On Breathing Patterns

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On Breathing Patterns

Thanks to a reader of The New Rules, for inciting me to write again about breathing. It’s a HUGE topic, so this post is a distillation. Here’s my reader’s query:  Here in Germany, singers, yogis, and tai chi practitioners are hotly debating the possibility of two types of people with different body organization. The focus lies on differences in breathing: exhalers and inhalers. In my understanding, their spatial organization corresponds to what you call earth-orienting and space-orienting, respectively. In everyday breathing…

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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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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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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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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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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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Free Your Head

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Free Your Head

In my last several posts, I’ve been drawing your awareness to the front of your spine.  Releasing the tensions we hold within our bodies at this depth can restore mobility, ease and freedom we didn’t know were missing.  Upper-cervical-facet-jointsIn this video you’ll practice a movement meditation that can restore mobility at the joint between the top of your neck and your cranium. This area so often expresses stress as rigidity, and is exacerbated by long hours spent in front of computer screens…

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Posture As A Practice

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Posture As A Practice

If you read between the lines, you probably sense that under the banner of “The New Rules of Posture,” I’m actually sharing a somatic practice–a physical path to self-knowledge.  Here’s what I wrote in The New Rules: to improve your posture you need to 1) “create new sense memories for what feels balanced and stable…” and 2) view “your posture as an ongoing perceptual process by which you orient yourself to gravity and to your relationship with the people, objects and events in your world.” Not something you do once and forget about.  It’s a practice…

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Posture, Perception and People

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Posture, Perception and People

To “heal your posture” I always invite you to practice perceptions rather than positions. I don’t advise you about the set of your shoulders or the placement of your head, but rather try to help you discover an internal sense of balance, and presence with a capital P…

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Forward Head: Where Does It Begin?

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Forward Head: Where Does It Begin?

I recently did a movement/posture coaching session with a woman who came to me complaining of pain in her shoulder.  She pointed to the spot and said that all her stress “always goes right here.”  Hmm, I thought…

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More About Fascia

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More About Fascia

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…

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