Great that you have chosen to give yourself some you-time at work!
Giving yourself time to become more aware of your body and the movement you can make with it!
Do you have a sedentary job? A job where you do not pay much attention to your body?
Or are you someone who stands a lot for work, where being conscious of your body also isn’t the main focus?
Would you like to receive some sensible tools to enable you to relax more, so you can experience less stress?
Then this Relax @ Work 10-day chair yoga program is for you!
Rianne helped us to find a moment of peace and relaxation during our busy workday. At uniQure we held three workshops and received a lot of positive feedback from the employees who participated. The best part was the class was structured in such a way that it could take part in a meeting room. There was no need to change into sports clothes. The exercises that were done could also be done from behind a desk. This was a positive experience that we as a company will definitely repeat in the future.
-Monique from Uniqure-
It is great for your body to give it some love, attention and conscious movement. There is a lot you can learn from it, when you learn to listen better.
It is not easy to change habits, so it’s great that you are taking this step!
Our bodies are built to move.
Movement is what keeps our bodies healthy. Also, when you dedicate some mindful time to yourself, your mind will function better afterwards too.
Movement is not only important on a whole body level, but also movement within and around our cells. At first, if you don’t move, the cells in your body will just tie everything together with connective tissue or fascia fibers, which is why you feel stiff in the morning or after you haven’t moved a lot for a while.
When the tissues aren’t being stressed for a longer time, it just degenerates.
Movement is a form of stressing tissue, which is very healthy for the tissue (that’s also why people in space need to have a lot of exercise, because they don’t have the stress force of gravity working on their bodies. When they come back they need to recover, because part of their muscular and connective tissue have disappeared.). This kind of stress is not the same as the work or life stress that we can experience, which can result in all kinds of different symptoms.
In these coming 10 days, I’ll be sharing a practice in a chair every day. The idea is to really dedicate the time and space to this practice. When you are fully present for your breath and your movement, it will increase your awareness and help you to reconnect you with your body and the state it is in in that moment. As an added bonus, the movements will be way more effective when it comes to releasing tension.
A lot of the tension we hold in our bodies is actively held there by your brain without you knowing it (this is also known as sensory motor amnesia as described by Thomas Hannah). With mindful or somatic or embodied movement (so many different names), which is movement that you are actively feeling, observing and experiencing while you’re making it, your brain can be reprogrammed. Old patterns that do not serve you anymore, can be let go of and can change your experience of you, within the body you inhabit.
Here we do this by moving in a way that is called pandiculation. It’s not a workout, nor is it stretching. With pandiculation we slowly, gently but actively engage muscles of certain movement patterns in a way that we can sense it and then actively release them again. The conscious sensing of the contraction and the release will help to connect your conscious brain to your body again, so that the patterns we had learned that have become unconscious, that served us at some point in our lives, can become conscious again and they can be let go of.
If you find some movement challenging or are not sure if you are doing what I’m asking, use a mirror. It is helpful to use a mirror to really see if you are doing what you think you are doing and to see it happening. You can also look down at your body, but be aware that you are then just moving your head and neck and not introduce twists and bends as you check yourself out.
If you really feel like you are getting stuck and would like to receive 1-on-1 help, send me an email at rianne@vyanayoga.nl and we can schedule a private session.