Up until now I just do the body shaking exercise, and it removes stiffness.
I don’t hear about the face shaking exercise either, but I do some face massaging and it does help me to have a more expressive face.
Not sure what body shaking exercise u r referring to
@Dr.X . As for TRE, I believe that one of the Bacchus' field reports and also some of Carousel's posts the body shaking exercise of TRE is supposed to transition into face shaking. I've experienced this before on my own where I have somewhat successfully channeled the shaking from body to the neck and then consciously telling my face to relax and then all the sad/angry baby expressions come out
I think Carousel said that if u aren't getting the face to shake during TRE u aren't getting the full benefit.
I've seen some comments on the face massaging on this forum but yet to try that out.
Here's some sort of a field report of the first 5 TRE attempts that I did over the past 1.5 weeks.
1st attempt: Stomach was so tight and I didn't even know how to get it to shake. So I stopped at shaking of the legs because I didn't know what to do. The thing I've realised throughout the 5 attempts I've had at TRE so far is that:
1. especially when ur muscles are tight u need to be quite significantly fatigued to activate the shaking
2. The shaking may not and should not (at least I think so) need to be activated on it's own. Sometimes it's fine to deliberately jerk your body a bit to trigger more shaking. Something else I've also found helpful, is to consciously say to myself in my mind "it's fine (my name), release the chest and let it shake and let it go"
2nd attempt (The next day after first attempt): Since I actually work out daily in my room, I planned to try my second attempt at TRE immediately after the workout. I sleep on a futon-style mattress so that's also where I've been doing my TRE since I haven't got an exercise mat. I had to deliberately jerk my stomach a bit to get it really shaking but after this attempt my stomach area no longer had any problems getting into shaking. The futon-style mattress helped me because as my stomach started to shake more violently, my chest started bouncing on the mattress and that triggered even more shaking. With some deliberate jerking and conscious effort of shaking the shoulders, I managed to get the shaking to spread to my chest for a brief few minutes
From this point on, I started doing TRE only immediately after I finished my workout
3rd attempt (The next day after the second attempt): Just a matter of doing the same thing that I did for the second attempt and this time I managed to get my chest shaking more violently. Somewhere around here I realised that because tremors are in waves:
It's quite important to get the stomach area shaking as vigorously as possible before putting the legs in the rest position and allowing the stomach to jerk on its own because its easy to lose the jerking momentum if u didn't build up a lot of momentum in the first place.
If u built up a lot of momentum to start with and managed to get some extremely violent shaking going, then it's quite easy to channel this jerking into the upper parts of the upper body including the neck.
Did not manage to get my face flinching/tremoring/ contracting this time but I was taking very deep, long, fast sad huffs that were bringing some emotions out in me and causing me to frown.
4th attempt: Did the exact same thing as the third workout. Built good momentum in the stomach area with really violent shaking and then during the workout I deliberately twisted my body on both sides to allow the sides of my chest, the muscles under the armpits stretching to the front and back of the chest to shake. Felt very good. Then I stopped the shaking then started it again from scratch in the stomach area and then I managed to get my face shaking.
While my chest was shaking, my arms were raised up in the air and not resting on the bed like how a boxhead zombie holds it hands up, and sometimes the jerking of my body would cause one of my arms to get tossed over to the other side of my chest with the arm lying over my chest (but still shaking)
In my case this was in the form of distinct, strong, steady contractions happening once every 0.5-1 seconds with upper lip and frowning muscles contracting, and my body was not in a supine position but lying to one side and my head rolling off to the side so my face was resting sideways on the bed. While this happened, deep breathing in the form of sadness and helplessness. The facial contractions were quite in sync with very deep and fast breaths.
5th attempt: Forgot to build momentum and very violent shaking in stomach area before putting legs in rest position and waiting for momentum of jerking to shift to upper parts of chest and head and neck. So it to quite a few attempts to eventually have my face shaking. This time the face shaking and contractions that I experienced involved stretching of the lower lip and some wierd raising of the eyebrows. Managed to get the chest to shake more naturally on its own than during my 4th attempt.
Hope this helps to others trying and starting TRE.
