Subscribe to this BlogBecome an Exhaler – Undercover Yoga 2
629 words will take you about 3 min, to read and give you a whole night of sweet sleep
Become an Exhaler I – in bed tonight
Expanding on the delicious morning ‘let-go’ from my December BBB Undercover Yoga 1 here is what you could play with tonight when you are softly covered in your bed.
For just a moment feel into what’s normally happening to your breathing when you remember you hear or see something stressful on TV, Radio, on the road, at the office, happening with your child, or when that person is on the line.
You probably recount a quick inhale “hhiiiiii” and than – - – you kept it right in. Your chin slid backwards and tensed up your neck slightly more with tension spreading into your shoulders and [at least] down your whole spine. Any further breaths go by un-noticeably and there never seems to be a release through a deep exhale. Hhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh…
If you just embodied what I was describing – that HHHaaaaahhh – “valley”, was very nice and needed, wasn’t it?
I was describing a very mild enactment of our ancient startle reflex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startle_reaction that has become a “normal” tension pattern piling up inside throughout each day. You may not have felt much of this until you begin to pay attention to these tightening responses that accumulate throughout your body during your day.
The startle reflex developed as a survival skill through thousands of years of evolution beginning with our animal ancestors and I see it as part of the freeze [play possum] strategy to avoid “being lunch”.
This clever and automated response obviously worked or we would not be here. It is still run by your “reptilian brain”.
A very useful reflex for some of those extreme life threatening situations we do encounter, but not very supportive when our “normal” daily stressors themselves become its constant trigger. In other words: when quick inhalation-tension without satisfying exhalation-release has become just another pattern that’s adding even more vigilance to our western stressed-out bodies and minds. OOOaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh
Just on the side; here’s another interesting food for thought. Ask somebody to exhale – they inhale first…. But that’s for another blog
“Exhalers live longer” –
This is one of the most foundational ideas I explore with all my clients.
Allow your exhale to be your main focus.
The slower we breathe – the longer we live – they say in Yoga.
For tonight’s comforting exploration your exhale does not need to be longer or stronger. Just notice your normal exhale! Curious isn’t it? Exhales automatically become longer when you pay attention to them. No strength needed - just sensing. You may find a release in your body, a let go, a softening of your chest and belly – and then – just an empty space —-before the next inhale cascades in ….
Your bed right now is the luscious haven of opportunity to set your internal stage for the whole night. Feel your body, bones, organs and muscles in the warm embrace we already explored in the December BBB.
Notice how noticing a longer/slower exhale relaxes you, even if only a tiny piece of your body softens. That’s it!
Your heart rate will slow down as well. Good!
Play with it again. You can feel how your bodies weight sinks towards your mattress, how your shoulders are moving away from your ears to where they can rest. No need to keep your head up any longer. [In Germany we say: hold your ears stiff… same up-tightness] This frees up your neck and even your jaw, your spine, your belly and your pelvis.
Luxuriate in another exhale. Can you feel how you are beginning to let go deeper? Look for a sense of slow flow and softening inside your tissues as you rel-ease your day.
I wish you a good night and very sweet dreams!
With a delicious exhale
Sabine
Onward with Undercover Yoga
Next months Themes include:
Become an Exhaler in the morning
Schlappe Noodle Fun
Life Spirals
Touch for Pleasure
Ocean Motion in your Hips
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
www.RadiantEmbodiment.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
Light for your Mind
Before I’ll offer more Undercover Yoga to you this pressing theme offered itself.
578 words will take your about 3 min to read
This winter my client Roxana experienced a heavier load of the bleak depressed feelings many of us dread repeatedly during this season. The “Happy Holidays” are not so happy for many of us often based on our family history in combination with THE weather and too many clothe, keeping us away from direct skin contact with [our] nature.
Roxana noticed how the darker shorter days made her feel just like that – emotionally darker and physically collapsing inside her chronically problematic spine. The “usual” stress she manages more or less well now had cut her off from feeling her light. Her painful im-pressions piled up on one another until one more finally broke her strength to cope.
The De-pressing of our Well-Being
Because of Graduate schools’ strain and added psychotherapy, which led to the re-incarnation of her unresolved traumatic experiences, Roxana had dropped her self care. She had stopped her long walks in nature that had given her a sense of groundedness. She gave up cooking and stuffed herself from the fridge. She also drank more wine to relax her growing tensions which only supported her dis-embodiment.
Sounds familiar?
“If it’s not one thing – it’s your mother”……
Her straight-A achievements couldn’t help when finally her mother’s demand for Roxana’s face at several parties [that included long air trips] pulled her even further outside her sense of self.
Especially during heightened pressure we women learned to pull-our-selves-together for the world. Forced by hyper masculine ‘normalcy’ we are numbed against the human nature underneath our skin. We vacate our body and crunch into our mind only narrowly surviving. We separate from what moves our spirit and abandon the nurturing self-care we depend upon.
That day at my office Roxana just managed to close the door before her dams broke. When she offered her desperate hope to just die her body trembled with exhaustion and angst.�
She had just come from her therapist leaving a very difficult session of profound insight into the lack of interest in life. Than she hit massive traffic and was late for our session. Roxana felt like a total failure and was ready to give up.
Touching for Life
I held her gently and long. I moved her achy body to reconnect with her awareness mainly guided by the Feldenkrais® Method. As we ‘touched’ on all her overwhelming issues, her body began to soften and expand. Roxana’s breathe deepened and her head could let go.
When she left she was glowing from inside, she felt calm and present all the way through her feet. Roxana was emanating the beauty, vulnerability and softness that comes from finding our inner connections, our true strength of aliveness.
Later Roxana reported how this treatment had freed her from her minds life-less prison. She was able to feel her whole self again. Her body gave her a spacious sense of being HOME. The self-compassion that followed gave her desire to go out to the beach where she buried all of 2009’s burdens. She had fun cooking and certainty that she could get through the next family gathering with a healthy ability to find the positive.
Roxana’s journey highlights again that our body, not our mind, can contain life’s challenges. Our minds re-membering of our body’s vast capacity for well-being in the midst of overwhelm can return when we keep taking loving care of it first. Hugging and touching every day keeps us connected to our real power.
Thank you for your attention
with pleasure
Sabine
Onward with Undercover Yoga
Next months Themes include:
Become an Exhaler
Schlappe Noodle Fun
Life Spirals
Touch for Pleasure
Ocean Motion in your Hips
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
www.RadiantEmbodiment.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
Pleasure 2010? – Undercover Yoga 1!
584 words will take you about 3 min reading time
I dedicate myself to the Recovery of Pleasure for this New Year:
Pleasure in every form to energize my health, my relationships and my work.
To seduce You by Your Own pleasure I’ll offer delicious “Undercover Yoga” that I am developing throughout my book on Feminine Radiance.
But first let’s begin this ‘hidden’ journey into the Revival of our Senses by
Exploring the Stress Bat – Race Rat
How many mornings do you awake tightening up immediately intruded by all the thoughts that come flying into your mind like bats returning home to their empty cavern at dawn? Things you could hopefully and did deliciously release during your sleep. But now they invade the sanctuary of your innocently expanded Self, just to dangle their shadows down from the ceiling inside your head occupying the otherwise blissfully clear space.
I have noticed in those precious moments juuuust between being still asleep and awake that none of these thought bats where there yet. I am one with the total free flow of my em-bodied state.
Only during the following moments concepts ideas words and the old problems come bursting back into my head one by one. I used to think that that was me and I tightened automatically even before getting up. Each morning the mind is successfully diverting our attention away from our sense of wholeness and the physical experience that we are actually only here, inside our spacious body and our cozy warm bed.
Without this realization, stress that’s overshadowing our mind starts oozing into our body. Mental contraction leads to emotional and consequently physical tension. It thrusts aside and numbs our physical pleasure perception. The rest of our day [and our New Year] we’re back glued to the old stress track rat race with everybody else. Schwup-dee-vup!
Self-Compassion follows
The double Catch
For most of us body tension got chronic and can not just release over night. A continual elevation of muscle tone causes our primal brain stem [our survival expert] to suspect looming danger. Over time while trying to suppress the growing jeopardy of this self-perpetuating interior alarm mechanism we get really good at restricting our breathing. Take a breath – More on this below and in February…
Wake up to your senses; get unstuck from the rat race for your own life inspired by your passionate pleasure.
Undercover Yoga 1 – December’s Pleasure of Warmth
You are just waking up. It’s cold and dark out there and your day is packed. –“Don’t jump out of bed – Simmer.”– Robert Blythe[?]
How could the rest of your day unfold with a pleasurable sense of yourself? Answer: You relax into it right here while you drink in the delicious warmth under your covers with a deep inhale. Let every cell of your body lovingly expand to receive these nurturing and luscious feelings through all of your skin.
As your exhale expands notice how your body’s softening also relieves your mind. Allow yourself luxuriously to sink into your warmth one more time. Drop into your pillows. AAAHHHH! �
Look for a sense of release and expansion – a slight increase of sensation in your 3D body. MMMMMMMHHH!
Use your mind for noticing this loving kind of self-awareness more often and…you have left the rat race behind with a radiant smile.
Welcome! 
Join me each month in my Essential Undercover Explorations.
Themes include:
Become an Exhaler
Schlappe Noodle Fun
Life Spirals
Touch for Pleasure
Ocean Motion in your Hips
Happy New Year
Sabine
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
www.RadiantEmbodiment.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
Manifesting Dreams with Numerology
A theme of this 11.2009 letter is unfolding around money and how we can manifest our dreams with the support of numerology.
TODAY, November 29th (2+9=11), we are experiencing the rare numerological phenomenon of 11-11-11 for the second time this month.
“11″ is the Master Number that opens the doors of awareness and opportunity for the energies of Creation at all levels. 2009 (2+0+0+9=11) carries this vibration throughout the year; according to Andrea Hess’ newsletter.
Here is what happened on the financial side for me:
I was able to get the assessors office to adjust our property value so next year we will save money on taxes! I also found out that some homeowners Insurance give credit if you have a burgler and fire alarm system installed. We recieved a refund check over more than $800 for the past 6 years!
I am excited and grateful about this ‘celestial’ boost and hope that alerting you will spurt your manifestation as well.
AND it is never to late to invite more positive experiences!
My favorite Autumn Poem
Herbsttag – 1902 by Rainer Maria Rilke
I put it here in German. The translation did not resonate as much. Reciting it 1989 at the Esalen Institute helped me fall in love with my mother tongue for the first time.
Herr: es ist Zeit.
Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren, und auf den Fluren
laß die Winde los.
Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gieb innen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her unruhig wandern,
wenn die Blätter treiben.
A Womyn is a Mystery that can guide the Wise and open Men
- Rumi
“To ask you bluntly: How different do you think the world would be if our mind set on overdrive [masculine] could cool down enough to realize IT has an amazingly real physical body? Female or Male, your really amazing and ever changing [feminine] body carries your mind around to experience our world more wholly…
Bertha’s Budget Makes Cents
“It’s all about Money Honey”
As a sweet little gift for you, your family and friends I highly recommend Karen Bertha Evans Caldrons’ book on how to save money. Karen is my friend, client and a WOOP member and has written, illustrated and self-published this most enjoyable piece of art. It’s a $9.95 investment you can appreciate. Her paintings are inspirations. To find out more go to her website.
A Woman is a Mystery…
736 words – about 4 min reading time
A Woman is a mystery – that can guide the wise and open Man – Rumi
I believe feminine energy can slow us and our self-destruction down.
To ask you bluntly: How different do you think the world would be if our mind set on overdrive [masculine] could cool down enough to realize It has an amazingly real physical body? Female or Male, your really amazing and ever changing [feminine] body carries your mind around to experience our world more wholly.
Women and men develop the sort of masculine force that grows more exclusively when there is [or was] reason to for self protection. Most of us have been negatively affected by our immediate and/or larger world since we were conceived and collectively worldwide during at least the past 18 months. For most the future does not look so restful rosy either. Experiencing threat automatically gears up our mind to labor in high action mode. Self-preservation has us either drifting in numbness or act with anxiety and aggression. Driven by our alarmed survival instinct we tightly parade all our striped muscles to be ready for fight or flight or freeze at all times.
This is not living life. This is surviving it!
“Always look for the third possibility…”- I learned from Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais. http://www.feldenkraisguild.com/method/a_biography_of_moshe_feldenkrais/
Let’s have a look!
As Saniel Bonder http://www.sanielandlinda.com/calls it: “The Hyper Masculine Dharma” is ruling our daily life. Aggression, violence and force are represented by 2 ½ times more brain cells in men’s heads. That is why in difficult times fear and stress are ruling.
But unfortunately not just in men. Women have learned to flex their masculine intensity pump very successfully; sometimes quiet domineeringly. Our [mental] world seems to turn faster and tighter, creating more pain and suffering each day. This fear of loosing control [masculine] takes over and does not let us go easily.
People look driven drained and hungry for real life.
Here is what I found – my third possibility.
Our global painfully intimate experience can also centrifuge us from twirling outwardly between our glooming past and uncertain future in-ward into this present moment where we notice our self and body here now. “Hey Buddy! Welcome! I miss you so much…!” – could be the first embrace when you begin to suspect your body and breath again.
“You are out of your mind!” the little controle goes off.
Smile… With your body encounter come your feeling senses, your gut-feeling-wisdom, your soft-heartedness, your sure-footedness, your strong backbone and your true exhale of relief.
With awareness of your body comes your trust in the Life–Death–Life-Cycle[Women who run with the wolves- Clarissa Pincola Estes] each moment anew and cumulative.
To me it feels natural that mostly women are [re-]connecting with and expressing our spirit and souls em-bodiment. I wrote in Septembers’ BBB that in contrast to men women have their brains tuned more toward the art of connection and emotion. In contrast to the male principle our female brain centers and nervous system more readily obtain notions by perceiving physical experiences.
I certainly can not exclude myself from us women spinning all to easy in overdrive far too often and more and more and faster. So I was very surprised and thankful when just the other night my husband was the one who brought home a deeply relaxed and opening view to all of the tightening problems in my head… His Yoga class that night had been a rare two hours of restorative poses… aaaahhhhhhhh!!!
Reminding myself of this ‘whole’ other ‘half’ of my human [and not just easeful feminine] capacity to feel life’s events more wholly as invitations by including all physical senses I re-member my power to choose my experience. mmmmhhhh!
I am writing my book on the Recovery of Feminine Radiance because I know women have an easier access and connectedness to our body: The mystery that can guide the wise and open men… A Woman’s innate effortless flow and pleasurable softness as her body are also giving each one of us the challenge and the opportunity to invite our own radiant ease back in and to share our exquisitely fulfilling wisdom from ‘this side of life’ with others, women and men through our body.
“Life is but a dream dadu dada. Life is but a dream dadu, dadu, dadu, dadu dada. Life could be…..”
Look for the third choice with a smile.
Until next month
Happy Holidays
Sabine
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
www.RadiantEmbodiment.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
Disguised Pleasure
PLEASURE in 500 words?
Contemplations on the most important experience of our life
501 words will take you less than minutes to read
Since the early springtime I was invited to teach 2 workshops in New Zealand.
What a wonderful exciting intense work pleasure! The 9 month of planning and re-planning, organizing and promoting zoomed by like that jet that was going to get me there in just 13 hours.
It was the 21st of September – that day I always remember… [- Rolling Stones]
On that Monday morning of my flight – All my bags are packed; I’m ready to go… [- John Denver] I finally got phone contact with the organizers in Kiwi Land. They still had nobody signed up for the weekends AND only 2 people who signed up for the free introductory evenings — I had been under the impression those had filled up…
Under new im-pressions my bodies’ enthusiastic flow of achievement evaporated at the inhale. I experienced myself go physically through the Startle Reflex first phase [Ex-Tension]. I finally ex-haled ex-hausted [phase II, Languish] I closed my mouth – I sat down.
Now my mind desperately began trying to wrap itself around the Unexpected, the Impossible. Only my ‘old friends’ jetted in – self-judgment, failure, inadequacy… Before they could take complete crippling control over the unusual beckoning void inside my head I also perceived a new voice like a beam of life light – Self Compassion! AAAAHHH!
“BUT what about my trip, the new country……..!” – My mind kept interfering with notoriously agaonizing disbelief.
I heard myself laughing– Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans… [- John Lennon]
The unbearable space of freedom dawned on me.
3 weeks of unscheduled time?!
This jolt in the plow line of my field of professional desire returned me to feel this present moment. I landed at the heart of life.
10 min later I called back to cancel my trip.
There’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in… [- Lenard Cohen]
Another few exhales later my mind integrated enough into my body, noticing space inside, feeling my feet on the ground and my whole spines’ smooth unwinding. I made another phone call.
Was it the September, my readiness, the crack, divine planning or all together? The Big Sur cabin where I have had the absolute pleasure last year to write on my book was available for a full 2 weeks! YEAH!
During the week I had left to get down there I released more illusions on running my life, relaxed, reconnected, repacked. I was also able to schedule just enough individual sessions and classes to earn exactly the amount for the cabin rent.
Only when I sat in the harvest moon bathed bathtub on the deck of my cabin in the Red Woods over the deep canyon I remembered how sometime during the busy frenzy of this summer I had wished for the money and time to write on my book this year.
“Be careful what you ask for!”
I learned to trust the mystery of the river of life.
With smiles of gratitude
Sabine
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
Pleasure II in 500 words?
Contemplations on the most important experience of our life.
501 words takes you about 3 min to read
Returning from the 15th Annual Pacific Women Circle Association Crescent Moon Retreat on Vancouver Island [http://www.pwcacamp.org/index.html] I strongly feel the need to keep writing about expanding our minds automatic association of the words “Pleasure” and “Touch” with Sex.
I feel the urgency to bring alertness to our painfully limited, and by the way hyper-masculine, one-way fantasies that put physical pleasure immediately into the sexual amphitheatre, as if that’s our only playground to enjoy touch sensually. ? Ouch!
In last months Blogging Body Bliss I mentioned our gender based brain differences biologically stirring men to link life’s experiences 2,5 times easier to sex. So why do women fall into that same cul-de-sac around ‘getting some’, or not?
I spend a full-blown pleasure week with 60 remarkable women, dancing, laughing, celebrating, teaching, singing, learning and trusting the mystery that unfolds in each moment because we were softening our bodies. Creating art on all levels with everything just because we did it with the awareness that comes from slowing down in the sacred circle we created. Even crying was received as pleasurable because women were releasing tensions, trusting one another enough to open, feeling held and safe enough; finding and releasing into serenity resting inside our bodies; allowing the warm and spacious container of the great-er mother to nurture us inside and out, all around.
On the opening night I offered a circle massage sequence; asking each woman to get really close to each other, do a ¼ turn and reach for the shoulders in front with soft paws. To my great sadness many of the women had not been physically touched and nurtured for sooo long, some for many years.
The initial nervous giggles from our unusual closeness with touch quickly turned into sighs of release, purrrrrrs in delightful surrender and in the end swaying full body smiles.
From the lakeside the warm rays of the setting sun melted our tensions tangibly into the grass underneath our bare feet.
That cold-blooded grip of our fear of intimacy softened just enough to allow us to feel more freely and to begin to perceive our own humanness and with that each others divinity. Tired exhausted women felt energized, tense stressed-out women landed inside their bodies and released their suffering minds. Everyone relaxed those boundaries that we so tightly install inside and around ourselves in this unfriendly intimi-dating world of the survival of the fittest.
We began to date intimacy. We had entered a sacred space to trust the touch for another woman; a hug, a little massage, even a smile; we let it in stilling our feminine hunger for real connection. Giving and receiving touch at the same moment with 60 women let our awareness grown beyond any usual suspicion.
Let you own awareness deepen with each experience. Notice how your body will flow naturally with more nurturing gentle and loving pleasure.
Free yourself from a male brain anatomy imposed stereotype of perception and invite men into the endless space of your whole body deliciocity.
With a smile
Sabine
Thank you for reading
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
www.RadiantEmbodiment.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
Pleasure I in 500 words?
501 words will take you about 3 min to read.
Whole Body Contemplations on the most Important Experience of Your Life
I am a “Pleasure Pig”! Can you relate?
Pigs love to play in the soft warm mud – That I found out very young around the little pond in the meadow below our weekend cottage to the great dismay of my already sensitized mother who constantly changed my ‘ruined’ clothe before she gave in and let me take them off altogether. Finally – freedom and total pleasure for me! Yeeepeeeeeeee!
In my twenties I specialized in Child Development and Sensory Integration [SI] and worked with babies and kids. Then the mud turned into thick heavy Nivea Cream, warm water, cushy plastic mats, and lots of towels to clean up the wonderful mess.
Wow!
Imagine you smear cream all over your body and swish down a warm water slide. Oozing and squirming, spiraling your body smoothly and with total ease in the goop —- may be later after you read more on how life changing that can be?
Today I help adults re-discover their ability to feel, receive, integrate and give nonsexual pleasure on all levels. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!
Women’s Pleasure Perception is different!
Dr. Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain scientifically clarifies what women noticed all along: Compared to a male brain [with 2 ½ times more cells for sex drive and larger centers for action / aggression] a female brain has 11% more neurons for language and hearing, a larger hub for emotion, memory and greater ability to read peoples’ cues. – We have a brain whose primary values are communication, emotional sensitivity, memory, connection and responsiveness.
You knew it! Our biological brain allows women greater capacity to feel sensations sensually and with our whole body.
You may also sense it is high time to stop “denying the influence of biology.” – I take the pleasure to invite our innate human animal [and consequently our partner's] to enjoy pleasure at its Whole-Body-Deliciocity-BEST.
Women’s bodies are wholly sense based – I am not talking about the fun we can have with science, politics and business – Here I am guiding thatmind into your physical receptivity /sense-ability /sens-orality.
Uuups my PC says “no no” to the word orality and suggests – morality…great isn’t it? – Exactly! Our growing body-phobia is our core agony roboterizing the world.
Pleasure means Sex [?]
Results are sickening divorce rates and healthy drug sales for depression. We overeat to fill our gaping vacuums hungry for real communication. Pleasure-deprivation usher us into the fangs of a masculinly sexualized industry selling ‘pleasure’ from anti-ageing, to fitness [get hard – stay hard] and out fits ‘that turn heads’, to S/m workshops and rich man’s online dating.
Existential fear has women and men’s masculine energy run for sex, aggression and action. Stop!
Feel – find connection and pleasure inside the depth of your senses in this moment.
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves” – Mary Oliver
Find your Pleasure of Expectancy until the next Blogging Body Bliss
Thank you for reading
Sabine
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
www.RadiantEmbodiment.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
The SERIOUS Deliciocity of Foot Pleasuring Massage III
JULY 2009
1784 words will take you about 9 minutes to read
A 3-piece of writing about our incredible feet and how caressing them grows us deeper into life and love and presents
III. How?
At last, the practical instructions on touching each others feet.
No more excuses left- you can do it, especially YOU who’s read all three pieces.
If pleasure is so good for everything how can I have more of it?
Answer: You give what you want to get!
So, if you have never received a full body – or ‘just’ a foot massage, I highly recommend it and even urge you to gift yourself a.s.a.p. Ask around for a great and nurturing massage therapist and receive a professional treatment first. After you have felt how deliciously fantastic it is to let go and receive - just do it - create that space for somebody else!
Your curiosity has already begun to open your heart. There’s no reason for thinking that you can not pleasure your own or somebody else’s feet just with your touch. Even if you only hold that foot – that is so trustingly laying in your hands, warm it and allow your good intensions and your heart to flow out of your soft-ening palms and into their whole body – you are creating magic for both of you.
Precautions
In general do not massage the feet of a person with cancer, infectious disease or fever. You might cause those processes to be exhilarated because of the stronger blood circulation inside their whole body that will occur when you kneed their feet. But this should not keep you from lovingly holding, warming and caressing there feet. During pregnancy the areas of the inner and outer ankles as well as the lower legs should not be worked on.
In some very sensitive or simply stressed people a good deep foot massage can ignite a cleansing response for the whole body. Even a little therapeutic pressure on the feet might provoke a strong reaction of their autonomic nervous system. The first sign shows up as sweaty wetness of their hands and/or feet. This is when you stop what you are doing and just hold the feet with your thumbs gentle resting on the solar plexus point in the center of the sole of their foot. Please see photo.
Hold those places still without pressure until their nervous system has relaxed again and the sweating has dried up. This is called ‘the Motorcycle Grip’ – I always imaging riding the Harley through the desert. My leaned back spacious mindset allows the person also to relax and feel safe inside again. This kind of your presence will be very helpful.
Should you keep stimulating, those people might feel anything from slight dizziness to strong dizziness, feeling hot or cold or both and all the way to vomiting and diarrhea – this is called a ‘Healing Crisis’ generated by the autonomic nervous system. Generally very good! BUT I would not suggest to anybody Giver or Receiver to slide down that road unprepared unless you are with an experienced reflexology practitioner and a deep cleansing is necessary and freeing.
Beautiful Moments
My friend Aleeta’s body was cancer ridden. On my visits we would snuggle up together on the couch so I could hold and caress her swollen sore feet and her body got more comfortable. During those moments we were able to drop into deep intimacy. A place where our physical nurturing relaxed our minds enough and her and my initial fear of death softened. We both felt a sense of space, ease and deep connection in a bigger experience of life and death.
Here are some practical tips for you
Invite your Receiver – you don’t have to be shy. After all you are inviting them for a real treat. “Would you like to receive a foot rub? I just read these articles about it and I invite you to be my guest…”
Your Pleasuring Session
O. Relax – be warm and cozy – as always – the setting is important – this can be very simple with a blanket covering your sitting or reclining partner and a towel under their feet if your use oil. It feels good to be touched by clean warm hands. You can play more elaborate with a hot scented foot bath, candles and soft music, wine, bonbon and on from there.
Before you begin any kneading and when you end your session apply a few connecting strokes to the lower legs and feet.
It is healing to support the flow of life energy streaming up and down our body through the invisible Meridian System. Here you can get a good look at it:
Here is how it goes: Gently, from the knees stroke down the outside of both legs, over the outer ankles and off over the 4 outer toes. Than; stroke up from the big toes over the inner ankles and up the inner legs towards the knees. Turn and stroke down the outsides again. Do this a few times. The rhythm and flow of these easy strokes will help both of you to get here.
Now you can play on with any or all of the touch techniques below.
1. Always touch with a listening touch!
2. Trust your gut feeling – your loving touch can not do anything wrong!
3. Touch how you would like to be touched – begin lightly, and remember
your own wonderful experience or delightful fantasy with foot massage.
4. Be curious without judgment -
- Where is this foot soft, hard, tight, rough, smooth or flexible?
- How would you like to touch this area? Firm, deep, soft, light or just holding and warming it? What does it need?
- Play with fast heating rubs with the little finger side of your hand and steady slow circles with a thumb or other fingers.
- Gently uncurl those toes – holding them on the sides – lengthen them
- Where do you want to stretch and bend – expand?
5. Play with long strokes or ‘kneading dough’ stationary with big soft hands
or just with your fingers.
6. It’s never to deep, it’s only to fast…
7. Ask them to tell you how it feels. Ask them to use words at first and later
just to use sounds. Let your partner’s pleasure guide you. Mmmmmhhhhh!
By the way – this is how we can learn to communicate what we need and how during sexual play as well as in other areas of our relationship.
8. Stay within the limits of pleasure! Make it easy and simple!
9. Notice your own breathing and relaxation before theirs. We all tend to
tighten our breath and body in new or in intimate situations, [read
about that in my April 2009 Blogging Body Bliss on Breathing your
own breath]
10. You can use oil [olive oil from your kitchen’s great] or massage cream or special foot balms or salt/sugar cream scrubs or nothing but love – no shocks with cold squirts or aftershocks with stains. Please warm up the lube in your palms and put a towel under.
11. Relax, exhale, this is about pleasure for both of you. When you feel your
partner’s body soften, see their face relaxing and their breathing
deepen; just let it in. This is their gift to you and lets you feel how easy
you can connect on a really nourishing level. The more you can allow
yourself to feel the pleasure the more your partner can let go and�
receive as well.
12. Keep massaging painful areas but more lightly and less pinpointed -
imagine your touch is spreading and diffusing built up tension like�
honey crystals melting in warm tea – have some and also lot’s of water.
13. Find your ever changing rhythm – enjoying your self is priority!
14. Slow down – allow!
15. End with Motorcycle Grip [under precautions] and Meridian Strokes.
[explained above]
You are always touching the whole body when touching feet
Some very special places on the foot
I said before that all of our body is represented in our feet. Please have a look at the map again.
Here are some places to pay special attention too.
1. The Meeting of the 3 Rivers
This point is located 4 fingers wide above the inner ankle – you can find it there where your circling thumb seems to be able to drop right into a little dent on the inner shin bone. The point is usually quiet tender and can really hurt when pressed harder. This acupuncture/acupressure point got its name in Chinese Medicine because the power lines of the liver, kidney and spleen meridian are meeting here! Do not press on it when your partner is pregnant, but do disperse its tension when she has any menstrual problems, including cramps and foul moods. This area is a wonderful place to help with balancing our whole menstrual process.
2. The Pelvic region
The spaces of the inner and outer heel represent the whole pelvic region including our sexual organs, ducts and muscles. As described above do not work here when your friend is pregnant, but do work here for all issues related to menstruation and sexuality.
The line between the inner and outer heel across the front of the ankle is representing the ovarian tubs or seminal ducts as well as the lymphatic system of the pelvic region.
All these places are often tender to pressure and can respond with whole body bliss and delight when they begin to relax through your touch and attention. This said – the area offers itself as a fantastic zone for sensual foreplay.
3. The Swim Skins
Here I mean the webs between the toes. The lymphatic drainage system for the head is represented here. So if your person/child has a cold or the likes, this area might be extremely painful. You can support the healing process when you gently stroke and pull on the skins to release their tension. GENTLY! Especially if they are running a fever.
4. Kids
Cleaver moms have told me how little foot rubs calm down their overwhelmed kids, balance their energy and allows them to finish the homework in peace.
Summarizing
the potential of the Deliciocity of Foot Massage I’d say you are:
- Creating a safe place to become present and connect and talk real
- Relaxing and reviving every inch of the body
- Easing a bad mood to shift into simple deliciocity
- Heightening the ability to experience pleasure sensuality and
sexuality; authenticity intimacy and sanity
- Creating a wonderful space for healing and growing on every level
- Helping to save the planet
Enjoy your play and the deepening of your relationship with each person you touch.
Sabine
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do – Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.
The SERIOUS Deliciocity of Foot Pleasuring Massage II
A 3-piece of writing about our incredible feet and how caressing them grows us deeper into life and love and presents
1693 words will take you about 8.5 minutes to read
II. Why?
is it that a little foot rub can change life?
Our Sensory Development
As you have noticed in part I [see May 2009] of this article your feet are a key to your whole life.
How much can you sense of and with your feet right now? Socks, Shoes, Space, Temperature? How about a sense of Release, Landing and Comfort? Not jet? Read on.
Where are you going?
To appreciate the fundamental importance of your feet, [which not only literally carry you where you want to go in your life], it is fun to look at the exciting sensory development from the foot perspective.
Being able to really FEEL your feet is at the end of a fascinating installation, awakening and ripening process of our whole bodies’ sensate systems that begins around your mouth with the 8th week after your conception. Starting from the head your sensory awareness is fine tuning and expanding down your embryonic tiny body.
Although most of your skin can sense stimulation and even differentiate pain from around the 12th week after your conception – when you were almost 3 ½ inch tall and your weight was an amazing 1,6 ounces – awareness reaches your feet last.
Baby Steps
If you are a mother you may vividly remember the wonderful reassuring kicks of your babies’ feet from the inside. Fathers and special friends got to feel this exhilaration from the outside.
Directly after being born a baby can use these well practiced motions to ‘crawl’ up to its mother’s nipple and nurse for the first time all by itself within 30 min.
But for the next few months their legs and feet are by far not as interesting to them as their mouth and upper body because the ability to sense with discrimination has not yet reached the lower body. When you gently massage their exquisite feet infants will let you know clearly if you are doing it just right, but they do not make the connection to where on their body that pleasurable feeling actually comes from until their nervous system has ripened all the way down.
Old Horizons
Throughout my Physical Therapy training in Germany and still during my further specification in child developmental therapy [Bobath and Sensory Integration] during the early 80’s the understanding was that the fundamental learning capacity of our brain ends at the age of 7[!] From than on, my teachers said, our brain could only refine the basic patterns that had been engraved by those early impressions.
I remember a deep sense of loss and even a ‘giving up’ hearing this – not just for all my adult patients who where trying to learn to walk again after injuries, hip or knee replacements, or other surgeries - but also for my own need to fill the gaps of crushed pleasure horizons and limiting mind-sets that I was raised with by my parents’ and grand parents’ WW II generations. In those times they had none for ‘sweet footing’ around.
In our achievement obsessed world we need to value that a baby will only stand up by itself naturally and maturely when its nervous system has developed enough by integrating sensory acuity with muscular strength. Curiosity and a desire for pleasurable experiences build the floor.
Unsurprisingly maturing happens naturally in the horizontal positions on the floor.
I always cringe when I see parents who stand up their babies and pull them to walk earlier and earlier. Besides other devastating long term effects on the unprepared hip joints and spine, standing on those immature feet alone takes away all of the necessary information that their whole body would otherwise receive and assimilate by rolling, crawling, creeping, pushing, pulling, pivoting; in short playing around on the floor. The natural year long [not counted the time in the womb] completion process of getting to embody ones whole world with ones whole body gets a terrible far-reaching short cut.
As a result we see too many adults who struggle to stand on their own two feet. Too many appear spineless. And our spirituality feels flat - “it comes out like a fax”.
New Pleasure Horizons
Researchers only recently found that our brain keeps its plasticity all along and so we can all celebrate what I was so curious about: It’s never too late to explore and develop our capacity to feel the nourishment of pleasure! Neuro plasticity/learning, the sprouting of new neural connections between brain cells for physical emotional and mental recovery, and our over all expansion and deepening of human awareness never has to end! Spirituality can dance on the feet of your embodiment.
As babies play their way down their body one extremely important achievement happens – they get fascinated by their feet, learn to grab them and thoroughly and extensively lick and bite and chew on them; from about the 5th month onward.
Talk about natural contentment and sensuality… aaaahhhhhh! Uuuuuuhhhhhh!
Steps to Awareness
What’s your connection to your feet in this moment? Warmer?
Do you recall spending time barefoot in nature? Does that not always feel like summer vacations?
Since the very old days where kids grew up barefoot our world got more and more modernized and we ‘concretized’ more and more over Mother Nature.
Our mothers began than to protect and hide our feet in those, I have to admit, irresistibly cute tiny baby shoes too much too early. Our ‘hungry for life’ feet do not come in contact with enough sensory ‘nourishment’ any longer.
I never forget my boss, the Neuro-Pediatrician Dr. Inge Flehmig creator of the Institut fuer Kindesentwicklung [Institute for Child development] in Hamburg, stating: “Shoes? Only for protection against cold wet and injury!”
To this day I feel disconnected from my clients as well as my intuition if I wear shoes when giving a Symphonic Touch® session or teaching my workshops. I keep asking my adult clients to walk barefoot as much as possible for grounding, relaxing and connecting to themselves and root to the earth.
Feminine Radiance – Masculine Presents
Our predominantly established sexualisation of pure sensory experience to me is one major reason for the lack of true masculine clarity and presents in men and the lack of feminine ease and flow in women. How can we feel safe enough to allow ourselves to live our true nature if we do not sufficiently feel our whole body resting on our ‘awakened pleasure’ feet? Therefore how can we trust our foundation? In other words; Authenticity is a question of embodiment.
As you can imagine by now; one seriously delicious return to sanity is to entice some-one out of their head and into their em-bodiment with a wonderfully relaxing foot rub. You do not have to wait until next months ‘How” is posted to grab any available foot including your own and start exploring right now.
Foot Notes
Foot fetish – I could not get around researching the adult sexualized view of our feet. This is what I found:
In 2002 Neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran proposed that foot fetishism is caused by the feet and the genitals occupying adjacent areas of the somato-sensory cortex, possibly entailing some neural crosstalk between the two.
Great! Isn’t it? The possibilities of getting your skeptical girlfriends or even your tired man more easily interested in receiving and giving a foot rub just multiplied. Curiosity moves mountains.
Foot Talk
During the late 80’s I had justt gotten very curious about the very descriptive, simply down to earth, embodied language that Germans use when I immigrated to the US. Here are some of the English examples I found since that give you a sense of how embodiment shows up internationally through your feet.
Getting cold feet
I’ve lost my footing
Got blown of my feet
Pussyfooting around
Walking on eggshells
Tip toe through the tulips [could also belong below]
Having to put a foot into your mouth [might not be so bad after all – try]
And here’s a German one: If your idea has no hand and foot – it’s useless
OR
Surefooted
Jump into life
Down to earth
Walk your talk
Put your foot down
Get a foot in the door
Connecting to our roots
Getting back on you feet again
Land/ Stand on your own two feet
Putting one foot in front of the other
A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step
It rolls
At last I want to call to your attention the people who are born without or have lost or badly injured their feet. As a Physical Therapist I can only imagine how their nervous system, physical body and psychology are facing a tremendous amount of challenges with daily ups and downs. But [re]-learning to walk on our own, I know you know, is a tremendous motivation and accomplishment for us humans. I am sure you have also heard of someone who got back onto their feet after a devastating personal event. Do you remember how relieved/light footed that made you feel?
When I was about 21 and working at a big orthopedic hospital, I remember unassumingly asking a patient in his wheelchair: “How is it going?” “It’s rolling!” he answered.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
Onwards in July with
III. HOW?
OK – if [foot]-pleasuring is so good for everyone, how can I have and give more of it?
Resources
Das Leben vor dem Leben – Katherina Zimmer
Normale Entwicklung des Saeuglings und ihre Abweichungen – Dr. Inge Flehmig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_fetishism.
Disclaimer
Please! Whatever you do. Stay within the limits of pleasure. Make it simple and easy.
The author doesn’t take any responsibility for any possible consequences that might occur from your thoughts and actions.
Sabine Grandke-Taft
Embodiment Expert and Workshop Leader
for more information please go to
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinegrandketaft
Creative Commons License
Sabine Grandke-Taft holds the copyright for her blog but allows you to copy and distribute her work provided you give me credit and link back to my website www.radiantembodiment.com Thank you very much.