11 Minutes to Get Somewhere Else
An exercise for when you don't know what you need
This is an exercise I do when I’m in a funk. When I wake up already with a headache. Two cute beasts - glee and remorse sit on my chest from the month I’ve had. I have work to do and time to do it, but I don’t feel well. And it’s not just physical. The shoulds are swirling. I should do a yoga video. I should mediate. Go for a walk. Call a friend. Write the article. Send the application. Start that show. And something rebellious in me says no. I don’t want to do any of it. The world isn’t alright and neither am I. Which is true. But…
Gotta keep trying. I’m stuck, and I don’t know what I need. I want to hop to the next stone in the creek AND I want to sit on this stone and decompose. Here’s an exercise for all that.
Stills
You’re going to hold 11 different poses or “stills” - each for a minute. They can be any shape: official yoga poses, freeze-dance poses (the game where you dance and when the music cuts out you freeze), poses inspired by vines and mushrooms, 11 different napping poses, etc. Don’t decide on the shapes in advance. You’re going to want an audible timer as opposed to a face clock. I set my timer for one minute and 7 seconds.
The Goal: Hold still for one minute, eleven times. (or 3 or 8 or 100).
The Rules: You can take any pose you want but they have to be visibly different from each other. If you get into a shape and realize you can’t hold it for a minute, you must adjust imperceptibly or very very slowly, so that you could perhaps trick someone watching you into questioning whether or not you were actually moving. Take only a few seconds to get into each next still shape.
What for?
Physical Awareness: You’ll learn over the 11 minutes what your physical parameters are for that day.
Risk-Taking: Get into the practice of trying and failing and trying again.
Warmth and Circulation
Brain Space: You get to watch your brain for 11 minutes instead of it watching you
Needs and Wants: Your body will start to tell you what it wants. It will start craving adjustments. Certain muscles will say Me Next! while others will say Let Me Go! You are forced to delegate the varied wants of your body, and this is a skill.
Somewhere Else: After 11 minutes (or 4 or 12), you’ll be in a slightly different place. You’ll be somewhere else. And you might even have a sense of where to go next and when to stop.
But isn’t this just copy-cat yoga?
It may look like yoga, and probably has similar benefits. But this exercise doesn’t come from any ancient spiritual or physical tradition. It comes from Art Modeling. Many figure drawing classes start with a warm-up. To help the artists get into their groove, they have the model take a series of quick positions. The artists draw a new pose every 60 or 90 seconds using only a series of lines and curves - no time for erasing, judging, or detail-work. This period of time also allowed me as the art model to get in tune with myself, see where I felt strongest and creakiest, and also warm up my body. After 10 of these poses, I felt just about ready for anything.
One day I was feeling stuck and stormy and at a loss for what to do. I was too fatigued to do an exercise video, and I knew that would trigger the hypercritical voice already fighting for space in my mind. I thought maybe it would help to lay on the floor, but I found I craved some kind of distraction from - and order for - my thoughts. I decided to set a timer for 90 seconds, and I draped myself into a long heap on the floor. When the timer went off, I rotated to a new heap. And again. After three poses, I found my muscles were talking to me loud and clear. We want to walk, said my hamstrings. We ache, said my ankles. That was a new conundrum, but I found it was one I felt prepared to confront. Even if confronting meant doing three more long still heaps.
I love yoga, tai chi, and movement structures that help my body and mind work together. But I have a vicious perfectionist in me. I also have cell disfunction from tick borne illness that makes recovery from exercise a potentially slow and tricky business. There are times where I really need a body-mind practice of some sort, but doing a traditional practice like dance, pilates, even pranayama, can put a bull horn in front of the perfectionist voice, and piss off all my red blood cells at the same time. The “Stills” exercise allows me to let go of correctness by providing one goal: hold still. And that for me is helpful.
This is not medical advice or a replacement for medical advice. The purpose of this exercise is to better understand your own strengths and limits, not to push them.