“Combine the extremes
And you will have your true center. “-Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The natural world around us is our greatest teacher! When animals wake up, they naturally arch their backs, then reverse the motion and drop to their bellies to curve downward, lengthening legs, back, and belly in a full body yawn. Moving back and forth between extreme positions of the spine resets their alignment before running off to play. This is called pandiculation, and it is something we have naturally been doing for millions of years to relax tight, tense muscles.
From prolonged positioning, muscles learn to stay in suboptimal positions, where some muscles are contracted in a shortened position, and the opposing muscles are stretched or lengthened. Pandiculation is a way to reset your body’s software and tune up your hardware, to reboot your sensation and muscle control. Alternately contracting and releasing decreases the tension on your muscles and nerves, relieves your body’s aches and pains, and improved voluntary muscle activation.
Pandiculation improves your body awareness, or proprioception. When you contract a muscle, your brain receives sensory feedback and responds with renewed voluntary muscle control, coordination, and relaxation. Your nervous system learns through awareness of your movement to release accumulated tension. Improved neural connections help the way you move, feel, and even improve the way you think. How you move defines how you live.
We pandiculate even before we are born, as revealed by imaging studies and the magical kicking mothers feel from their unborn babies. We naturally want to pandiculate upon waking, as we gently tighten our jaws, arms, and legs before yawning, then reach our arms overhead as we stretch our legs out. When we do this, we are first contracting our muscles, then slowly lengthening them, and finally relaxing. This natural sequential pattern allows our brains to integrate the new feedback, resetting our muscle lengths and restoring optimal alignment. As creatures of habit, we find ourselves maintaining the same postures for long periods of time, as we get so caught up in our higher cognitive functioning that we forget about our innate, primitive instinct to align our bodies.
So next time you want to stretch, try pandiculating, first contracting the muscle that’s tight, slowly lengthening it, then completely relaxing. Note the difference not only in sensation and control of the muscle, but also in your range of motion and sense of ease throughout your body. In our modern lives, many people become sedentary and stressed through much of their days and lose touch with the innate sense to pandiculate. Get in touch with your primitive animal spirit and pop some pandiculation into your day for a simple, gratifying technique that will release muscular and emotional tension, reduce pain, increase mobility, and improve your posture and core alignment for optimal functioning. For more empowering techniques for your mind-body-spirit, please refer to my award winning #1 New Release “Master Your Core”.
and Subscribe to my YouTube channel
Please like and share. Have an awesome day!!