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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Rolfing® Revisited

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Rolfing® Revisited

You may not be aware of my background as a Certified Advanced Rolfer, a practitioner of the bodywork approach developed by Ida Rolf, PhD.  In recent months I’ve been taking a “sabbatical” from my Rolfing practice to focus on writing and teaching.  Lately, though, I’ve had a yen to see clients again. After I revised my website to describe my new,  unconventional approach to the work, I decided the piece made an interesting blog post as well…

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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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Enliven Your Spine (Japanese translation)

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Enliven Your Spine (Japanese translation)

背骨を生き生きさせる

あなたの背骨は３次元

あなたが背骨について考えるとき、あなたの意識は背中に向かうでしょう。あなたはかたい床に横たわったときに感じるでこぼこの脊椎の突起を思い浮かべるかもしれません。でも、あなたの背骨には前面もあります。それは椎骨のボディーで構成されています。それらは丸く、厚みがあり、それぞれの椎骨の上下にはディスクがあり、それがクッションの役割をしています。あなたの背骨には深さがあり、椎骨の前面の表面は4分の1から３分の１胴体の方へ突出しています。(身体の前の表面から中へ約3分の２の距離に椎骨の前面がある）私たちの生命維持に必要な臓器の後ろに位置し、背骨の前面は感情的に影響を受けやすいエリアでもあります。

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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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Posture, Perception and People (Japanese translation)

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Posture, Perception and People (Japanese translation)

あなたの姿勢を癒すために、私はいつも姿勢よりも知覚を練習するよう求めています。私はあなたの肩の姿勢や、首の位置についてアドバイスをしません。むしろ、あなたに内側のバランスの感覚や大文字の P と共にいる感覚（過去や将来の不安なしに今ここにいる状態）を発見するよう手伝おうとします。

あなたが３次元の空間でオリエンテーションを維持している間に、真に地面が下からあなたの身体を支えるのを許しているとき、いつでもこのバランスと今ここにいる経験を受け取ります。（空間というのは人々にとって省略された言葉です、ものごとやイベントが生じるところです）。もしこのことが不可解なら、私はいい本とDVDをお勧めできます！

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Low Back Pain and Substance Abuse

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Low Back Pain and Substance Abuse

A 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…

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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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Guns and Shoulder Tension

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Guns and Shoulder Tension

The anniversary of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, CT has made me think about guns and gunmen. It’s also brought to mind a client—a different sort of gunman–who wanted my advice about his chronic shoulder pain.  This man had worked for many years as a parole officer, and a requirement of his position had been a quarterly shooting evaluation. The pain in his shoulder dated back to that period in his life, and persisted despite his having been retired from law enforcement for several years…

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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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Skin-deep Posture and Movement

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Skin-deep Posture and Movement

I recently recommended to a Skype coaching client that he read pages 131-132 in The New Rules of Posture–pages that describe what I nicknamed “skintelligence”.  One of this man’s goals was to improve his ballroom dancing. His partners had commented that they felt he was holding them rigidly, so I wanted to remind him of the surprising degree to which our tactile sense influences motor coordination.  I knew that turning on his skin could help him turn off excess muscle tension…

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