Your hands are how you connect with the world.
They can create art, a boundary, an expression. They can touch with clarity, tenderness, skill. They can offer support, strength, gentleness.
Pause for a moment right now and consider what your hands have done since you awoke this morning. Even if you’re still in bed, I bet they’ve done a lot.
We use our hands so much that we often take them for granted. Whatever you’ve been doing with your hands today, here is a simple, 4-step hand-care practice that you can do in less than 5 minutes wherever you are either standing or seated.
Handy Hand Care Practice ~ 4 Steps to Happy Hands
1. Swing
Your hands are, of course, intricately connected to your arms and shoulders. Releasing tension in the whole arm positively impacts the hands.
Either standing or seated (just scootch yourself to the edge of your chair so your arms don’t hit anything), swing your arms front and back. Wrap your arms around you in a hug and then swing them easy and wide. If you want to get fancy, switch the arm that is on top as you hug around front. Do this ten or more times as long as it feels good.
2. Shake
Each of your hands has 27 joints, 34 muscles, and over 100 ligaments and tendons. Since we are using them all the time, chronic tension can build in these amazing, complicated structures.
Shake out your hands at the wrists. Gently release and shake your hands in any way that feels good. My wrists are sometimes tender, so take care and shake gently (perhaps more like you are flicking water off your fingers) or more vigorously depending on what feels helpful and relaxing.
3. Squeeze
Imagine your whole arm is a tube of paint and you want to gently but firmly squeeze all the goodness from your neck to your fingertips.
Place your right hand on the left side of your neck behind your left ear and gently squeeze from the top of your neck, down the side, across the top of your left shoulder, to the outside of your left shoulder, down your upper arm, into your lower arm and then into your hand and fingers. Take your time working from top to bottom, noticing any places of tension or tenderness. Pause there to give extra attention. When you get to your left hand, squeeze in particular the muscles at the base of your thumb, and on the outside/little finger edge of your hand and give attention to each finger.
Do the same on the other side, with your left hand moving from your right neck all the way down to your right hand and fingers.
4. Love
Now pause, close your eyes and feel your hands from the inside. Take a few breaths to notice the direct experience of your hands. Rather than what they look like, what they do, what jewelry they wear, simply feel what they feel like to you. Are they hot or cold? Tingling or pulsing? Sensitive or numb? What do your hands feel like?
Now open your eyes and look at your hands as if you’ve never seen them before. Imagine someone telling you everything your hands have done for you this week – not in your whole life, just this week. Every single vegetable chopped, hand shook (or fist bumped), every shirt folded, and soap applied. Every thing your hands have done. Take a breath of gratitude for your incredible hands.
Finally, do something loving for your hands. Maybe massage them some more. Or put some good lotion on them. Or slide them into warm mittens. Give your hands some love.
Your hands are the connection between your mind and heart and everything around you…including yourself. As you move through your day notice how you connect with objects, other people, and your own body with your hands.
You are amazing. Exactly as you are. Your hands are, too. Celebrate both of you.