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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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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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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Stop Chasing Pain Interview

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Stop Chasing Pain Interview

Here'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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On Pilates and Core Strength

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On Pilates and Core Strength

As the author of The New Rules of Posture, you might think I’d be a paragon of deep abdominal core strength. Sadly, not true. In fact, shortly after the book was published I was beset by an embarrassing bout of low back pain—a sure sign of low toned abs. And this wasn’t the first such episode—I’d been plagued by a back that “went out” pretty regularly for 15 years. Because I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of Rolfing© Structural Integration, I continued to assume that the pain was due to misalignment, and that more structural bodywork was what I needed. But I also saw the occasional chiropractor…

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Stiff Eyes and Neck Pain

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Stiff Eyes and Neck Pain

This morning I happened to read an excerpt of a poem that described someone has having eyes that were “stiffened” in horror. “Stiff eyes”—what a striking description. And it got me thinking about the connection between stiff eye muscles and stiff necks.

To feel what I’m talking about, try this experiment. Lightly place your finger pads along the back of your neck, just below your hairline. Then imagine a fly buzzing around in front of your face. Follow the fly with your eyes, but without moving your head around…

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Finding Support from Your Sacrum

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Finding Support from Your Sacrum

Today’s blog entry attempts to answer a reader’s question about sitting support while also sharing something from my current class.

Shawn’s question was about lumbar support for sitting and why I recommend the Zackback sitting strategy that advocates sacral support instead. My reply to Shawn went something like this: For sitting in the car I like to work my sacrum back into the corner between the seat and backrest and then place the Bucky “Baxter” just behind my diaphragm

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New: 7 Week Workshop DVD

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New: 7 Week Workshop DVD

Since 2007, when The New Rules of Posture came out, I’ve had scores of requests for a video to assist readers in moving through the explorations and practices in the book.  We all take in information through various channels, but when it comes to body learning, there’s no good substitute for the senses.  Words, no matter how pictorial and evocative, have a hard time becoming flesh.After many months resisting the video project—I knew it would be a mountain–I finally jumped in.  The first step was to find a videographer—an easy task, you might think, here in Hollywood-land.  But I had a bite-sized budget and a yen for quality—two things that might be hard to match.  Eventually I found Ian Campbell, who, I learned after I’d hired him, studied yoga at my friend Mike Nalick’s studio.  (You’ll meet Mike in my DVD workshop.) This was the first of many good omens…

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The Best Way to Walk

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The Best Way to Walk

The waiting one does at airports is a good opportunity for blog writing. This time I’m people-watching at Bob Hope Airport (Burbank, CA). There is such a variety of ways to put one leg in front of another–the pregnant airport security guard, the woman with exaggerated movement in her hip joints, the men with none at all. I want to train other movement professionals to observe and intervene in clients’ walking patterns. How do I teach them to communicate effectively to someone who says, “You mean I have to learn how to walk all over again?”

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A Day at Dallas/Ft. Worth

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A Day at Dallas/Ft. Worth

It’s not always easy to walk my talk. The truth is that my current situation here in Dallas challenges my own sage advice to replace compressive, destructive, teeth-gnashing tension with sincere and steady shifts in perception

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