excess pounds. This is great! Use the stairs! Walk to work, when you can, etc. What I’m getting at here is more basic to our experience of ourselves in space and time. Refuse to deaden yourself, physically, or at least, set functional limits, and see these as a way to promote better health, well-being AND better thinking and problem-solving. The evidence supporting this claim is close at hand to you. Find a place in your body that is stiff, itching to move, impatient or in pain and finds ways to move the area. If it’s too painful to move there, search around in your body for small movements that start to give you a sense of relief, like a small spontaneous sigh and “ahh” feeling. Do more of the ones that work. Exact repetition can deaden our experience of such a release, so give each motion a slightly different rhythm, speed and texture. Go smaller, rather than larger, in your attempted range of motion. Play with rocking, swaying, undulating, flexing, extending, circling, twisting. Enjoy putting motion into your pelvis so small, your co-workers wouldn’t notice (though you’ll probably want to practice that in private first!)To me, a major challenge of our computerized, sedentary times is to allow and utilize the inherent movement always present in our bodies; to develop and refine our bodily “felt sense” of the “all that” of a situation/environment ( after Eugene Gendlin in “Focusing”) as a resource rather than a distraction from the rational mind. The micro-movements I am referring to can reflect that felt sense back to you if you let them. What is the message in the movement right now? Could you put a word to it?After doing so, does it start to shift? Does this shift modulate, moderate, exaggerate or in any other way modify the earlier words used to put a “handle” ( Gendlin’s term, again) on the felt sense of the whole situation now?These messages don’t always provide cognitive resolutions to the problems they bring to light. For instance, sensing into my shoulders now, I can feel a sense of “holding myself back”. Sure, this begs the question: “from what?” Also, we can’t always vent our impulses with large muscular movements in the midst of social or work situations. This kind of movement might not be what your nervous system is “asking for”, anyway. Awareness and micro-movement in the area of your body that asks for it may allow more sensation, reflection and perspective to filter in to your thinking, giving depth and volume to what may have been a more 2-D sense of things. Gendlin says it takes 30 seconds of attention to allow a felt sense to come through our usual inner babble. Time yourself for thirty seconds to get a sense of how long that is, then try it! This has to have at least as much potential value as many things we are interested in. Astrology comes to mind here. It would…I am a Gemini, after all.