Ease and Spaciousness

Welcome. Thanks for joining me today. I want to go through another series of poses that are available to you in your chair. I have a tendency to have a bit of nerve pain, and so I find on the days that I do have higher nerve pain when it feels lots of burning and tingling in my lower half. I'm a little bit more fidgety, and some of these poses just kind of help distract me from the pain, give me something else to think about. So while we're starting today, I just want to center ourselves in our chair, get comfortable in our lovely seat, planting our feet firmly on the footplate, calming the eyes, coming back to our breath, taking a nice deep breath, filling the lungs, exhaling it all out. We're going to start today with a little bit of a weight shift wiggle, rising up out of our chairs, pushing firmly in the wheels, but I'm kind of letting my shoulders sag up to my ears, letting my hips hang. I'm going to do a little rotations here, going clockwise with the hips right now, trying to get as much full rotation as I can. I'll stop and go the other direction. Nice inhale, and sinking back into my seat. Grab my trusty gate belt that I carry with me everywhere. I haven't named it yet. I'm going to do some sun salutations. I'm going to start with just some lengthening of the arms up and over and continue that hip rotation. So let's get our arms up. Full extension, trying to relax the shoulders. And lean sideways. Inhale back to center and lean sideways back. Sometimes my abs want to work with me here and I can lean further than other times, but sometimes I just feel like a teeter totter like today. A nice long inhale. We can turn to our right, maybe widening the grip. Inhale back, relaxing the shoulders, rotating to the left, kind of pulling on the strap, trying to open up my shoulders in between, creating some tension in the strap. Inhale back to center, relaxing my shoulders. Move into some deeper twists here. Using our chair to our full advantage, I can put my left hand on the outside of my right knee or perhaps if it's available to you to grab your chair. And I have handlebars on the back of my chair and some people don't, but this handlebar gives me a little ability to kind of push against it when I'm twisting. So I'm starting as low as I can in my spine and then eventually opening up into the shoulders and rotating and looking behind me. Inhaling, lengthening, and with every exhale trying to turn a little bit deeper. You can push on the back of your wheel with your hand if you need to push a little bit more. Do one more big inhale here. Exhaling the spine and as you exhale, turn a little deeper. Inhale, slowly unravel. Take a nice inhale and center position, neutral spine, trying not to lean back on your backrest, twisting the shoulders, and then we'll go to the other direction. We'll inhale, rotate, starting from as low as you have, then twisting the shoulders, then twisting the head. Inhale, turning the body, exhale, folding forward and into it more. Inhale, lengthen. Sometimes when I'm lengthening here, I can feel the metal in my spine. It's kind of interesting, but it doesn't hurt. I can just feel that my muscles want to shift around this foreign body. One last big inhale. Let your neck lengthen out of the top of your head and then spin it backwards. Inhale and slowly unravel back to center. Give a little shift if you need to realign yourself and check this out. Whoa! Perfect. If you can, get yourself near a counter, a desk, something that provides you a lovely surface, even in just another chair like this or a friend who doesn't mind giving you their shoulders. We're just going to do a little bit of a back opening here. I like to leave my brakes off for this. In fact, that way I can get a little bit more movement in the chair and in my side bodies. I'm just going to reach out, grab onto this chair here, push back a little bit. Inhaling here, lengthening, and as I exhale, sinking in and letting the head sag through my arms. My chest is sitting on my thighs, but I'm trying to push my head more through. I can move my head from side to side here. Find movement in this. Move your right hip to the right side, maybe lengthening your left side body. Just kind of wiggling my hips side to side, creating more lengthening in my shoulders and in my ribcage here. Every inhale, creating length in every exhale, sinking further into it. It's also a good time to look at your heels. You can see that I have kind of shortened achilles today. They're not really flexed up. My heels don't want to touch my foot plates, but hopefully by putting my head and my chest into my knees, I'm creating a little more pressure there, creating a little more tension. One last inhale, hands up. I can also use this counter or chair, whatever it is, and kind of deepen your twist. I'll put my brakes on and grab out in front of me. Grab the back of my wheel and I can push a little bit more, remembering shoulders up, down, and back, getting your shoulders away from your ears. I can feel the lengthening when I'm turning to the right here. I can feel some lengthening in my left hip and side body. Inhale, unwind. Exhale, let's rotate to the other side. Trying to relax my jaw, my eyes, my shoulders.

One last big inhale. Exhale, sink a little deeper. The next inhale, come out of your posture slowly unraveling, and then we'll say goodbye to this magical chair that just arrived. Isn't that so groovy how that happens? Our shoulders get a lot of work out in this chair positioning, so I just want to make sure that we give a lot of good stretches to them. I find that my shoulders get tight and sore often. I've been working myself on getting better at the cow face arms, so this is where we'll reach our arms up, and let's tuck our right arm. I'm touching my tricep here and trying to tuck my right arm in the middle between my shoulder blades. I'll inhale and stretch my tricep here, trying to relax my shoulder and my neck. Sometimes it's available to me, but sometimes it's not, to reach my left hand around and touch my fingers. Inhale, trying to open up my shoulders and arms. I really feel this a lot right now on the left arm, which is the lower arm. One more inhale, slowly unraveling. Give my shoulders a shrug. I'll show you guys how to do it with your strap as well. Let's do the other side, but having a strap of some sort, I can lift my left arm up and tuck that one behind me, putting my hand in between my shoulder blades. Inhaling for space, exhaling, melting into that space. Before I tuck my right arm around, just grabbing onto, just like you would normally with your sun salutations, just grabbing onto the strap normally, but my hand is going to tuck. Focusing more on this wrap around my wrist, I'm trying to pull that shoulder up a little bit, open this shoulder and this hand. Where I feel this stretch on this arm is right in the front here. One more big inhale here, trying to find space and a straight spine and abs engaged and relaxing the shoulders as I exhale, melting further into that stretch into my shoulder. The next inhale, I'll release. That one can be kind of intense on your shoulders depending on the day and the activity that you've been doing. So we'll just do a simple shoulder stretch to kind of even that out. Parts of our bodies that we maybe don't pay attention to so much, just simple things like you can do this while you're chatting with your friends. Inhale, just kind of lengthening, grabbing my tricep the outside here and just kind of lengthening my arm across my body. I am leaning a little bit more into my backrest right now. Let's rotate the other side, trying to keep that shoulder away from the ear and pulling the arm across the body. Another simple stretch right between our legs, we can place our hands. I have a lot of on my left arm, I find that I feel like I have a little bit of tendonitis from pushing sometimes. So this is a nice stretch that actually opens up the forearms and open up the hands. If this spot isn't available for you, you can just grab your hand and kind of reach it out in front of you. Let's do the other side. Play around with just little parts of your body like your thumb, rotate it around, see how that feels. Alright, as always I like to get a little bit out of my regular butt seat, so let's scoot forward, get your butt to the end of the chair here. We're going to do kind of some hip openings, some grounding, get our feet on the ground, spread our legs, don't tell anyone. So get your legs as wide as you can, if you can get them on the outsides of your wheelchair, that's great. If you can ground that right foot, see my left foot is a little bit more not as happy. Take the time to melt that left leg into there. So we can lean on our knees, being careful here, just making sure that you feel comfortable in your seat and that you're not going to tilt out of your chair. We can push on our right leg and kind of lean to the left, getting a little more lengthening here, and then we can kind of surf to the other side and push on our left leg and lean to the right. My belly is kind of sucking in, I notice that my navel is trying to reach back in towards the spine here. Let's go to the other side again. Move with your breath, keep your core strong, maintaining balance here, back to the right. And then as we come back to center, let's just open up those hips, open up your shoulders as well. Big breath in, melting down the shoulders, keeping the core strong. We can add a twist here, can put your left hand on your right leg, rotate around. Nice big inhale. I can feel this stretch a lot in my IT bands and just on the insides of my legs all over actually. My fracture is at T12, so my sensation, this is just border lining my sensation area. One more inhale back to center, bringing your legs in, scooting the back and legs back onto the footplate. So we're back to center here with neutral spine, we can open our hips a little bit. I like to rotate, I grab my leg and rotate my pelvis outward just to try to do a little bit more hip opening. I do that throughout the day as well just so I don't feel so concave in my chair. So our hips are open, let's lean forward, be mindful of how your feet look if their ankles are rotating out or your heels are touching the ground. Let's stretch our fingers to the ground, let the head hang. This feels like a really nice lengthening for me in my lower back, like if my spine were a rope it's being stretched. Let's take three full breaths here. Let the shoulders relax with each breath, melting further into your own thighs. Think about as you inhale, lengthening and as you exhale let your navel come backwards, creating more space in your belly. On this next inhale, work your way back up, using as much core as you can. Let's end our practice with the old weight shift. Lift up, get out of the chair. Let's come back to those hip rotations.

If you have some music on, get groovy with it. I think we might have a tendency sometimes when we do our weight shifts just to just lift up and plop right back down, but maybe get in the habit of just doing a little bit more movement and rotation with those hips when you lift up. So come back into your chair, maybe let your hips be open, that way they're open for a few more minutes. Remember that any of these poses are available to you, every countertop you see, bend over it, check it out. Every door you see, open your chest up and the doorways. Thanks for joining me today and let me know how that goes for you.