One-Minute Practice: Spacious Joints

Are you noticing yourself being tighter, heavier, or numb? Do you often find yourself holding your breath, your shoulders, your guts? 
It's not just you; it's most of us. Our nervous systems are reacting to the scary things happening in our world, and the uncertainty that means for each of us. Our mammal organisms are trying to get our attention, and to protect us. Fight, flight, freeze and fawn—these are also trauma reactions that if we become aware of, we can possibly respond to, with conscious awareness. 

No one knows what to do right now. Many good people have ideas and plans, many have a sense of purpose day to day. But as a whole, we are floundering while the people in power who have lost any moral center continue to destroy democracy. 

Some ways to respond—

First: protect yourself and your closest people by taking care of each other. Rest more, move more, enjoy each other more. Eat well, breath fully, give yourself and others compassion. 
Second: focus on doing one thing a day that feels right to you. So many organizations offer simple calling scripts, specific actions to take or rallies to attend. 
Third: share, amplify and perhaps participate in what is good around you, and possibilities you see for a different future. 

You can also encourage your whole being to release into a sense of more spaciousness by bringing awareness to your joints. Joints are held together by ligaments, tendons, muscles, fascia, and all these tissues get tight with tension and fear. When our tissues are tight, they pull our joints together, and then we feel more tight! We can invite our joints to have more space and we might feel our tissues opening and softening. We can invite our web of tendons, ligaments and muscles to soften and release and we might feel our joints open.
Try this: put one hand on your other hand's wrist. Tighten the muscles in that hand so that you feel the contraction of those little wrist bones with your inner sense and with the hand that is resting there. Now release the muscles and notice the space in the wrist.
Try this with other joints. Put a hand at the top of your neck, the base of your skull. Tighten your neck and notice how the skull comes down toward your spine, and your shoulders tighten too. Now release your neck muscles into a gentle length and notice how your delicate neck spine elongates and your head can balance easily. Let your jaw release too.
If you play around with this in joints throughout your body, you will find that tightness anywhere affects other places too. In fact, every part does affect every other part. And if you let yourself play around with spacious joints, you will find that you have more breath, that your thinking and emotional state may even ease up.
Playing with ease of movement is good for the nervous system, and the more we take care of our whole undivided self, the more agency we will have to do the right thing.