The Psoas Muscles and Breathing
There is a center of breathing — at the region of the diaphragm/solar plexus.
Common breathing instructions would have you breathe into the belly. While this instruction is appropriate for people who are “chest breathers”, as a compensatory instruction, it’s not the final word.
Abdominal breathing instructions liken the diaphragm to a piston that, as it draws out of the chest cavity, produces a suction — inhalation. However, this view is incomplete and actually leads to restriction of the chest, as people overcompensate, breathing into the belly, which, though better than breathing with the chest (so-called, “deep” breathing, which is actually shallow breathing), is less than optimal and has side effects on posture.
Those side effects include tension patterns that disturb balance and movement, including walking.
Walking is the “psoas connection”; the psoas muscles initiate walking movements. The tendons of the iliopsoas muscles “interleave” with those of the diaphragm at the high end of the lumbar spine; movements of one affect movements of the other. So improper breathing from outside the center of breathing causes us to initiate movement from a location other than our central core, contributing to tension and awkwardness (that can be recognized as awkward only in contrast to the feelings of well-integrated movement, which people typically do not have, and which this exercise provides).
In optimal breathing, we expand more like balloons, with the center of breathing being the expansion point and with the breath producing sensations at least to the floor of the pelvis and into the head.
The exercise taught here teaches you how to find that central location and then, after a bit of practice leaves you breathing naturally into and from the center of breathing without any special effort to do so.
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Recent articles about “sitting injuries” highlight the possible consequences of sitting for too long.
To that, I add, “sitting at a high level of concentration with minimal movement.” The combination sets up a pattern of tension involving the psoas muscles, hip joint flexors (near the front pockets of your trousers), and the low back muscles.
This entry clarifies the “why” of such sitting injuries and how to avoid them.
In the ’90s, I became aware of a fanciful seating alternative called ‘The Nada-chair”.
It consisted of two loops, about thigh length, attached at opposite sides of a back-pad. The loops went about ones knees, the back-pad behind your sacrum/low back. The pull on the loops by your knees pulled the back-pad against you, creating a secure support for your back. All you needed to do was stay balanced.
The ilio-psoas muscles perform a similar function, although attached at your groins, not at your knees. The part that pulls on your back like the back-pad (but on the inside), we call the psoas muscles; the part that pulls on your pelvis from the inside, we call the iliacus muscles. Together, they share a tendon at your groin, and so we call them the iliopsoas muscles. They span the distances between your groin on each side and your low back and between your groin and your inner pelvis on both sides. Their pull on your low back is like the pull on the back-pad, only along more of your back as high as your diaphragm; their pull on your pelvis on both inside surfaces pulls the pelvis top-forward, adding to the support of your back.
In that way, your iliopsoas muscles are like the Nada-chair. When you are sitting in a chair, your iliopsoas muscles shorten to hold you up, especially if you are sit perched on the edge of your chair (as so many do), but those muscles shorten also in those who slouch back in their chairs and hunch forward.
Tight Hamstrings: a Big Deal
When your hamstrings get tight, as happens when you get into — and work in — a high-stress-state too often and for too long, your hamstrings pull on your sitbones (deep to the creases of the buttocks). In the sitting position, tight hamstrings pull your bottom out from under you, forward; they cause you to sit too much on your “pockets” (tailbone). Tight hamstrings are one reason people slouch back in their chairs.
To sit erect, under that condition, people with tight hamstrings
must tighten their hip joint flexors and psoas muscles to counteract
the pull, to bring themselves forward and lift themselves up.
Then,
the same high stress state tightens the back muscles, as part of a
pattern of nervous tension. Eventually, the back muscles tire and the
person slumps.
Please see this article and the embedded instructional video to free tight hamstrings.
So, in closing
If you spend too much time in your chair, particularly at attention at a high level of stress, with minimal movement, in either position, you have successfully followed the formula for creating tight, short iliopsoas muscles. Congratulations.
Not only that, but muscles under tension formed this way and maintained by habit are the first to tighten under stress and the last to let go when the stress is over. That’s one explanation for why people mysteriously tighten up into pain some time after an injury.
We become how we live. We get more and more familiar with being certain ways, more and more ready to be those ways, more and more set in the muscular tension set of those ways, our attitudes and our remembered reactions to everything that’s happened to us in our lives. It all builds up as our “set” — as in “set in our ways” — a pattern of muscular tension as well as a psychological state.
Sit for too many hours all the time, your Nada-chair muscles get set at a shortened length. You can never really stand up all the way. If tension accumulates, those muscles may become too tight even when lying down and you won’t be able to sleep on your stomach. The same thing happens with your hamstrings and your back, only it’s your knees and back that get affected, until you develop groin pain, deep pelvic pain, a deep belly-ache, and possibly sacro-iliac pain.
Then, your massage therapist gets his or her elbow ready. Are you ready?
There is an alternative.
You can do something to change your postural set (which comes from muscle/movement memory) — besides “trying to have good posture”, which doesn’t work very well, you may have noticed.
If you take these steps, you’ll end the pain, be able to stand up and walk comfortably, at last.
If you don’t, you may just stay in the condition you’re in, which brought you to this page.
As it happens, it isn’t exactly rocket science to understand why the psoas muscles get tight. The answer is, “insults and injuries”. When we get uptight, we get tight.
(For the clinicians out there, the tension is part of a larger pattern of psychomotor/ neuromuscular tension activated by stress and maintained as an activated memory pattern, and that kind of tension involves the body-core.) When we get injured, we tighten up in Trauma Reflex (cringe response).
Insults and injuries form memory patterns. We never completely forget. Insults and injuries that occurred when we were not up to the demand of an experience leave their mark in memory. Immaturity may lead to painful experiences. And the memory of those experiences is not just “inner” and “emotional”, different from the body, but present as the felt state of the body: patterns of tension and other stress-induced changes resident in memory and activated — the physical sensations of the memory, carried all the way through to the core and experienced to a greater or lesser degree as physical changes.
For that reason, single-muscle releases miss a lot of the tension pattern of which tight psoas muscles are a part.
There’s more.
In “An Essential Understanding of the Psoas Muscles“, I use the term, “open core”. I refer to a person’s “full stature”. I talk about the nervous system’s centralized role in regulating muscular tension in arising from rest to sitting, standing, and walking; for each of those movements, a corresponding state of mind exists. I’ll go into that shortly; as you’ll see, it’s pretty obvious, when pointed out.
Chronically tight psoas muscles indicate the existence of stuck movement-memory patterns. To free tight psoas muscles, we must release the trigger of the tension — whether the memory of activity (movement), of a sensation (injury), or of emotional stress. Then, we must integrate the movements of our psoas muscles into larger, healthy postural and movement patterns, such as those of sitting or walking.
“Release” doesn’t necessarily mean catharsis. It means getting unstuck. Catharsis is the explosive uncorking of pent-up emotion when we release resistance to doing so suddenly. Better, to regulate the resistance and the emotion, together, and do the releasing gracefully and essentially comfortably.
Memories are congealed patterns of experience. The more we return to them, the more ingrained they get. Then, they show up as habitual patterns of tension.
A person stuck in a habit pattern is enclosed in the habit and to that degree, closed to new experience. There’s no space. All there is, is the repetitive replay of memory. Noise. The closed (or hard-) core condition.
However, a deliberate, new action can modify a habit – but only if that new action first softens up the habit.
The key to softening up a habit is to recover the experience of creating it, to begin with. That means that a person deliberately does what ordinarily “happens by itself” until (s)he can feel that (s)he is doing it, rather than that it happening to her/him. It has to do with recreating the habit pattern, deliberately. The saying is, “Whatever you are doing wrong, do it more, and then less. That action melts the mold of a habit so that it can be remolded.
To hear his experience, click above.
In that state of “melt”, the person no longer feels identical to (or trapped in and by) that habit; (s)he has transcended it. That transcendence provides the space for the emergence of The New (in whatever form).
We deliberately to do the movement actions of the tight psoas pattern (which involves many muscles and movement elements), add energy to them. When we do that, we feel those muscles “give in” and relax, as we relax. Step-by-step instruction in a program such as Free Your Psoas, guides you through the larger tension/movement patterns.
BACK TO THE PSOAS
The modes of psoas function – rest/repose to sitting, to standing, to walking, correspond to states of the psyche. As I said, it’s pretty obvious.
* REST/REPOSE: no intention, no readiness, no engagement with experience
Although sleep may seem the very definition of rest, sleep is no necessarily restful. Ask anyone with insomnia. Dream sleep involves emotional, mental, and subtle physical activity (e.g., REM — Rapid Eye Movement sleep). Deep, dreamless sleep is as close as most of us come, and generally, tense people stay tense even during sleep. Waking repose is generally not full rest.
* SITTING: coming to some higher degree of activity; mental and emotional engagement
* STANDING: coming to a still higher level of activity; active mental, emotional and physical engagement
* WALKING etc.: coming to a still higher level of activity and engagement
Any “hold” at any of these levels is a limit on the responsiveness of the psoas/iliopsoas muscles, generally at some level of contraction that you can’t relax by ordinary means.
If the psoas muscles are simply non-functional, they express a pattern of immaturity in which the person is either passive, relatively receptive like a child, without initiative, or without the capacity to formulate a deliberate intention and more concerned with outer appearances than with true intentions. It’s an arrested (ar-“rested”) state of development.
If the psoas muscles are equally tight, left and right, but very short, they express the stuck pattern of sitting and the mood of sitting — limited action and actually a restraint upon taking a stand (standing up) and taking moving action. It’s an arrested state of starting things.
If the psoas muscles are equally tight, but free enough to permit standing up without pain, they express a pattern of high arousal, but without action (repressed action). In this state, the spinal muscles, which get tighter as arousal level increases, arch the spine backward; the psoas muscles pull the top of the pelvis and lumbar spine forward, and the person exists in a state of co-contraction, which involves low grade low back pain from back muscle fatigue.
If the psoas muscles are asymmetrically tight, they usually express a stuck pattern of action, as if stopped mid-step in a standing position. It’s an arrested state of follow-through and often the state of a prior leg or foot injury that triggered a cringe response and changed the walking pattern. Alternately, there may have been a hard fall or other pelvic injury that knocked the sacrum (central pelvic bone, in back) off center and triggered a psoas muscle response.
All cases of chronically tight psoas muscles express an inability to come to complete rest, as one would expect after completing some activity.
Physical and/or emotional trauma can create a memory impression sufficiently fixated to create chronic muscular tensions of this type. So can voluntary actions repetitively done or done for a longer period of time at a high level of intensity. These memory impressions function as if the situation is still happening in present time – with the attendant emotional flavor and arousal state.
As I said in the other article, as a generality, people never experience deep rest; they/we are stuck at some level of activity, some level of tension, stuck in some pattern of memory, of arousal, of reactivity, of resistance to outer things and to things inside ourselves.
As the psoas muscles are involved in every state of arousal from rest to full activity, a person stuck at some state of activity has psoas muscles (and actually, the entire musculature, to some degree) stuck at some level of activity. This statement is, of course, an oversimplification, but as a generalization, it holds good.
To the degree that we are stuck in a memory at the physical level (memory of repetitive action, memory of injury), at the emotional level (memory of experience, memory of insult), or at the mental level (memory of worldview, memory of limitation), we are stuck in a closed/hard-core condition, unavailable to new information, new experience, change.
In general, we are held in a pattern and prevented from coming to our full stature, our best balance, our self-assurance, our freedom.
That means that psoas muscles don’t lengthen freely when coming from sitting to standing. We never get completely out of the crouch; we never elongate fully unless we apply extra effort (generally as an automatic action). We never come to our full stature.
And we are always held in a pattern. It’s just that the pattern may be long-term dysfunctional or short-term functional.
If it’s long-term dysfunctional, we are responding out of habit, maintaining our pattern with a sense of friction against some outer experience or in a state of conflict with our inner experience or preference, in a kind of chronic state of emergency. If it’s a short-term functional pattern, it’s emerging and changing in the moment, playing out freely as a stream of experiences: sensations, emotions, ideas arising without an effort to prevent or force them, a creative stream of new emergence by which we may bring something new (not memory-based or conforming to an existing memory mold).
Creating something tangible in that stream of creative emergence involves a state of alignment in which, if we “take our hands off the steering wheel,” things continue to go along with a kind of momentum. It’s called being “in the groove”, “getting your groove on”, “in the zone”. The flow flows without much fuss. Open core, free sleeve. Resilient, responsive psoas muscles.
IN THE ABSTRACT
In the abstract, an awakening or filling out of somatic awareness involves recognizing when we are fixated in stress-patterns (memories) and progressively melting the mold of memory. The mold of memory keeps us in patterns of tension, formed some time ago. To melt the mold of memory permits us to continue to dissolve, and evolve, to reshape all the way through to the core.
With each increment of “melt”; we elongate into looser movement and a more comfortable balance. By melting, we surrender both to staying the same and changing. We let ourselves stay the same, and also let ourselves change
Without that “melt”, attempts to free the psoas muscles and the core are limited to the degree to which we have already outgrown our earlier memory patterns and can release them. In other words, a limited amount.
And, in any case, the limitations of our present existence are the present temporary limit to which we can be free in mind and in the musculature.
AND CONCRETELY
Somatic education is a good place to start. Develop greater mastery of your attention. Learn to feel and, through your attention combined with movement and memory exercises, to melt the ways in which you, like jello, are set.
Put yourself together, better. Streamline your abilities by developing a bodily sense of organization that affects everything you do, from how you pay attention to how you understand how things function, to how you upgrade your abilities. Know distinctly the difference between not getting results and getting results and whether the result closely met your intention..
And, of course, there’s reverse the cumulative effects of stress-memories that make you age faster, and recapture some of your lost youth (or masterful athletic expertise, if you’re an injured athlete).
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