Awareness Through Movement #1.5

Side Bending Back and Front with Olena Nitefor - from OpenATM.org

One of the reasons Moshe insists on us lying on the back is to provide support for our systems to be soft as they move, knowing they have a surface underneath them to support movement. That’s one of the reasons…

our vertebrae have such a huge range of movement, right, left, back forth and all the angles in between.

…. another is to learn the three planes of motion. Tonight we discover side to side… the lateral plane. Tonight Olena Nitefor makes this movement a little clearer by having us lie on the floor so that the back can feel its way along a flat surface… and make it easier differentiate (this is) ‘right’ from (this is) ‘left’.

A conversation with a bus driver last year prompts me to share this concept of where people are in space. He said young people would sit on the bus glued to their phone not knowing where to get off, and not knowing the names of nearby streets to give a hint of where they live. It’s happened to me quite a few times, asking people where something is and them having no idea where what I ask for is, let alone how to get there.

Has me think too many people are lost in space, with no idea where they are until the tracking device in their hand tells them. Which is a bit of a worry as far as I’m concerned.

Anyways, enjoy tonight’s lesson with Elena.. learning about this lateral plane from a different angle. We’ll be returning to the whole first lesson again in two days to feel if these in between lessons have helped at all.

Tomorrow night, Marianne gives us another lesson in yet another position to practice side bending.