YAWNNNNNNN….

I watch my kitties stretch sinuously, luxuriously, whenever they get up from a nap, before they pad off about their business. It looks like a whole body yawn. We see animals do it all the time.

It’s an organic wave that comes from the inside and involves every molecule: pandiculation.

It’s a reset for the whole system.
I do it too, perhaps not quite with the voluptuous elegance of the fuzzy princes.

It’s incredibly different from a hamstring stretch I might feel I need to do Because My Hamstrings Are So #$%^&* Tight.

Hmm, looks pretty imposed from the outside, doesn’t it? It could sneak past physiological range to a degree which may feel good (or not) and perhaps give some temporary relief… but it might result in…

Slow motion Boinnnnnnnng! The tissues stiffen in defense, back to short and tight.

(A better question: why are my hamstrings being instructed to be tight? Ahhh. Not your fault, hamstrings, I suspect the instructions are coming from higher up the line.)

But darn it, I love to stretch! How about I Alexanderify it in a pandicular direction?

Not local, but global.
Organic, from the inside out, the giant body YAWNNNNNNN….

The heck with being imposed upon!

Including by me. I choose to be the gentle inviter, not the outside imposer.

Approaching any stretch from a pandicular origin….
It seems very different, much yummier. 

A quote from master Alexander teacher Patrick MacDonald:

Just look at all that lovely tension!

What is pandiculation?

Pandiculation is our nervous system’s natural way of waking up our sensorimotor system and preparing us for movement. Humans, along with all vertebrate animals, tend to automatically pandiculate when we wake up or when we’ve been sedentary for a while. If you’ve ever seen a dog or cat arch their back when they get up from a nap, or watched a baby stretch their arms and legs as they wake up, you’ve witnessed the pandicular response. It may look like a stretch, but when we pandiculate, we’re actually contracting muscles that have been inactive.

Pandiculation is our innate response to the sensations of lack of movement and to tension building up in our muscles—which often go hand in hand.
Pandiculation sends biofeedback to our nervous system regarding the level of contraction in our muscles, thereby helping to prevent the buildup of chronic muscular tension. This is an extremely important function of the pandicular response. A pandiculation contracts and releases muscles in such a way that the gamma loop, a feedback loop in our nervous system that regulates the level of tension in our muscles, is naturally reset. This resetting reduces muscular tension and restores conscious, voluntary control over our muscles.

– Somatic Movement Center

Credits:

Tiger stretching, image by TheOtherKev from Pixabay;

Yawning lion by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay.

Adapted from my ‘Spark of Alexander’ series