Life, as we know it at the moment, has limitations. The space that we each inhabit with our daily patterns and behaviours has decreased to a smaller range as we stay at home and reduce our interactions. We interact with screens and we spend most of our time in our living space. We cope with these limitations in our individual ways and we seek, and find, a new normality.

So too do we respond to these limitations by moving differently. As we go about our daily lives we express, respond and react with movement. We gesture, we habitually move from one place to the other, we move according to our emotions and to our interactions with others and the world around us. We move unconsciously in different ways and in different directions every single day of our life. So as we stay at home, living differently, our patterns of movement reduce, and we unconsciously reduce the full expression of our self. Couple this with challenging feelings we may be experiencing as a result of lockdown, and we can find ourselves becoming stuck in uncomfortable patterns. How we feel affects how we move, and how we move affect how we feel.

What this means however, is that we can use movement to unstick our patterns and change how we feel. By consciously expanding our movement we can expand our expression again, moving in different directions and opening into the space we are in, rather than locking into it. We can move through a few simple movements and feel better. 

The attached video takes you through a short movement practice. It’s 5 minutes long and opens and moves the body in 3 dimensions. You don’t need any special clothes or kit, just you, your body, yourself.

Author: Caroline Toshack

Caroline works at Edinburgh TRC