Whole-Body Integration

The Psoas as an Anti-Gravity Machine!

One of my Seattle Rolfer™ colleagues shared this on a discussion forum we have for its relevance to the psoas muscle. In the Rolfing® Structural Integration world, we love (worship?) the psoas, which spans two joints. Broadly speaking, it's the "iliopsoas," with the "psoas" portion going from the femur to the lumbar spine and the "iliacus" going from the femur to the iliac crest of the hip. It's a hip flexor, and is the first muscle to engage as you flex your hip (raise your knee); it's also the muscle that stabilizes when you stand on one leg.

When it's spasmed, the back can go out. Ever heard a friend say his back is out and he can't put on his socks or pants? Well, to do that you have to flex your hip, so this points to the psoas being involved. A tight psoas can also cause many pelvic tilt issues or lumbar sidebends. And not surprisingly – because it travels along the colon and kidneys – there can be a visceral relationship here too.

A happy psoas? An integrated psoas? Watch the lead dancer in this video from 1964 and check out the lubrication of that pelvis and how lightly and easily he flexes his hips. All the dancers move well enough, but he stands out for the light quality of his movement. 

Now Ida Rolf, the founder of Rolfing Structural Integration, was born in 1896, so her reference point was an earlier era. She always spoke of Fred Astaire as having the "perfect psoas." Watch this video and you'll see the same light quality, his legs just float under him, so that Gene Kelly seems relatively earthbound by comparison. 

In working with my Seattle Rolfing clients, I very often do some psoas work – a little or alot! While it may seem paradoxical, the psoas can even play a role in neck and shoulder issues. Anatomically, it's in a different region, but if the psoas is tight and shortening the whole anterior of the body, it will be implicated in a forward-head posture and shoulder-girdle slump. It's a hip flexor, right? When you sit all day long at a desk, your psoas is in that flexed (shortened) posture all day, and lengthening becomes imperative for proper alignment and integration. How to stretch your psoas? – lunges (yogic or otherwise).

So whether it's back pain from an auto/work accident, a sports injury, or too much yardwork; poor posture; a tight pelvis; or a heavy, clunky quality to the legs, learning about your psoas and getting better psoas length and integration may help put you back in your dancing shoes!

 

Empathy vs. Sympathy and Its Role in Healing

This brilliant animation on the difference between empathy and sympathy has dialogue from this talk by Brené Brown. The whole talk is well worth listening to, and this animation is a wonderful extract of one of her points, where the art beautifully and whimsically illustrates the content. 

At one point in the longer talk, Brown says "Our capacity for whole-heartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted: which is a terrible thing, but a truthful thing." Empathy requires the capacity to be present to another – which includes being present to our own pain. This requires vulnerability, letting down the defenses around our hearts. 

She speaks of this in terms of interpersonal relationships, but from my bodywork practice in Seattle – whether the client is seeing me for Rolfing® Structural Integration, craniosacral work, visceral work, whatever – I feel the question is also one to address to ourselves, to the wounded places, to the parts in pain. People don't like to feel pain, and we tend to defend against our mental and physical pain. I hear clients say things like "I hate my body," or "I wish I could get rid of this bad knee, just cut it off!", and they usually are oblivious to the violence they are expressing towards themselves. 

I work with whole-body integration, with uniting the mind, body, emotions, and spirit. That means letting the mind be aware of the hurt, letting the heart feel the pain, letting your being feel how physical pain affects your spirit. Going back to the animation above, the question becomes "Can you be empathic to your own pain?" Instead of doing the sympathy trip – telling yourself something like "my [knee] sucks, but at least I have xyz in my life" – can you open your heart to that body part, can you fully feel in your body what is going on in the tissue rather than armoring against it? Can you wholeheartedly be with your own pain? 

While my work could probably help many people without that kind of emotional vulnerability on their part, multidimensional transformation comes from being deeply human, which means opening to all aspects of ourselves. Being human is being vulnerable. The more of you is available in receiving bodywork, the deeper the work can penetrate, the more it can support self-healing and be more than a quick fix.

 

Instinctual Intelligence and the Belly Center

I had to share the link to this amazing fox video.

First, as a Rolfer™ who works with bodies everyday – from the ordinary to the super athletic – I'm always blown away by what the human body can do (and how it can change!), and in this case what an animal body can do. Such amazing grace as this beautiful creatures dives into the snow for field mice underneath.

Then, as a meditator and student of mind-body-spirit integration, I marvel at animals' instinctual intelligence. The narrator says that the fox is most successful at catching the mice – about 75% of the time – when it is oriented to true north as it dives. Yet, clearly an animal doesn't do this as a mental, head-based process of "plotting a trajectory." Rather, this is going to be a deeply instinctual, embodied action, and that is part of what causes the grace.

Have you ever noticed how clunky your movements can be when you are self-conscious? – like when you first try to learn to windsurf or dance? It is only when our movements are deeply entrained into body intelligence (the belly center – which the Japanese martial artists call the hara and the Chinese the dantian) that we find that fluidity. Not surprisingly, the belly center is considered the "center of being" and many meditative traditions teach practices of concentration on this area as a way to develop presence. When the belly center is integrated, we move from "fitness" to "art" in our movements. This is the difference between an ordinary person mindlessly pumping away on an exercise machine while watching the TV screen at the gym and the grace of a dancer or martial artist whose mind is focused but relaxed and deeply present with his or her movement. (You don't see martial artists and dancers watching CNN on video screens as they work out!)

The belly center truly does have a function of intelligence, as is recognized in the common expressions of having a "gut feeling" or "I knew it in my gut." Yet we so often tend to focus our minds and knowing in our heads, and become disembodied as a result. Optimal intelligence, function, and grace comes when the whole body is integrated so that mind-body-spirit function as one.

In my Rolfing® Structural Integration practice in Seattle, I work with clients' bodies to free up tensions and restrictions, to enhance range of motion, to create natural alignment, and – critically – to enhance body awareness so that there is more possibility of integrated function and mind-body-spirit integration. Let us all aspire to the grace of foxes!

"The Epic Split": With Commentary on the Adductors, Leg Swing, Low-Back Pain

In Rolfing® Structural Integration, we have a classic 10-Session Series that I tell my Seattle clients to think of as a 50,000-mile tune-up on their bodies: it's a very thorough protocol to align and balance the body in gravity, strategized and tailored for each person. One of my favorite sessions of the Series is the 4th session, where we work the inner line of the leg to increase leg swing and connect a sense of lift from the arch of the foot to the pelvic floor – a mysterious connection that relates to Ida Rolf's axiom that gravity will lift an aligned body, rather than drag it down. 

Among the key structures of the inner leg are the adductors – a group of muscles between the quadriceps group in the front and the hamstring group in the back. The adductors connect onto the pelvis at their upper end, and when tight can "drag" on it, and through the pelvis drag on the spine, contributing to low-back pain.

When contracted, the adductors bring your legs together. When relaxed, they allow your legs to spread. Now watch the linked video.

For your legs to go into the splits like Jean-Claude Van Damme does here, you have to have good adductor length - as well as superb control to gradually let the muscles go. [Any of you who do Pilates reformer work will know this from the move where you have one foot stabilized on the frame, and the other on the unfixed carriage, using the adductors to bring the carriage in and slowly release it out.] 

Most people can't do the splits because their adductors are too shortened, and unfortunately these muscles are neglected in most people's stretching programs. An exception to this is martial artists, and I think it's no accident that Van Damme is a martial artist. If you are going to do any kicks into the air and moves like that, you need adductor length, and you need your adductors to have fascial glide relative to the quads and hamstrings. In most human beings who are not martial artists or dancers, the adductors are shortened – dragging on the pelvis – and bound up with either the quads or the hamstrings or both. A session with a Rolfer™ can help free and lengthen your adductors, resulting in much more mobility (a longer stride for runners), which often helps to relieve low-back pain as each step you take is no longer dragging on your pelvis.

And of course Van Damme shows amazing self-possession and centering here. He's clearly trained his mind and emotions, not just his body.

An Amazing Demonstration of Strength + Flexibility + Embodiment

I had never heard of "acrobatic gymnastics" before seeing this. As a Rolfer™ in Seattle I've had dancer and yogi clients with good core strength and flexibility, but this is off the charts. 

As a meditator, I'm also interested in the concentration and mindfulness aspecs present here, which are unique since this is a team event. To do this discipline, each of the three young women must be impeccably present in her own body, with the single-pointed focus that many meditation practices work to develop. Yet as a team event that relies on intricate multi-body balance, each participant also needs to be acutely aware of what the others are doing for these combined poses, which is more an aspect of field awareness. In a sense, they have to function almost as a group organism. 

If they were in Seattle, I'd love to do some Rolfing® Structural Integration on them and see what their muscles and fascia feel like. I would expect a nice quality to the fascia, as the flexibilty required of them would lengthen the muscles to counterbalance any contraction from their strength training. It's the balance of contraction and lengthening that allows the fascial envelope around the muscle to stay resilient and hydrated. 

New Year's Resolution: Exercise for a Healthy Brain

As we move past the winter solstice – allowing our dark Seattle days to gradually become lighter! – and into 2014, my mind is on my vision for the new year, which includes improving my level of health and fitness. I found some great support for that today in a blog post by The New York Times health and fitness writer Gretchen Reynolds. She surveys research that links the evolution of the human brain and cognitive capacity to the development of physical fitness and endurance, suggesting that "if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today." 

Sounds great, especially as there's also reams of research linking physical activity to longevity and happiness and quality of life. As you engage in any new activity or increase in your current level of activity, it's important to avoid injury so that your program is not derailed. Here's a few words of advice from my professional background and training in bodywork and movement:

• Any increase in activity or training needs to be gradual and intelligent: don't "just do it" but listen to your body and what it tells you as you move, as discussed here. Work out in a harmonious relationship with your body, not as its dictator.

• As you add in or amp up strength training or cardio workouts, be sure to stretch as well. I recommend yoga (particularly  Viniyoga) and Scott Sonnon's Intu Flow (which you can learn from  this dvd or on YouTube in this video and others.) I'll be writing more about Intu Flow in the future as I work with it myself, but my initial impression from doing it for about 6 weeks is that it is an awesome methodology for joint health and mobility, plus it is fun to practice.

• To support your physical activity, you may want to consider bodywork, particularly Rolfing® Structural Integration and manual therapy for the nerves to open up stuck fascia around the muscles, joints, and nerves. These "gunky" shortened areas will be challenged as you increase your level of activity, and you may feel restrictions there as either tension or pain that will make you lose heart rather than stick to your program. Some quick tune up sessions can easily jump start your range of motion and make it easier to stay on track.

• For the truly inspired, you may want to consider the Rolfing Ten Series, a ten-session protocol that I describe as "a 50,000 mile tune-up for your body." 

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy 2014!

 

 

Thanksgiving - The View of Gratitude, Inspired by Leonard Cohen

One of my Rolfing® clients recently mentioned a book he is reading about "rewriting your life story." Without knowing more about the book, that snippet led me to a contemplation that evening where I reviewed my life, not from the nitty-gritty of what issues and conditioning I had to overcome but rather from what I appreciated about the twists and turns and how that has brought me to growth, situations, and people I might never have otherwise been open enough to encounter. For example, I can't imagine that my "disembodied" upbringing could have led me to my life now, self-employed in this strange but profound bodywork profession of Rolfing Structural Integration, were it not for various people, situations, and opportunities that each allowed me to open a little further, expand a bit more, develop mind-body-spirit and transform past what was the restrictive norm in my family and community. It was a very heartening exploration, appropriate as we approach Thanksgiving, a time of gratitude and appreciation.

On the same theme of gratitude, yesterday I came across this lovely speech by Leonard Cohen, given on his being awarded the 2011 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. This Spanish award honors Cohen whose "poems and songs have beautifully explored the major issues of humanity in great depth." In the speech, Cohen acknowledges the mysterious vagaries of life, the twists and turns by which unexpected pieces led him to his poetry - through the inspiration of the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca - and to his song - through a random meeting with a young flamenco guitar player who taught him a six-chord progression that "has been the basis of all my songs and all my music."

He thus honors the artistry of Spain and concludes his speech by saying, "Everything that you have found favourable in my work comes from this place. Everything, everything that you have found favourable in my songs and my poetry are inspired by this soil. So, I thank you so much for the warm hospitality that you have shown my work because it is really yours, and you have allowed me to affix my signature to the bottom of the page."

Read that again, if you will. Let it impact you. Have you ever heard an artist pay such selfless tribute to another person, country, or lineage? Cohen is an extraordinarily selfless being, or perhaps it's that his life and Buddhist practice has led him to that over time, as he is now in his 70s. The same humility, the same graciousness, was evident when I saw him perform in Seattle in 2009: Cohen would respond to solos from members of his band with a bow, palms together, and he ceaselessly thanked the audience for coming to hear him perform, as if we were doing him a favor. 

Inspired by this, may we all grow into humility and grace. May we all remember to thank those who have helped us, guided us, taught us, inspired us. And may we all remember to pay tribute to the mystery that unfolds us ever so gently.

 

Orcas Right Off Vashon Island!

This is not about Rolfing® Structural Integration. It's about the beautiful Pacific Northwest where I moved six years ago. The camera work on the video is shaky (I think it's a cell camera and the woman was trying to control her dog or child) but it is amazing footage of a pod of orcas right offshore from Point Robinson on Vashon Island on October 28. My friend who lives out there got a call that orcas were headed that way and went out to see them from shore - lucky! - and she sent me the link (thanks, Laura!).

Rolfing® SI Helps NFL Players Stay in the Game

As we are in the football season, I thought I'd share some memories, thoughts, and resources for those interested in how Rolfing® Structural Integration can help professional athletes.

I personally am not a football fan. I've never tried to learn the rules of it, so I see large men clobbering each other to advance a few feet on the field, then everyone takes a break. I hear there's alot of strategy involved for those in the know that makes it compelling. While my interest in the game is minimal, I am nevertheless fascinated by the bodies.

Many years ago, when I was doing deep-tissue massage at a spa on Maui, I had the privilege of working on two NFL players. I say "privilege" because professional athletes' bodies are like fine-tuned sports cars, anatomy developed to a specific, driven purpose. One was a linebacker, and he was built like a tank. I knew enough about football to know that his job was to jump on the other guys. I worked around this gigantic muscular form for an hour, not getting much response but grunts. I was gratified later when one of the spa attendants told me, "I asked him how his massage was, and all he said was "Damn!" I figured that meant I'd made an impact. (I had a reputation for being able to go really deep.)

The other gentleman was a wide receiver (apparently that year's Heisman trophy winner). The body type couldn't have been more different. Again, fantastic muscular development, absolutely sculpted, but this guy was lithe like a ballet dancer. Not knowing about football, I had to ask him what a wide receiver did that he was not built with bulk, and he helped me to understand that his job was to run fast, not get jumped on, and catch the ball and run more. So bulk would not have been in his favor, but man he needed those glutes and leg muscles.

That's about the extent of my understanding of football and my experience working with pro players, but here's a video of a Rolfer™, Wayne Henningsgaard from Minnesota, who has made working with NFL players a niche element in his practice. It's old, but has some nice interview time wth Wayne and video of him working on some Vikings.

 

As Editor-in-Chief of Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute®, I knew Wayne's reputation in this area, and a few years ago I invited him and his wife Sandy (also a Rolfer) to write about their Rolfing work with NFL players for our publication. That article can be viewed here. It's quite an interesting read, about how they work with athletes in training, the time demands of working during the season, and a charming story about Sandy coming home one day to find three Vikings playing football in her backyard with a passel of eight-year-old boys (it must have made their day!).

The upshot is that Rolfing sessions can help any athlete with faster recovery from injuries that occur during training and play, and can prolong a career that depends on optimal functioning of the body. Likewise, for those who are not athletes but have careers that are physically demanding in other ways – like construction, supermarket stocking, massage therapy, long-distance trucking – Rolfing sessions could be a way to help you stay in your game.

 

 

 

 

 

Seattle Has a Superhero

Check this out: Seattle has a posse of guys who dress as superheros to stop crime! From reading an article about Phoenix Jones, apparently he and his team all have either military or mixed martial arts backgrounds - that shows in his build, particularly those crazy quads. He seems to have fairly good mobility for being encased in rubber, although I'd say his body is somewhat on the tight side, probably particularly in the IT bands and quads, also through the quadratus lumborum as you see him sidebend quite a bit in his walk. I think his current uniform is a big improvement from the earlier one seen here.

I'd like to try a session on a superhero, so if anyone knows this guy, have him call me! I think Rolfing® Structural Integration could help him move a bit more smoothly, aiding his vigilante activities!