Samantha Faulhaber

This one is the one about meeting God, or – freeing up your frozen, locked-up back. Keep it in your back pocket please if you ever experience a need for such things and send it to someone else if they have a similar malady/desire.

If you’re feeling a frozen feeling around a joint a combination of the first entry in this series and this one will probably do the trick with a little bit of patience and repetition for as long as it takes – a few days maybe. This one targets the muscle belly more where yesterday’s post targets kind of all of it in a joint or area.

It’s fun to teach in person. I get to use my fingertips to help target and also inform you that you’re doing more than you realize in the beginning stages because I can literally feel your muscles doing it with my hands better than you might be able to perceive it at first.

This is deep self-connection. It’s part of my 3 Tests for Body Awareness Course, $15, where you learn to connect and be kind with yourself if you’re interested.

And so:

Isometric ramping

The short version:

The written version:

1. You need an object like a bottle cap, pink eraser, tennis ball, or rolled up washcloth. Something you can lie down on and feel but isn’t painful or uncomfortable to do so with. You can do this with any part of your body but I’m going to imagine this being used the most for the back in these instructions. Apply modifications as needed.
2. Lie down with the object that works for you today near or on the area that feels locked up.
3. Begin focusing all of your attention on the point of contact in your body with the object. Spend at least 30s here simply focusing on it and trying to feel the area. This in itself can sometimes feel spiritual. You may also divert quickly to other things, which is fine, just come back to trying to find the spot you’re in contact with.
4. Option 1 is to try and breathe so that you feel the area expand and relax using your object as a measuring tool. Hands can be useful as the tool if you can reach and also still focus.
5. Option 2 is to try your mightiest to simply press down using ONLY THE AREA, SLOWLY, onto your object, then SLOWLY release the pressure. Take at lest 5 seconds in each direction which will be staccato at first but smooth out as neurological connections improve.
6. Option 3 is to isometrically engage and release the area. As we discussed yesterday, isometrics are engagement without moving. If you squeeze and release the area, you will probably notice that you have a hard time. You will also notice that a lot of other things squeeze in response that weren’t your intention. We are trying to increase the amount of good information to and from this area and your brain by slowly enhancing the amount of division you have between squeezing it and squeezing everything else that is trying to engage or help. At first, you may be able to get one glimmer of squeeze and release for a second. Aim to increase the slowness (lol) and squeeze very very subtly then increase slowly until you can’t increase any more, then release very very slowly too, imagining that every second just a few cells are either engaging or releasing there.

Longer video

Why does this seem to help people meet God

I believe that increased awareness of our physical body enhances our ability to connect to everything else. Our bodies are antennae through with all experiences happen, all perceptions and sensory engagements. Even if it happens on a spiritual plane, the connection is felt through your body. You know all that stuff people say about a small percent of your brain working. We have a small amount of our bodies connected consciously. Wim Hof is showing all the time how he can control seemingly autonomic nervous system activity. So have yogis for decades since research has been developed to study it. Things like intentionally fluttering a heartbeat or stopping it altogether, stopping blood from starting while piercing oneself, etc. Wim’s big trick is to make different parts of his hand hot or cold based on his desire to do so.

Isometric ramping has a superhero quality to it, if you can overcome the sometimes frustrating beginning without losing patience with it. Accept that it’s there, and keep trying to increase the connection.

If God is All, and you increase your ability to feel All, well – it kinda helps to feel like you’re connected to something bigger than your body.

I know for a fact that spirituality is felt, and if you have limited access to feeling then it’s probably difficult to feel a connection to any form of religion, formal or otherwise, and also to the people around you.

Connection is connection. It’s feeling.

So if you’re experiencing a locked up lower back kind of pain, try to connect and flesh out the nuances of feeling up and down the scales from all the way relaxed to all the way squeezing as hard as you can without hurting or straining something. Tell me what you find there besides relief.

Continued in Part Three.

[Feature Photo by Raquel Baires on Unsplash.]