About habitual tension, pruning roses, and the value of a neutral state.
This week in Grimsby, the forsythias are still in bloom.
It’s been another week of pruning shrubs, especially roses. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working on a large bed of carpet roses, which have matured over the past couple of years and were ready for their first deep structural prune. Carpet roses tend to really grow into each other, and there was a lot of squatting and hunching involved.
While pruning short shrubs that require you to hover above them, balance becomes not only useful, but essential. Even the slightest miscalculated action can create painful reminders for weeks to come.
Over the past few years, since beginning gardening full time, I’ve taken to starting my days with some brief yoga. Nothing complex. I tend to do a couple of sun salutations in the Ashtanga tradition, which warm up my back muscles and stretch out some of the larger leg muscles as well.
This yoga practice has helped me over the years to become more confident in balancing above thorny rose shrubs and other adversarial plant material.
However, over the years, a second, unexpected benefit has appeared. The steady returning to the same set of postures, and especially the beginning posture – equal standing, Tadasana, Samasthiti, whatever you want to call it – has taught me what that posture feels like. And that means that now, every time I drift away from that posture, for example, if I go swimming, rowing, or if I do a week of pruning roses hunched over, I notice that certain changes have occurred in my habitual tension patterns and muscular holding patterns.
In my morning yoga warm-ups following last week’s rose pruning, I noticed that my chest felt particularly tight. When I raised my arms above my head, they tended to be forward and ahead of my center line.
Realizing this, I thought about that rose pruning and what could have led to such a strong effect. The hunching over and the pruning seemed to have relied heavily on my back muscles, and perhaps because of the position of my body, often hunched over standing or on a kneeling pad, I may have neglected to engage my core and balance out the strain on my back muscles. Sometimes when you’re working, the habitual default is the easiest, whether or not it provides structural support.
Over the course of a couple of days, the repetition of the morning yoga warm-up allowed me to regain a more equal sense of balance in my body, bringing my hunched shoulders back behind my heart for support, strengthening my core while relaxing my overexerted back.
When I came back to the roses this week, as I started pruning, I immediately noticed what I had failed to notice before: a tendency to hunch forward and to rely on my back muscles to support my entire frame while working hunched. Through the small but repetitive work done over the course of the week, all it took was that bit of awareness to engage the core.
After a day of pruning roses, once again, I found that I had worked my back, but I felt less unbalanced, and my body required less work to rebalance.
You may not be a gardener full-time, or even part-time. You may do yoga, or you may not. This exploration is about neither of those things, although they do apply.
The idea here – yoga, even though it is a brief fifteen-minute warm-up in the morning – takes the place of a point of stability to return to, an exploration of balance. It could even be summarized by just the standing pose, equal standing, which is a simple, neutral posture from which you can observe what is going on.
When I stand in equal standing at the beginning and end of every warm-up session, which I have engaged with daily for years, I now have a neutral baseline to which I can compare my state. I know this week my hamstrings feel tighter, and another week my shoulders are more hunched than usual. I’m establishing what a neutral, balanced state feels like.
Having that balanced state is key. It allows me to respond to imbalances with a rebalancing action. It gives my awareness a context.
Yours may be something completely different, and it may even be a non-physical practice, such as reading, that allows you to gauge your state of mind. Or you may walk every day. The key is a small action repeated many times.
That becomes a baseline that allows you to not maintain balance at all times, but to notice quicker what feels out of balance, and to return to balance quicker and more easily than you would otherwise.
Finding your balance quickly after exertion will prevent habitual imbalances leading to health issues and injury over the long term. Also, clearing your mind by revisiting a familiar state can do the same for your ideas. In some ways, it’s similar to our four seasons of gardening, where during winter, I let ideas and gardens lie fallow so I can see them with fresh eyes the next spring. That cycle allows me to create balance on a large scale.
But on a small, day-to-day scale, equal standing is, will remain being, and will increase being invaluable.