Day 12:Warm Up Exercises and Phrases

While Skinner's book Speak with Distinction does not focus on exercises like Linklater's text did. However, there were a few example exercises broken down similarly to the eight steps in Linklater's progression.The first set of exercises I focused on were the ones for the facial muscles, the necking shoulders, and the lower jaw.

The facial muscle exercise is as follows:

Knit your eyes into a frown, let go. Lift your eyebrows, let go. Wrinkle your nose, let go. Lift both cheeks into a smile, let go. Pull the corners of your mouth downward, let go. Relax your jaw wide open and point the tip of your tongue straight out, let go.

Reflection: This exercise was super helpful in terms of working on tension and relaxation. Most of my work with Linklater and Berry was focused on tensing and relaxing the other parts of the body. This was extremely specific to the face itself, which was work I had yet to do. I think the most helpful portion of this exercise was the work with jaw and tongue relaxation. As I mentioned previously, I hold a lot of tension in my jaw and this was super useful to get in my body. I hope to incorporate this facial muscle exercise into my daily practice.

The exercise for the neck and shoulders is as follows:

Going clockwise, trace imaginary circles on the ceiling with the top of your head. Start small, then gradually get larger in size. When you make them bigger, being to make them smaller again until your head feels poised on the top of the neck. Repeat it going counterclockwise. Next maintain this alignment and trace circles with the tip of your nose. Start small and get larger, and then make them smaller until your head is at rest. Repeat it going counterclockwise. Inhale as your raise your shoulders, exhale as you let go. Repeat several times. Inhale as you raise hands and arms toward the sky and exhale and let go. Repeat several times. Inhale as you rotate your shoulders forward and up and then exhale as you drop them down and back. Make several shoulder circles in both directions.

Reflection: This exercise was the most useful of the work I did today. I really enjoyed doing this circle work because it was repetitive and I felt my head and neck were aligned after I had finished. With Linklater, I did a lot of back and forth neck work and shoulder shrugs, but this was good doing something different. It also was useful because I went both clockwise and counterclockwise.Linklater's work had me solely going back and forth, which made it more difficult to find true alignment.

The exercise for the lower jaw is as follows:

Drop your head forward, bend your knees slightly. Allow some space between your upper and lower teeth. As you exhale, gently shake your head from side to side and allow your relaxed lower jaw, tongue and checks to flutter with the shaking.

Reflection: This exercise was not as helpful as useful as the other two. The shaking exercise reminded me of an exercise we did last semester in which we laid on the ground and shook out like a bug (similar to the dog GIF pictured right). This exercise, while seemingly silly, was helpful because I was able to have fun and relax. The portion of this exercise with the jaw was super similar even though it did not involve touch of sound.

Tomorrow I will repeat this work to hopefully get it in my body more and share some key pieces in my research.