Shrutee Sharma
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The Story of the Patterned Sweater

12/31/2018

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Picture
This is the sweater my son wore all winter long last year. He looked adorable in his little man pants and this zip up, patterned sweater.

Only problem is - the thing doesn't fit him anymore. He doesn't want to let it go. He wants to wear only this sweater and is unsettled at how it could have gotten smaller. Mommy and daddy explaining him the concept of 'growth' or pointing to the other one only make him upset and overwhelmed.

You won't believe it, Shrutee, he even checked on it after coming back from school one day to make sure it hadn’t disappeared into the oblivion of give always and hand-me-downs. :O You can understand we haven’t been making it to school on time. This is the last thing we needed in our morning routine!

To think of it, he's a little 5 year old who is attached to his sweater and lacks an understanding about how we grow out of our clothes. But this episode made me think - Don’t we all do this, Shrutee?

We fill our mental and material closets full of things and thoughts that don’t fit us anymore. They just sit there and overwhelm us. They keep us from seeing the things and thoughts that fit us much better, if only we could reach them past the clutter we have gathered.

Don't we all do this? 
Do we even know the thing and thought that doesn’t fit us though? If we did, we’d be smarter, right? The problem is that much of the time we are running on autopilot and aren’t even aware when we are filling our mental plates until we are so far along that we are feeling the overwhelm from it.

My friend made me laugh the other day saying how it’s like we are hamsters rolling along in circles. Jokes apart, unhelpful thought habits can be seriously overwhelming and draining of energy, isn’t it? It’s like a leakage in a tank that we are constantly trying hard to fill with food, sleep, good company, passion and purpose!

How about we cut to the chase - speed past overwhelm to our deepest wishes?
How would it be if we could create an environment in which we could recognize clearly and specifically, the thing that doesn’t fit us anymore? Without anybody telling us or forcing us.

How would it be if we felt safe enough to come out of our shell and try out the things and thoughts just a little beyond the patterned one? Maybe my son would enjoy the new sweater that fits him better? Maybe we could see more clearly the thoughts that are aligned with our deepest wishes?

How do we do this? 
What if we could use our body to delve into the first two questions in a way that we begin to clear away the clutter and pain in our body? And what if I told you that when we did that, you will also begin to come unstuck in your emotional self? You will begin to move towards what you want with more energy and clarity.


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Moshe's Thoughts on Stiffness

12/31/2018

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​On Day 1 of the Amherst Training, Moshe Feldenkrais said,
"Learning - is the process of mobilizing ourselves for action. If you don't make the process light and easy and comfortable, you become stiff; you become old, senile and decrepit."

If you've had a slow morning getting out of bed or if getting out of a chair or car isn't exactly springy for you, you know that feeling. The feeling of not being together and co-ordinated and whole. And that isn't an easy thing.

Moshe didn't stop at the physical, though. He said,
"We stop using the most important part of our being - the ability to recover, the ability to heal ourself, the ability to adjust ourself to the changing world around us."

He was telling us how we are an interconnected system and anything that affects us physically affects us at every other realm - emotional, mental, behavioral. And he was a master at showing us how we can make those far reaching, dreamlike changes to our life simply by accessing our body in a particular kind of way.

What amazes me is that he did that from the very first day of the training. His Amherst training was one of his seminal trainings taught in the United States in a basketball stadium to 235 people.
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Are we an interconnected system? Like the farm, the sky & earth?

12/31/2018

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I watched my daughter’s third grade class play earlier this week. It was about a hard working farming family that didn’t see what was coming at them.

The story goes like this. The farmer has 7 children. He insists that all his children work hard on the farm so that they have food to last them through the winter and they have enough to make a living. So they work hard - sowing, reaping, doing the farm chores.

Here’s when the story gets interesting. Two of the seven children look at the sky every now and then. They see something unusual and they bring it to everybody’s attention. “Look up at the sky! The breeze is blowing. Something’s on its way!"

The farmer snubs them for not being serious about the work that needs to be done. And asks them to go back to work. This happens a few times. Each time the farmer tells them “The work is on earth where we stand.” and asks them to go back to work and not make an excuse for going out to play.

Later that week, one night, a storm comes in and floods the farmers’ house. The family is distraught that all the food is destroyed and they all will starve this winter.

At this moment, the 2 children ask the rest of the family if any of them had seen something in the sky? And they said, “we’d been so focused on working in the dirt, we weren't looking at the sky!”

This is profound! Most of the clients that come to me have already tried other modalities that didn’t work for them. When I ask my clients what changed in working with me. They say, “they were too focused on my arm, my shoulder, my back. They didn’t look at anything else the way you do.”

The truth is we are an interconnected system. Just like on a farm, the sky and the earth are connected in their impact on the farming family’s life; our hip joint and ankle joint are connected in their impact on the back.
And I'm not talking about some woo-woo connection. I am talking about very specific ways our parts are connected. Those of you that I've worked with have a clear understanding of what I am talking about.

Over focusing on strengthening or stretching the back muscles while ignoring the impact on the back of what’s around it can be a short sighted approach, not very different than the farming family’s over focus on the dirt.

When we over focus on strengthening or stretching one part of our body, we lose sight of the relationships that this part has with the other parts of us. And so we don’t see the impact that these relationships have on the pain or discomfort we’re having.

Are you stretching or strengthening the ‘problem’ area? Would you like to experience how leveraging the interconnectedness of you can speed up your healing?
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