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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Becoming Bone Conscious

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Becoming Bone Conscious

I’ve been browsing through a wonderful new book about myofascial efficiency in movement. Born to Walk, by my friend, James Earls, delves into the minutia of joint mechanics and into how they are supported by the soft tissue layers. The book is exhaustively researched and elegantly illustrated. Earls considers the helical motions of the feet and pelvis, legs and spine, and for my money, gets it about as right as right can be. Body workers and somatic educators will do well to study this fine volume…

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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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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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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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