The Constructive Rest Position is described in each chapter to encourage a sense of the ever-returning cycle of exploration. Each time you return, it helps broaden, deepen, and nourish your awareness.
The spiral unravels both inward and outward.
Figure 6.1. Constructive rest position
The constructive rest position (CRP) is described in every chapter to engender a feeling for exploring the ever-returning cycle of somatic awareness. Each time you return to an exploration, it will broaden, deepen, and nourish your awareness.
Each exploration is a study of how to begin and how to initiate a movement. As you explore you will become aware of your previous conditioning. Noticing your conditioning is very important because directly sensing how it affects movement immediately ignites a change. Once aware of the present moment, conditioning, in whatever form it takes, begins unraveling.
Providing comfort and safety, CRP creates a perfect climate for decreasing excessive nerve excitation, which is very helpful when learning to consciously perceive and differentiate sensation. A neutral position, CRP is a starting point for unraveling all forms of tension throughout your body. It can be used as a baseline to compare sensations before and after an exploration and a reference point for noticing change and growth.
In any of the given explorations, you may potentially become aware of skeletal relationships, muscular expression, organ functioning, circulation, breath, energy, feelings, thoughts, or images. You may wish to place your attention on one particular aspect before progressing to another sensory observation, or you can simply allow your somatic sensations to guide your focus. Either way, a rich experience awaits you on your journey toward somatic awareness.
Unraveling muscular, fascial, and visceral imbalances will take you into a constantly inward and outward flowing spiral. Go in toward freeing the bones and core muscles and then out to the surface to release outer muscular compensations. Similar to the ebb and flow of breathing, you too will go back in toward your core and out toward the world over and over again. Below is a list of ideas for where to begin.
Skeletal awareness:
Sensing weight and grounding
Sensing suspension and rebound
Awakening hip socket joints
Awakening shoulder sockets joints
Sensing pelvic integrity
Core muscle awareness:
Sensing the psoas
Releasing extraneous psoas tension
Sensing the psoas while moving the leg
Sensing the psoas while moving the arms
Neutral core awareness:
Sensing pelvis-to-skull midline
Sensing neutral spine when crawling
Sensing neutral core when sitting
Standing and swinging leg
Dynamic core awareness:
Curling and arcing
Regaining a supple, juicy core
Awakening the back body
Awakening primal fish movement
Supple core awareness (freeing the psoas):
Articulating the layers between core and skin
Grounding into bones to experience rebound
Recognizing survival responses and acknowledging their value
Softening tissue and sensing energetic flows
Resolving muscular compensations:
Lengthening and/or toning flexors and extensors
Lateral and cross-patterning relationships
Articulating rotational movement
Applications—putting it all together
Whether it be yoga, Pilates, exercise, or dance, let your own somatic awareness be your guide for everything that you do. When you become attentive to rather than ignore the innate pleasure of sensation, you will be moved from deep within by life’s core wisdom.
Let your practice be guided by your internal sensations.