While “good posture” is considered a sign of good movement health, there are true and false teachings about how to achieve it.
The popular view of good posture is that it is something you have to maintain; it’s a “good” holding pattern. The concepts, “neutral spine position” and “alignment”, fall into this category. “Shoulders back, chest up, stomach in” are typical instructions for maintaining good posture.
The popular view and the typical instructions I have described constitutes a false teaching about good posture — and by false, I mean detrimental.
Here’s why: It adds strain to an already strained muscular system and unnaturally restrains movement.
The common teaching about good posture assumes that good posture is not the natural or free condition and that one must therefore do something to maintain it. This view may seem reasonable and inevitable; “If you don’t do something to maintain good posture, you’re left with the poor posture you had, already.”
But an unrecognized truth underlies this assumption: Most people are beset by habitual muscular tension patterns that drag them down from good posture, tension patterns of which they are unaware because they are so used to them, tension patterns formed at the time of injuries or of emotional stress (i.e., nervous tension).
In actuality, good posture is the easiest condition to maintain — if you are free of habitual tension patterns. If not, then you must do something to counteract those tension patterns, to restore good posture. That’s the condition most people are in.
This assertion may be hard to accept until you have experienced the reality of what happens when you get free of your habitual tension state.
Massage and bodywork typically seek to alleviate habitual tension, but with rare exception, they do not alter a person’s postural set because to do so would require a second step: to develop better coordination.
Coordinationis the basis of good movement, good posture, good alignment.
Posture, viewed another way, results from moving into a certain shape and holding it. It’s a function of movement.
Most movements are developed by learning. So is posture.
The difference is that injuries and stress change movement patterns in lasting ways that are commonly beyond the ability of people to change; these movement patterns persist on automatic. That’s why teachings about posture recommend counter-actions to those movement patterns.
So, what’s the answer? Are we forever destined to poor and worsening posture as we grow older?
The answer is, no. But what is needed is a way to undo habitual muscular tensions formed by injuries and stress, not to counteract them (either through “good posture” disciplines or through strengthening of muscles).
Such a way exists. The discipline of clinical somatic education teaches and employs exactly such a way.
All animals with a backbone do a certain action instinctually upon arising from rest, as they become active. This action, commonly mistaken for stretching, involves a strong muscular contraction followed by a leisurely relaxation; different animals have different patterns, but all do it in some form. This action pattern called, “pandiculation”, refreshes the brain’s body image and purges accumulated tension. Birds do it by shrugging their wings back, reaching their legs back, one at a time, and then flapping their wings; cats and dogs do it by first bowing, arching their back, and then shaking. Humans do it in the natural “yawn and morning stretch” (different in performance from the calf or hamstring stretches athletes do).
Clinical somatic education uses techniques that activate this genetically-present action behavior methodically and in a magnified way to free people from the grip of tension patterns formed by injury and stress. In the case of clinical somatic education, we apply the contraction/relaxation behavior to places where the person holds tension; with injuries and stress, these tensions always exist in patterns, so it’s not a matter of “releasing muscles”, but of releasing entire patterns of tension. The result is a lasting release of muscular tension. Then, we teach movement patterns that link muscle groups together in certain inherently well-organized patterns of coordination, to replace less well-organized pathological patterns. It’s a lower-effort, easier, more efficient condition of living.
No longer is the person dragged down from good posture by habitual muscular tension. (S)he is free to stand and move at her or his full stature and in the easy balance that free and well-coordinated movement permits.
The results of pandiculation distinguish the good posture of freedom from tension from the ‘good posture’ maintained by pitting one muscle group (used to maintain good posture) from other muscle groups (held tight by the lingering effects of injury and stress).
Easy balance is the natural state, whether at rest or in movement. Good posture isn’t something you maintain; it’s nearly effortless, the product of good balance and good coordination.
To see and hear how we apply pandiculation to back trouble, view Back Exercises for Lower Back Pain. See other examples of pandiculation instruction in the somatic exercises shown on YouTube channel “Lawrence9Gold”.
A common misconception exists about core exercises or core workouts — even, or particularly, among some athletic trainers. The misunderstanding of which I speak is, “What is ‘core’?”
Commonly the muscles of the abdominal wall are considered, “core”. This is incorrect. Those muscles are surface, the way the skin of an apple is surface to the apple core.
The core muscles are the deepest muscles; they lie closest to the bone (or body center) and exert the greatest control of balance and coordination. Among them, the psoas muscles, the quadratus lumborum, the diaphragm, in the the trunk, and the scalene muscles of the neck and the muscles of swallowing in the throat, as examples — all of which affect spinal alignment, and thereby, balance. Strength is not their primary contribution, and so the notion of “core strengthening” is inherently misguided.
What is sought through core strengthening is usually stability, but stability doesn’t come from strength; it comes from balance.
Balance is a consequence of close coordination between opposing muscles and between muscles and their synergists (helpers).
When a person gets musclebound, as often happens in physical conditioning programs and in cases of injury, close coordination gets distorted, as one muscle or muscle group overpowers another.
Easy balance is impossible when one is in that condition; the person is inherently unstable and muscle tone must shift throughout the body to compensate for those imbalanced in a less-easy stability.
More than that, a person cannot strengthen what they cannot feel, and one can’t feel the core if one muscle group overpowers the other. The core can be sensed only when muscles are closely coordinated in a condition of easy, dynamic balance.
Even if core strengthening exercises give equal attention to strengthening all muscles in the (supposed) core group, they don’t necessarily give attention to both freeing musclebound muscles and developing balanced (i.e., equal) control/coordination of all of those muscles.
More than that, if muscles of the peripheries of the body, e.g., legs, arms, neck, are musclebound or poorly coordinated, they cause unbalancing pulls from the peripheries of the body to the core. They cause instability that cannot be corrected by core strengthening; they can be corrected only by restoring suppleness and balance among opposing muscles and among muscular synergists (mutual helpers).
So, approaches at core conditioning must have the following two elements present:
alleviating musclebound conditioning
developing balanced coordination
That said, I’d like to point you to an example of a core conditioning program that does just that: called, “The Five-Pointed Star“, one of a number of programs people use to alleviate pain, to recover from injury, and to cultivate balance and suppleness.
Another program that has garnered special interest concerns the psoas muscles, Free Your Psoas, also has that effect. Recognizing that the peripheries affect the core, this program presents a whole-body approach to freeing and integrating the psoas muscles.
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).
If you have back pain, then the first thing to consider is that you don’t “have” back pain; back pain “has you” in its grip. That way of describing it would seem to be more true to your experience, wouldn’t it? This video, below, shows how you can get control of the back pain that has you in its grip and then get rid of it, while recovering the comfortable and secure use of your back.
Although some people believe that standard procedures are “time-tested” and inherently more reliable, in this case, the opposite is true. Faster, more complete, and longer-lasting relief can be obtained with a less invasive, “high-touch” procedure that hits “the mark” than by standard procedures that miss “the mark”. What is “the mark”? What to do, right now?
This video shows what you can do to relieve your own back pain and restore freedom of movement. The procedure has helped thousands of people who have already had back surgery or other invasive procedures.
For a clear understanding of a new, more effective approach to back pain than stretching, strengthening, adjustments or massage, please see this page.
For chronic back pain, please see this page, which also contrasts conventional back pain methods (including spinal decompression devices) with an entirely new, more effective approach.
Add your comment — what you would like to ask or tell.
This entry is for you if you have bruxism, orofacial pain, earaches, TMJ headaches, or clench your teeth at night.
Oscar W. in Session for TMJ Dysfunction
Once again, I am drawn to address common practices used to alleviate common health conditions. In this case, it’s TMJ Dysfunction (or “TMD” or “TMJ Syndrome”), a condition that people commonly expect to take months or years to clear up, but which can be cleared up in weeks by oneself or faster with clinical somatic education sessions.
The Root of TMJ Dysfunction
Common dental practices overlook the root of the condition: neuro-muscular conditioning caused by trauma (injury, previous dental work) or long-term emotional stress (particularly, anger). “Neuro-muscular” means, muscles controlled by the brain. Another name for “neuro-muscular” is “muscle/movement memory” — the state of tension we return to, automatically.
Even “neuromuscular dentistry” approaches the situation indirectly, by changing such things as a person’s bite pattern, rather than changing muscular tension habits; the “neuromuscular” part exists in their minds, but not in their way of approaching the situation.
The common therapeutic means for addressing the condition address symptoms, rather than causes.
As a clinical somatic education practitioner, I’ve developed an effective and reliable self-relief program, which addresses exactly the underlying cause of TMJ Syndrome: the reflexive muscular action in the muscles of biting a chewing that causes the complex array of symptoms associated with TMJ Syndrome.
MORE: Free Preview of Self-Relief Program — 5 Well-designed Somatic Exercises That You Can Use
to Make Your Jaws Feel Better
and Make Your Bite Better
— in about 2 Weeks
We all respond similarly to injury: we tighten up (involuntarily cringe).
Stress (in life and relationships) and repetitive motions (e.g., in our occupation) have similar effects: we tighten or get tight so often or for so long that our brain — the master-control organ of our muscular system — learns to hold muscles tight indefinitely, automatically, habitually, and ultimately, beyond our ability to relax them.
For example, a car mechanic may develop back spasms or neck pain; a haircutter may develop wrist, hand or shoulder pain; a massage therapist may develop low back pain, and and wrist pain, or leg pain; someone with a stressful job or home life may develop headaches — and of course, joint pain due to overcompression by tight muscles is common among the general population; they call it, “arthritis”.
A person going through a life crisis may emerge with new tensions, restricted breathing, and low energy.
We forget how we used to be and get stuck in a strange new condition. The burn of muscle fatigue and stiffness become permanent. Inflammation, chronic fatigue, and joint degeneration commonly occur as long-term side-effects of that tension. Stress-related symptoms such as headaches or sciatica or other symptoms occur, seemingly inexplicably.
Despite these symptoms, including pain, we may have no injury. The injury may have healed, the life crisis may have passed, but we may remain stuck with the residue of injury and/or stress.
Because tight muscles cause pain and stiffness, because your brain controls your muscles, any therapy, to be effective, must address muscular activity at the brain (i.e., memory) level.
Somatic education has some advantages over drugs or therapy applied to soft tissue and joints: much less pain during therapy and faster improvement. For most cases of chronic musculo-skeletal pain, Hanna Somatic Education® is sufficient as a stand-alone rehabilitation method.
The mystique of technology as a fix for everything extends to back pain — in particular, as spinal decompression therapy, an offering that has gained visibility as among the latest in spine care (along with laser treatment — this article applies to that approach, too).
The method involves a mechanical device intended to separate vertebrae and thereby to relieve pain.
This approach is a higher-technology variation on a simpler method, inversion therapy, which involves a kind of treatment table that, by anchoring the user’s ankles and turning upside down, uses gravity to separate vertebrae.
Both methods are variations on traction, again, using mechanical force to separate vertebrae.
The premise of all three methods, spinal decompression therapy, inversion therapy, and traction, is that vertebrae are too close together and need separation.
That premise is good as far as it goes — but let’s look deeper. Why do vertebrae get too close together?
Understand that vertebrae are linked together not only by discs and ligaments, but by muscles that control spinal alignment. When those muscles tighten, vertebral alignment changes; twists, curvature changes, and compression of neighboring vertebrae result. Muscles pull vertebrae closer together; the discs push the vertebrae apart.
Muscle tightness of this sort is supposed to be intermittent and temporary, as required by the demands of movement and lifting; muscles are supposed to relax (decrease their resting tone) when these demands end. However, when, for reasons related to injury and stress, this tightness becomes habituated (i.e., quasi-permanent), problems (i.e., back pain) result: nerve root compression, bulging discs, facet joint irritation, and muscle fatigue (soreness) and spasm.
This habituation is a muscular behavior (postural reflex pattern) learned by and stored in the brain, the master control center for all muscles. Learning is a matter of memory; when either prolonged nervous tension, repetitive movements, or violent injury occur, the memory of these influences displaces the memory of free movement and habituation results; people forget what free movement feels like and forget how to move freely. They fall into the grip of the memory of tension.
Muscles obey the nervous system, with all but the most primitive reflexes stored in the brain as learned action patterns that control all movement. There is no muscle memory other than what is stored in the brain; muscle memory is brain memory.
Knowing that, consider approaches that mechanically stretch muscles or pull vertebrae apart. What do they do to habituated muscular behavior? to the memory of tension? The answer: they temporarily induce muscular relaxation but do not restore the memory of normal tension and movement, which is acquired “learn-by-doing.” We are genetically designed to return to our familiar movement patterns once outside influences end; we return to our memory of how we have learned to move and hold ourselves. Shortly after the end of therapy, our familiar movement behavior and muscular tensions come back because you can’t change learned reflex patterns stored in the brain by stretching muscles; you can only retrain those reflex patterns by new learning of movement. If you want a lasting change, that’s what you have to do.
So, the typical experience of relief after manipulative therapies lasts hours or days.
For some people, whose habituation is not that deeply entrenched, manipulative methods are sufficient; you know for yourself whether this is true of your experience; now you know why.
Here’s a question: How could you relearn free movement?
The answer has two steps:
(1) Unlearn the habituated pattern of muscular tension.
(2) Relearn free movement.
The process involves recovering the ability to feel in control of the involved musculature in movement; it’s a learn-by-doing process, not a mental process, only, but a process that involves both mind and body.
Wouldn’t you prefer to be free of repetitive therapy? to be free of dependency upon a therapist and the involved expense? to be able to care for your own back? to be free and safe to do any activity you wish?
Those are good reasons to make note of the approach described, here (bookmark this page): getting back control of your own muscular tension.
Free yourself from the grip of the memory of injuries, stress, and repetitive movement, not merely at the mental level, but also at the bodily level.
Visit this page for a more complete explanation of back pain and therapy.
FIRST AID FOR BACK PAIN
For chronic back pain, please see this page, which also contrasts conventional back pain methods (including spinal decompression devices) with an entirely new, more effective approach.
Add your comment — what you would like to ask or tell.
