I am doing three exercises or ways of exercising, which are life-altering. 1) I am completely straightening my right leg as I walk. 2) I walk backward, particularly up an incline (It has an incredible impact on my upper thighs and glutes. 3) I do 10 plies and releves every time I stand up (except when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.), which brings me to number four. 3) I finally do Kegel exercises.
Dorothy encouraged me to start doing them after I complained about my limitations. I started doing them while peeing. After only a few days of doing them, I could feel my pelvic floor lift. Wow! Talk about a life-altering exercise. It flattens my stomach and relaxes my back.
I have learned more about my abdominal muscles in my old age than I ever learned in my dance classes or previous yoga classes. I heard, "Pull your abdominal muscles up." I always thought that referred only to the wall of muscle in the front of the body. Well, how do you pull that wall of muscle up? As I experience it, the pelvic floor is lifting, pushing everything in the abdominal area up.
I told Yvette that I had started doing them. She told me her grandmother had taught her to do them when she was young while holding her pee on the pot. Here's the interesting part. Yvette's mother and aunt, both daughters of the aforementioned grandmother, had amazing posture. That same woman's two sons have some of the worst postures I have ever seen. She only taught the girls to do this exercise. Could this exercise be the key to their phenomenal posture?
I wasn't quite sure of how to do the exercises myself. Yvette said you only hold long enough to stop the flow, and you only do ten repetitions. A doctor told her not to do more than ten at a time.
I finally made it to Kaiser to pick up cream for skin irritation. The pharmacy was empty; it took no time at all. Later in the afternoon, I had a vet appointment for Elsa. A tech was going to clean out her ear and put in a medication.
The arrangement due to Covid is for the customers to wait in their cars until a tech comes out to pick up the pet. I called shortly before 1:30, the time of my appointment. By two, several other cars had come and gone, and I was still sitting there. I called the office. The receptionist apologized. They were swamped. Because my appointment was only with a tech instead of a doctor, I was put off until they had a moment. I could have been there all day.
It didn't take long once someone came out to pick up Elsa after my call. When they brought her back, the tech told me she shouldn't swim or be bathed for a month. What? Why wasn't I told that beforehand so I could bathe her before I brought her in? The tech apologized; someone forgot to tell me.
I had five pm. appointment with a new tutoring student. I knew he was young. I thought he was seven; he was five. He has annunciation problems. He is unintelligible except to his parents. They were both by his side as I met with him on zoom.
Seeing how immature he was and the order of his difficulty, my first reaction was," What the f—k am I going to do? "When he spoke, I couldn't understand a word. I had to ask his father to translate. As we went along, I only understood one thing he said on my own. He is unaffected enough by this problem; he is still untroubled by the look of confusion he sees on others' faces. He is a sweet, open-faced child who feels no compunction about saying whatever he wants to say. He is unaware of his difference. However, he knew why he was meeting with me, so he wasn't totally unaware.
I thought I would try making a sound and see if he could imitate it. He was willing to give it a go but did not do that well. Okay, what was I going to do? With young children, I like imitating their sounds. They love it when someone does that. Why not? The two of us wound up making sounds and faces at each other for a good 20 minutes. Fifteen minutes into the session, he got up. I thought," Okay, he's done."
But not, he pushed his chair closer to the table so he could get a better view of the screen." Okay!!! I guess I found a way in.
We did have an actual speech moment. The boy said what I heard as "boy." His dad told me, no, he's saying 'boink' as he hit something. When he said, 'boy' or 'boin,' I said, "boink." After about five or six rounds of that, he said, 'boink.' Hey, this approach may work. If I keep him seeing it as fun, we'll accomplish something.
I spoke to his dad afterward. Observations: He does not show any signs of having problems with intelligence, and he is verbal. He's ready to talk nonstop.
Because I could feel the father's fear for his child, I asked him if I could lead him through the exercise/visualization I have used for years to help children be less afraid when they are not performing as well as their classmates.
I was going to go straight into the visualization without explaining it first. Before I did that, I checked if he had a family background similar to the Holocaust. The only time I have had a negative response to the visualization was when I worked with a second-grader who was the child of parents who were refugees from Pol Pots' Cambodia. Her legs gave out after I did the work. She couldn't walk for a few minutes. She told me that had happened once before, at her grandmother's funeral. I hate to think of what her grandmother, or many people at the funeral, saw in Cambodia.
I once tried to use the visualization with a college-age student from Viet Nam. I couldn't do this exercise with him either. It doesn't work for me either because of my family history with the German Holocaust.
This is the first time I have done this exercise with a parent. It was new territory for me. I told him to see his forebrain and hindbrain as separate. It became immediately apparent that the fear for his son from the hindbrain dominated the forebrain. I had to back it off.
I told him the theory behind the visualization. When our brains were formed 10,000-12,000 years ago, we were living in small nomadic groups. If a child could not conform, they had to be cast aside. Those small groups lived on the edge of survival. Diversity is a luxury of abundance and safety.
While our forebrains are alive and well in the 21st century, our hindbrains are still responding as if we were living in small groups on the savannas. This is not a bad thing as long as we work with it instead of against it.
Once I helped the dad see that his fear was driven organically, but his forebrain knew perfectly well that no one would kill his son because he could not speak clearly, he started relaxing. I believe he pushed away thought that frightened him, the rejection of their child resulting in death because it is too bizarre. However, it is in recognizing that it is precisely that thought driving the fears that will allow him to get it under control. Once we realize what our hindbrain is screaming at us, we can say, "Thank you, but your fear doesn't apply to today's circumstances." We're not crazy for thinking such scary thoughts; that's how we are designed.
Is this design functional? Yes and no. It is not functional if we don't acknowledge how it works and its positive function in our lives. It is highly functional in sounding warnings. No, we do not want to get rid of that alarm signal. We just have to interpret it correctly for today's world. The smoke alarm goes off as the pot boils over or in a life-threatening house fire. Should we get rid of the smoke alarm because "it's out of touch with reality?" It cannot discern the difference between the two. I say, 'No!" We should all be grateful that the smoke alarm works. It tells us something needs our attention.
The father calmed with just these words of explanation. I think just articulating the hindbrain fears is helpful. Once he heard the true nature of his fears, he could immediately see it did not apply to his son's circumstances.
I suggested that he and his wife play sound games with his son as I did. Just not before he calmed his fears. Parental fears are actually more of a danger for children in today's world than outside forces. Since no one is going to kill them because they can't read . . . speak . . . throw a ball . . . look like other children, sending out that unconscious message to the children that they are in danger is disastrous. Kids can feel fear in their parents. They can feel the parents' terror. They know their limitations are causing the parents' terror. They can't see the danger coming from others. Okay, people are surprised or somewhat uncomfortable, but no one threatens the child's life. The kids are left confused. This is second-hand PTSD- and the kids don't even know what the danger is.
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