I have been arguing with my shoulders since I was 10! My days as a competitive swimmer were hard on them. It even resulted in a fair bit of physical therapy. But today… I’m using movement with intention to address my shoulder restriction.
I have been doing a lot of work with somatic movement and I’ve recently started learning tapping, or EFT, and it’s made me experiment with my movement a little bit recently. But what really made me think about this new approach was when my girlfriend picked up her copy of The Hidden Messages In Water again.
If you’re not familiar with the work of Masaru Emoto, he basically did studies on water and how intention projected onto it affected the molecular bonding structures when water froze. It’s very interesting stuff! So I started thinking that maybe setting an intention before a workout, or even before each movement would make a difference in how my body reacted.
What I discovered is that it did! I hate pushups, but I tried using them to release some very tight muscles in my left shoulder. I set the intention that this movement was for the purpose of releasing my left shoulder. And then I executed the movement very slowly while keeping my focus on releasing my left shoulder.
I was able to get my shoulder to release to a surprising degree in only a couple sessions. Now, this shoulder tightness has been an issue for a few years and I’ve done lots of things to undo it. And this helped more than anything else in only a few minutes a couple times!
I’m very excited to keep playing with this concept and see where it takes me!