Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Addicted to stretching

Sometimes I like using gravity to its full advantage. Instead of tensing my arms to carry my heavy grocery bags home I let gravity stretch them downward and I walked as tall as possible down the block and up the stairs. I love the feeling of stretching my muscles so much that I used to overstretch before dance classes and I was so loose that my muscles weren't strong enough to hold my limbs where they were fully able to go.
I love the floor. The harder the floor the better. I can fall asleep faster on the floor than on a soft couch. I cannot go a day without stretching and if I do I feel stiff and slow and tired. I don't know the chemistry behind this but all I know is how I feel. It's like coffee. It wakes me up.

I like that good pain- and you can tell the good from the bad if you're at all in touch with your body. I like to jam a raquet ball in the space between my femur and my pelvis and lean into it- I could do this for hours. My body is somewhat imbalanced due to a recent diagnosis of scoliosis and thus my right leg feels jammed unless I manipulate it. For some reason I can never overstretch this part of my body.

To treat myself I'll go to a Chinese Qi Gong Tui Na parlor for acupressure massage. They'll ask if you like it hard or soft- hard, please. I like it when she digs her elbow in my back, or walks on me with her heels. If I won the lottery I would get a personal masseuse. I don't know if all my tension comes from years of dance and going about my daily life with resistence to my muscles. Probably. Sometimes I wish I could go about things differently like others do, where they don't feel the need to stretch all the time. It's like a drug- I feel better when I do it. But I'm not addicted, am I?

1 comment:

  1. I feel addicted to hamstring streching. The good pain is nice!

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