MOBILITY – roll through some cat-cows! 20 slow breaths 🙂
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iEgTH_gBQY)
MINDFULNESS – consider the dilemma of the anorexic hermit crab!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgsvi3Tm7pI)
Today’s mobility work is to get that spine moving!
You likely spend a lot of time in spinal flexion while driving, reading, texting, or otherwise sitting. If that’s the position you are normally in, then that becomes your neutral! The problem with that is actual neutral becomes a position of “extension” and actual extension becomes a position of “hyperextension”!
Roll through twenty cat-cows ASAP (as slow as possible :P) to reset your spine and remember what full range of motion is like!
Today’s mindfulness work is to consider the dilemma of the anorexic hermit crab!
Every organism has two binary modes– growth and defense. Growth is a terribly painful and vulnerable process as well as metabolically expensive. Defense is simple and relatively cheap.
To grow, you need to do what you’ve never done before. You need to push past barriers and become something new.
To defend, you need only erect some walls, turtle up, and survive the storm. Rather than looking outward at what you can become, defense is looking inward and hoping to keep what you are.
We are really bad at growing and defending at the same time– thus the binary and zero-sum nature of growth and defense. We choose to grow or we choose to defend.
Sometimes, defense is necessary. The world gets crazy and we need to just make it through the next day. The problem is when defense becomes the normal. The true cost of defense isn’t erecting the walls around you, it is the opportunity cost of growth.
When we defend, we are not growing. Defense is comfortable. Defense is easy. It’s so much safer in our hermit crab shells, but we deny ourselves the chance to see who we can truly become.
Escape that small shell, be vulnerable, and do great things.
Eugene H Kim 