Foot Massage

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Foot Massage

That may not be true for everyone, but for sure, foot problems stop you in your tracks. As a Rolfer® and movement coach, I’ve seen too many miserable feet and the problems they’ve transmitted to the bodies above. So I’m motivated to share anything I come across that might help my readers care for their own precious gravity negotiators.  Feet, with their 26 bones and 33 joints and countless soft tissue springs and pulleys, are perfectly designed to negotiate uneven surfaces. When they don’t get to do that—when they’re constantly shod and subjected to flat, hard surfaces…

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Bodies and Wholeness

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Bodies and Wholeness

In my teaching, writing and manual therapy, I try to help people experience how bodily wholeness contributes to the health of mind and spirit as well as body. Two recent encounters have reminded me that “wholeness” is relative, and that no matter how integrated, coordinated, aligned and aware our bodies become, the health of the human spirit is vaster and more mysterious than mere physical perfection. My friend George has been in the online dating game for a long time…

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Know Your Feet

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Know Your Feet

My intent for the workshop is to empower you through information and experiences to understand how your feet are meant to support and transport you. The content includes:

• demonstrations and explorations to FEEL how your feet should work
• relevant but simple anatomy to understand the complexity and magic of the foot
• the relationship between your feet and your body as a whole
• what it means to feel and receive support
• self-help exercises to improve faulty foot habits

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Celebrity Spine

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Celebrity Spine

Vince Vaughn hasn’t signed up for online coaching with me, but if he does, I’ll be ready! This actor is frequently cast as an unconscious oaf who goes through a humanizing rite of passage. He’s good at it, and his fine serious talent shines through all the silliness. The other day I rented “Delivery Man.” Because Vaughn is in nearly every scene of this movie, it became impossible for me to ignore the way he moves. One could assume his lumbering gait is due to his 6’5” height, or is part of his characterization. But I think his  gait is an artifact of a spine that, lacking normal curvatures, doesn’t properly rotate…

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Tongue-to-Shoulder Tension Relieved!

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Tongue-to-Shoulder Tension Relieved!

I was lying in a backbend, supported by a chair. It had been beastly hot in Los Angeles, and Karin, my yoga teacher, had given our class a number of supported asanas to cool us down. But I was resisting: I had let my yoga practice lapse for a number of months and hadn’t been in that upside down position for a while. My throat felt taut. Trying to find the source of my discomfort, I zeroed in on my tongue. Sure enough, loosening it helped me settle into the posture. But Hyoglossal_musclewhy did my shoulders release so dramatically, just from softening my tongue? The image that came to mind was anatomical…

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Core Support, Kneeling and Stiff Toes

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Core Support, Kneeling and Stiff Toes

What follows is my response to a letter from someone who had difficulty kneeling on a yoga block as shown in the abdominal core lesson of my DVD. I know that when someone raises a question, others are likely wondering the same thing…

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A Shoulder Story

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A Shoulder Story

Can you see knot at the nexus of my left shoulder and neck? It’s never been especially troublesome, but it has been a long time companion.  Off and on I’m moved to investigate the tension, and my “shoulder journal”  has grown to near novella length. What follows is a recent entry. If I compare the feeling of my left arm with my right, the left one seems shrunken, shorter…

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Body Literacy: The Sound of Your Heart

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Body Literacy: The Sound of Your Heart

Not long ago Katy Fox, an artist and yoga instructor in San Francisco, contacted me because she had found The New Rules of Posture useful in her work. She also wanted to share her own vision with me. Katy has a huge vision–nothing less than the re-embodiment of our culture.Sensibly, she’s starting small. The week following our conversation she launched her first embodied public space: Soundscape of the Human Heart. She was pretty jazzed about this when we spoke…

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Spine Decompression Exercise

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Spine Decompression Exercise

For some time I’ve wanted to share an alternate version of an exercise in Lesson 7 of Heal Your Posture, my DVD workshop. The exercise on the DVD is similar to the yoga “cat stretch” but with added special imagery. The image is that each vertebra has its own vector, its own potential direction of movement.  For the flexion part of the exercise (the cat), the spinal vectors aim each vertebra into the space behind the body.  Envisioning each vertebra to have its own trajectory and attempting to move them one by one helps decompress the spine…

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Healing Posture in the Real World

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Healing Posture in the Real World

Walking through a natural setting, among trees and rocks, accompanied by wind sounds and bird cries, your body feels and moves differently than it does when you walk through an environment of glass, steel and straight lines, like an airport.  Your emotional state, the rhythm of your gait, your sense of yourself — it’s as if your bodymind airportmirrors the terrain — the varying textures and spaces of nature, or the hard, flat surfaces of the man-made world.  Your perceptions shape your posture and steer your movements…

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Heal Your Posture at Tax Time

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Heal Your Posture at Tax Time

I love my accountant.  The walls of his office display a 40-year collection of IRS cartoons, and he does everything he can to keep our yearly meeting light.  But there’s nothing like an hour’s contemplation of tax code intricacies to make your head spin and put kinks in your center line.  Money, when you have to part with it, compresses the body.  Which is how I walked out of the office…

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Shoulder Pain and Sitar Playing

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Shoulder Pain and Sitar Playing

Below is a video I made for one of my Skype coaching clients.  She’s a petite woman who is learning to play the sitar, a difficult and awkward instrument to tune as well as to play. I've been helping her with her sitting position, and with pain in her left shoulder that had become  severe enough for her to seek medical help. The exercise I shared in this video has helped her exchange upper shoulder tension for secure support that links her shoulders to her mid-back.  The video also includes a brief review of abdominal support and pelvic inclination. Many musicians—most anyone who plays a stringed instrument—could benefit from this exploration.  Not to mention non-musicians who simply have a habit of loading stress into the upper shoulder area…

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Helical Spine Stretch

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Helical Spine Stretch

The attached video is a holiday gift to my subscribers—a de-stressor practice.  But it actually has a further purpose. When we walk, our spines are designed to move in two counter-rotating helical patterns.  This movement is the basis of our contralateral walking gait; it’s why our arms and legs swing oppositely when we walk…

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A Tactile Solution to Shoulder Tension

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A Tactile Solution to Shoulder Tension

When you grasp a steering wheel (or anything else) tightly, you’ll feel tension generated from your hands up into your elbows, shoulders, neck and jaw.  There are direct myofascial and neural connective trains between the hands and the head. Such muscle chain engagement delimits your steering movements, dulls your perception of the road, and contributes to your aching shoulders. Notice this woman’s eye and jaw tension as well as her too tightly gripping hands…

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