Car designers seem to devise seats to support the lowest common denominator of posture, believing that people need soft seats that cradle the derriere, and backrests that ignore the capacity of your spine to support itself.
Read MoreDr. Rolf treated everyone (including me with my too flat lumbar spine) as if they were hyper-lordotic. What that did for me was gap the lumbar facets (so they were in constant slight flexion) and make my lumbosacral area unstable. I had low back pain for years after first being Rolfed. IMO Rolf got most things right, but not this.
Read MoreBallet flats aren’t cute on a misaligned foot. If the foundation in the feet doesn’t support the body above, another region of the body will take on the responsibility for support—a knee, a hip or even the shoulders. Misalignment leads to more misalignment, and more tension.
Read MoreI love the feeling that each of my toes is independently awake. The shoes make my toe pads want to investigate the ground.
Read MoreTrash day offers me 61 opportunities to lengthen my anococcygeal ligament, one for every step.
Read MoreIf our hunter-gatherer forebears wore simple hide foot coverings or, depending on the weather, went barefoot, wouldn’t shoes that are barely there be good for us too?
Well, not necessarily, because “we’ve paved paradise and put in a parking lot.” We walk on flat, smooth, unyielding surfaces, whereas our forebears walked on grass, dirt, sand and gravel…
Finding the sensation of healthy support from his feet made a lovely difference in Eric’s life. In the accompanying video this musician/songwriter shows how his musical expression changes depending on how he lives in his feet.
Your body can move around in the world without your being fully present in it. You may have good body awareness in general but lack presence in specific parts or areas of your body. In the video, Eric speaks about “finding his cuboid.” He’s referring to finding awareness in a specific region of the foot that activates better organization of the entire lower extremity. For more about foot organization, see Know Your Feet, my online workshop.
Read MoreVince 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…
Read MoreFor 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…
Read MoreA year ago I posted a piece about the relationship between joint pain and digestive abuse–an after-effect of holiday cheer. You’d think I’d learn, but guess what? This year I’m fessing up again, with a different twist. Beginning in December I experienced pain in my right hip, with radiating pain down my right leg and into my knee and low back stiffness. This was demoralizing because I’d been low back pain-free for three years, ever since becoming sincere about tending to my deep core strength. The pain was weirdly intermittent. A good Pilates class seemed to chase it away, but in a few days, back it came…
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreRecently, coming home from a walk, I was confronted with eight heavy boxes stacked up at the base of the steps to my house. They were not my boxes, not my responsibility, and without going into all the details, carrying them up the steps was not my idea of fun. I had walked a long time and was ready to rest. It was beginning to rain, and these boxes that were not mine would become a far worse inconvenience were they to become drenched. So I schlepped them up the stairs, one by one…
Here’s an amazingly well-produced television story about the latest research on fascia. Robert Schleip is in it and Rolfing is well represented. The graphics are incredible–you really get a sense of the fascia living inside you and a sense of awe for its role in your life. The video is in German, but the subtitles are clear…
Read MoreHere's the podcast conversation I had with Dr. Perry Nickelson of stopchasingpain.com. What a congenial host and interviewer! I really enjoyed speaking with him and felt free to go off on tangents, which seems to be my way of attempting to paint the whole picture…
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