Somatic Rockin' and Rollin' | Sets of Two | Breathing

Here's a little thing called, "Sets of Two".

It goes like this, using Cat Stretch Lesson 7, Breathing, as an example, but understanding that I am illustrating a principle that can be applied to all kinds of movement elements of all kinds of somatic education exercises.


The point of Cat Stretch Lesson 7 is to round out the breathing process, both in terms of evening-out the movements of inhalation/exhalation and in terms of BALANCING the sizes of inhalation and exhalation. By "balancing the sizes", I mean that we exhale as completely as we inhale; for understanding-by-means-of-contrast, people with emphysema and/or asthma are generally stuck in the inhalation action; you don't see people with these conditions with scrawny, caved-in, shrunken chests; their chests are stuck in inflation. Because they don't give themselves as completely to exhalation as they do to inhalation, and they breathe in and out from an inflated place, their tidal ("in-lung") air tends to be stagnant, and so they tend to gasp by inhaling further. You get the picture.

So back to Lesson 7 and Sets of Two, Lesson 7 is built around "the breathing pump", the pistonlike movement of shuttling the in-lung airball between the chest space and the abdominal space. The point is to ream out the passage between the two locations so the movements are uniformly easy AND we breathe, balloonlike, into and out of the center of breathing (not piston-like). The Breathing Pump is the central action used.

To apply Sets of Two to The Breathing Pump, we use a cadenced action.

Each time we shuttle air to the abdominal space, we pause for a moment and then shuttle it a little further in the same direction.  That's a "Two". It's a gentle action that has a very satisfying effect upon sensory-motor learning, which I will leave to you to discover.

Likewise, each time we shuttle air to the chest space, we pause for a moment and then shuttle it a little further in the same direction.

Move
Pause
Move

Move to the other place
Pause
Move

A - B - A       B - A - B
and so on.

Let us hear your experience of doing it that way. There's a place for that, below.


NEXT: integrating The Tongue Mudra into Lesson 7


ACCESS TO THE CAT STRETCH EXERCISES (complete program containing Lesson 7)