If you’re lucky enough to have someone in your household who gives good shoulder rubs, you know that a ten minute session under those hands can give you a new lease on life.  What you may not have noticed is that when you stand up after the massage, your posture is better. Not only that, but it’s easier to breathe and your holiday to-do list looks less overwhelming.

Ever wonder why the stress of the holiday season–or any other season–creates such a harness on your shoulders? Lifting the shoulders up toward the ears is what I call a “survival gesture”. Under threat it’s instinctive for humans to protect the soft inner core of our bodies:  our brains, hearts and guts.  Shoulder tension is a milder version of the emergency “duck and cover” many of us were taught to do in school.  The problem is that our survival instincts get recruited in non-emergency situations.

Using the upper trapezius muscle in this way blocks the natural motion of the upper ribcage, making breathing shallow.  Shallow breathing sets up a physiological response–the production of stess hormones–that makes everything seem more urgent than it really is.

If you get caught in a holiday harness with no masseuse in sight, you can help yourself by doing the foll0wing “progressive relaxation” exercise.  First, exaggerate the shoulder tension–temporarily make it worse on purpose.  Go ahead and pull your shoulders up toward your ears as if you were trying to touch your earlobes with your shoulders.  Hold them there and notice how boxed-in you feel, how tight your chest and neck are, how hard it is to breathe.

After appreciating how terrible your body now feels, begin to let the tension go very, very slowly.  Let it go in twenty distinct steps, one twentieth of the tension at a time.  Each incremental release allows you to breathe a little easier. As you pass the halfway point, feel your shoulder blades begin to settle down along your back.  Once you’ve reached step 20, take a moment to walk around a bit, letting your shoulders continue to rest on your back.  Repeat the exercise until you notice a subtle shift in your outlook, as well as in your posture.

The basic message of The New Rules of Posture is that we create body posture by the way we move through our lives.  Noticing a tension habit is the first step toward changing it.  Comparing the feeling of the tension with an alternative sensation in your body gives you choice.  In this example, it’s comparing the “boxed in” feeling with the more relaxed posture you felt after the progressive release.  In which state would you rather spend the holidays?

For more information about releasing your shoulders, breathing, and the relationship between stress and good posture, read The New Rules of Posture.

If you’ve read the New Rules of Posture, you know that I advocate dedication to body awareness as the best way to transform your posture. It’s great to practice Pilates or yoga or work out in a gym, but real change takes place in real time, during daily living when poor posture habits are apt to take over.

In my book I teach you about places in your body where you’re likely to respond to stress with tension. Once you identify your personal “posture zones”, I suggest ways to replace those negative tensions with positive ones. I’m a fan of Pilates, by the way, (see earlier blog entry, “On Core Strength”) but I know from experience that you have to know when to apply what you learn in the Pilates studio or gym.

The time to build good posture is when you’re doing something tedious—a simple household task that doesn’t hold your attention, that perhaps you’d rather not be doing. Let me give you an example.

The other day I was bending over the sink peeling pomegranates. I love the way the fruit looks when it’s heaped like rubies in a bowl, and I planned to serve it to guests. Pomegranate preparation is time and labor intensive–and messy. Wearing an apron, I held the fruit well down into the sink to keep the juice from splattering everywhere–pomegranate juice leaves stains that don’t come out any way that I know of. I’d been as peeling the little bulbs from the rind for twenty minutes or so, gradually accumulating my treasure. But I had other things on my mind and I was ready to be done.

My shoulders hunched ever more tightly the more impatient I became and my lower back began to ache. When I checked for abdominal tone I found only a kind of bearing down pressure—the worst way to stabilize the trunk. Even though I’d been to a Pilates class that morning, I seemed to have left the sensation of positive abdominal tone in the studio. What good is working on having good posture if you don’t bring it home with you?

So I stopped, actually grateful for the discomfort that tipped me off to my posture. I straightened up, released my personal “posture zones”, gathered in my “inner corset”, and bent down again to go on with my work. But this time I had support for what I was doing. Stepping aside from my impatience was the key that let me notice what my body had been doing.

So the time to build good posture is when your mind slips into a negative state. Use your mental state as a signal to check in with your posture and body usage. Boredom or impatience are pretty good bets. In those states the mind tends to drift into the past or future–usually unproductively–and the body goes on auto-pilot. So let your boredom become a cue to turn your attention to your body at those moments. Not only will you will pass the time productively by strengthening good posture habits, but you’ll likely find that your impatience and boredom disperse as well.

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. What you’ll feel under your finger pads is a subtle twitching as your neck muscles adjust your head to the movements of your eyes. There are layers of muscles along the back of your neck, but the ones you’re feeling are very deep inside. These tiny strands that interconnect the base of your skull with your upper two neck vertebrae are responsible for the orientation of the sensory organs that tell you where you are and what’s going on around you.

Still keeping your fingers lightly placed on your neck, imagine yourself studying your computer screen or a hand held device. Notice how the sensations under your fingers become even fainter, so faint that they might not be happening at all. Then imagine you are rushing to meet a deadline and your focus on the screen becomes more pointed and intense. Now the more surface layers of muscle get engaged, hardening to hold your head still. Imagine doing this for eight hours straight, day after day.

So you don’t have to be confronted by terrible things for your eyes to become stiff–they can stiffen in the comfort of your home or office. Stiff eyes are a liability of our present-day culture of electronic devices, and they are an unrecognized cause of neck pain and headaches.

To relieve your neck, cultivate the following alternative way of using your eyes. While continuing to gaze at some small detail in front of you, notice the colors and shapes that are perceptible with your peripheral vision. Doing this engages different muscles and different parts of your eyes. You’ll find that you can see what is before you just as well as before, and that your eyes and neck feel less strained. If you wear glasses, you can train yourself to notice the indistinct images to the sides of your glasses frames. This can be harder to accomplish if you wear contact lenses, but your attempt will indirectly relax your neck muscles and decompress your neck vertebrae.

When learning a new way of managing your body, it’s useful to go back and forth between the old habit and the new one. So stare hard at something again. Notice how this changes the sensation in your neck and the position of your head. It’s as if your head has been tightened down onto the top of your neck. Then renew your peripheral awareness to refresh the feeling of your head balancing lightly atop your neck. You might even notice that your breathing feels easier—that’s your body expressing appreciation for being used without strain.

*The poem was quoted in a Newsweek article about an early twentieth century Somali poet and incendiary who pre-figured Osama bin Laden.

Q: We just finished our discussion of Ch. 5, and a couple of questions arose.The first one was about the upper and lower fibers of the TA. We all understood that the lower fibers help stabilize the lower back (p. 93), but someone asked why not also use the upper fibers as well? I said that I thought constant contraction would restrict the downward movement of the diaphragm since it interdigitates with it, as well as restricting the movement of the lower ribs, but I said I would ask you just to make sure.

A: My understanding is that when functioning normally, the diaphragm and the TA (transversus abdominis muscle) are antagonists. So there’s a natural impulse for the TA (the whole muscle, upper and lower fibers) to engage during exhalation. That impulse is overridden in those of us who’ve lost TA tone, leading to breathing and core support problems. My emphasis on the lower TA is because the lower abdomen so readily loses tone through the hormonal vicissitudes of menses, pregnancy, birth, and complications–surgery, scar tissue, and digestive issue. It’s the lower abdomen that bears the brunt of things. Such events interfere with the natural TA activity during exhalation. Furthermore, it’s the lower spine intersections–lumbosacral, sacroiliac and lumbar vertebrae that are so susceptible to “going out” and therefore need the support of the inner corset. You’re correct that constant contraction of the upper TA fibers would interfere with breathing. So many people are already too tight across the diaphragm area from over work by the rectus abdominis and external obliques. This can occur through muscle guarding related to emotion, or through traditional sit-up exercises. So I wouldn’t want to encourage more tension across the costal margin by the TA.

Q: Would you say that the best way to release/relax the upper TA is with breath (and I would add rotation of the thoracic spine)?

A: I’m not sure what you mean by “rotation of the thoracic spine”. A natural elongation of the front of the entire spine coincides with inhalation, and a natural lengthening of the back of the spine coincides with exhalation. This movement is too subtle to be called extension and flexion. It’s more like an undulation in the sagittal plane. If the costal margin is tight (which is why you would want to relax the upper TA), it’s also probably the case that the vertebrae in that region are too stiff to participate in the undulation. So along with breathing, a nice visualization would be that the bodies of the vertebrae at that level are like eyes. The eyes open gently during inhalation (lengthening the front). During exhalation, as the eyes close, the spinous processes of the vertebrae move apart from one another (lengthening the back). That description is for seated breathing. For supine, I find it works better to just let the vertebrae sink toward the floor/table upon exhalation. If having “eyes” on the vertebral bodies is not a good cue, it can also work to envision the vertebrae floating upward (or forward when seated) with inhalation. In my practice, I put my hand underneath the spine and give the stiff vertebra a gentle push forward with each in breath. The client envisions everything in front of that vertebra softening so the “eye” can open. (I hope this is not too confusing. Wish I were there to show you. All the more reason for the eventual DVD!

Q: Also I have a question about the relationship between the TA and the multifidi. Why does the contraction of the TA result in a contraction of the multifidi if the TA aponuerosis fibers run horizontally and the multifidi fibers run vertically? I’ve tried to understand this by digging into Diane Lee’s pelvis book, but can’t seem to find an answer.

A: Having done a quick re-read of Richardson, et al (Therapeutic Exercise for Spinal Segmental Stabilization in Low Back Pain) I’ll make two replies to this question. First, my understanding is that the co-contraction of TA and multifidi muscles was was discovered clinically. In testing for the specific activation of the lumbar multifidi, scientists observed a co-contraction of the deep abdominals. To quote: “it was reasoned that the observation of this deep muscle interaction had potentially considerable functional significance, as the co-contraction of these muscles on each side of the spine would be able to increase the stiffness of the lumbar segments without interfering with trunk movement.” So, the co-contraction is something that has been observed and, as discussed in the rest of that book, proven to be clinically important in treating low back pain. But I could not find a description of the mechanism of that co-contraction. Richardson’s book was published in 1999, so perhaps more recent research holds the answer to your question.

Second, it’s not only the multifidi muscles which contribute to stiffening and extension (into a neutral curve) of the lumbar segments, but also the various layers of the thoracolumbar fascia. These layers criss-cross at oblique angles to the spine. The TA fascia blends into these layers. When lateral tension is applied to the TL fascia by contraction of the TA , the oblique vectors are transposed into vertical vectors. (This is a huge simplification of a very technical discussion.) Hope this helps.

I’ve had a great opportunity to test out that suggestion in the past three days. The fires in the mountains north of my home in Los Angeles produced such bad air quality that my immune system, compromised by travel fatigue, couldn’t resist. On the worst day, it seemed that I coughed non-stop, and that my insides were sure to be blasted across the planet. But I practiced what I wrote, and the coming of each cough became a reminder to contract my “front triangle”—what one of my friends has so aptly dubbed, “the clit lift”. I was so sick, there was really nothing else to think about.

Maintaining a neutral curve in my spine was hardest when I had to cough while standing up—to do it I had to bend at the hips and lean on something. Lying flat was difficult too—then I’d have to flex at the hips, draw my knees up and press my tailbone back into the bed.

The reason I’m sharing this goes beyond the caveat about coughing and urinary iincontinence. Another side-effect of coughing is low back pain. My lumbar spine is structurally flat in the lumbar area. Without posture awareness I’d look like the first drawing on page 61. Since I’m not the only person with this postural pattern, I write this in the hope of sharing a tip with others whose spines are flat. When the lumbar spine is flat, those vertebrae are slightly flexed. Coughing flexes the spine. Repeated coughing is like a percussion instrument adjusting the vertebrae in the wrong direction–more flexion. Result: a worsening of posture that impinges on nerves and produces pain.

Gratefully, I’m finished with the cold and once again am moving about with freedom. My body feels perfect. And think of all those Kegels I logged in!

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 (below the bottom corners of the shoulder blades). The result simulates the support strategy of the Zackback chair. I agree with developer Dennis Zacharkow, PT that the spine is best supported above and below the lumbar area.

After writing to Shawn I realized that he and others might take advantage of the support sensation exploration that students had done that day in my class. The intention of the exploration is to give you an opportunity to deeply recognize the sensation of sacral support so that your body will begin to crave it.

In the photo at the top, Marisol (kneeling) has her palm on Jacqueline’s sacrum. Your sacrum is the triangle-shaped bone at the very bottom of the spine.

When your sacrum is held in this way you can discern a subtle sense of security. When we cradle an infant in our hands, we instinctively support the head and sacrum. So an early imprint of the sensation of security is evoked when those specific regions are supported in present time. You’ll need a friend with whom to exchange the following exploration.

SACRAL SUPPORT EXPLORATION

Note that Jacqueline (partner A) is following the rules in Chapter 3, Smart Sitting: the stool is adjusted so that her thighs angle downward from her hips, supporting her lumbar spine in a neutral curve. Her pelvic floor diamond is spacious. With smart sitting established, Marisol (partner B) places her palm on Jacqueline’s sacrum. That’s the whole experience–the two of you remain there for at least 5 minutes. Partner B needs to be comfortable kneeling or seated in a way that lets her maintain constant gentle presence (not necessarily pressure) at Partner A’s sacrum. Partner A’s job is simply to drink in the sensation of that presence. Partner A can ask for a little more or a little less pressure, and for B’s palm to move a little bit up or down. The process is one of “re-imprinting” this supportive sensation so it needs to feel “just right”.

Almost everyone who has participated in this exploration with me (maybe a hundred people over several years) has agreed that sacral support feels wonderful–and that it helps the rest of the spine and trunk to rise upward without effort.

Partner A soaks up the feeling of sacral support for five minutes or more and then, when she is ready, she moves away from the supporting hand and stands up. It’s important for the imprinting process that Partner A moves away from the support in her own time, rather than having B’s support abruptly pulled away. People often report that walking feels different after this exploration. There may be more awareness of the ground, more lift and ease in the whole spine, or both. While walking isn’t really the focus of the exercise, it’s certainly true that having a clear sense of one’s sacrum makes standing and walking feel more stable. The main goal of the exploration is for participants to develop a sensory reference for choosing how to support themselves in chairs. Once you do the exercise, refer back to my answer to Shawn and see whether it now makes better sense.

Because seat designs haven’t yet caught up with somatic experience, we may sometimes have to settle for less than perfect sensations of support. But with body awareness, ingenuity and some props like Bucky Baxter, we can help ourselves to achieve sacral support in most chairs.

Finally it occurred to me that the Pilates work I recommended in my book might actually be the ticket for me. About this time an old friend happened to send me a photo of myself in 1965. I’m wearing my favorite dress of all time and I probably weigh about 110 lbs. But you can see my under active belly, right through the linen. Looking at that photo, I was looking at a life-long habit.

After a year of occasional private Pilates lessons and some mat classes, I can absolutely testify that Pilates can save a life. And, my enthusiasm prompts me to share a few observations and caveats about Pilates. It isn’t for everyone.

First of all, because Pilates has become such a household word, you should know that not all schools that train Pilates instructors teach the same thing. It’s important to work with teachers who understand that the deep core muscles can best be accessed when the lower back maintains a neutral curve, that is, when there is a slight space between your lower back and the mat when you are lying on the floor. This understanding was not part of Joseph Pilates’ original teachings, but has been embraced by teachers who have kept up with recent research into low back pain. See Australian researchers, Carolyn Richardson, et al.

Second, I recommend 8 to 10 private sessions before attempting a mat class. The work looks much easier than it is, and in the natural impulse to “keep up with the class”, it can be easy to perform the exercises imprecisely. This can result in your not accessing the correct abdominal muscles, or worse, injuring yourself. I asked my private instructor to spend our sessions teaching me the mat class exercises. That meant we spent hardly any time on those sexy-looking machines. But you can’t take a machine home with you for practice.

Finally, I recommend Pilates especially for those people who have the lethal combo of low back pain and under active abs. If you’ve always had a little “pouch” that you couldn’t get rid of, no matter how careful you are with food, that might be you. The down side of Pilates is that strength-building takes precedence over coordination and flexibility. For people who are already strong but lack fluidity and grace, I believe there are better ways to spend your workout time. Just as a steady diet of carrots can turn your skin yellowish, a steady diet of Pilates-only workouts can promote a stiff, muscle-bound appearance.

My mother was a nervous passenger, too. I’d hated it when she’d wail and press her hand against the roof whenever my dad took a sharp turn.

Well, the first “new rule of posture” is to pay attention, and at least I’m doing that. But now I need to apply Rule #2: replace a useless habit with a better one.

For the past year I’ve been taking Pilates classes in order to correct the persistent lack of tone in my deep abdominal muscles–what I described as the “inner corset” in The New Rules of Posture. Those muscles are stronger now, but under stress they still don’t fire as they should. Maybe this is an opportunity to get them turned on in the thick of things.

I notice that I’m expressing the freeway stress by loading tension in the periphery of my body–hands and feet–while my abs are billowed outward by downward pressure from my diaphragm. I’ve been holding my breath!

So right now, speeding down the highway I practice exchanging the tension in my arms, legs, throat and diaphragm with a “bikini squeeze”–that lift of the pelvic floor muscles that sets off a chain reaction through the transversus abdominus muscle and corsets my pelvis. Not too much, though–I don’t want the outer ab muscles to get so involved that they block the steady breathing that helps me manage the stress.

Looking through the windshield now I’m not so alarmed at our speed. And I notice that I’m seeing the scenery instead of only the bumper of the car ahead. The anxiety has receded and it doesn’t come back. When the next “close call” occurs I barely notice. Is that my imagination, or does containing my core really contain my feelings too?

Having stated the obvious, I unclench my toes and let my feet spread back out. I imagine them breathing inside my shoes as I sit on the train. A faint vibration from the tracks that I hadn’t noticed before pleasantly massages my soles. I picture the twenty-six bones of each foot rubbing against one another like marbles in a bag. Then I roll my feet along their long axes–weight on the outside edges, then rolling slowly back to the inside edges. Smoothy out and in. Gradually I notice sensations above my ankles, inside my shins, like a vague itch there. I imagine the membrane between the two lower leg bones stretching.

When the twenty-six bones of each foot glide within their sheaths of connective tissue, they cushion our steps with natural resilience. No shoe design can compensate for a foot that has lost it’s “give”. This is because that resilience begins in the membranes of the lower leg. When the feet can be felt to begin just below the knees, their interaction with the ground is softer.

I will try to let that feeling accompany me up the hill to the hospital.

Although the movement of walking occurs most obviously in the legs, the legs are not carting along a static head and torso as wheels would do. The torso naturally rocks above the hips in response to the exchange of weight bearing from one leg to the other. When this slight sway is not present, walking looks un-human (the mechanics of the spine actually dictate both undulation and rotation along with the side-to-side rocking). Consider the Chinese soldiers at the 2008 Olympic games. It was the absence of movement in their torsos that made them seem like automatons.

Dysfunctional walking can be disturbing to observe. We glance away from the elderly or the disabled, impatient at their pace. Via mirror neurons in our brains, distressed movement in others’ bodies signals dysfunction to our own, and for an instant, as we mirror that distress, we know it as not right. Our bodies know that healthy walking engages every joint and every muscle interface.

The energy of our steps cycles upward through the spine and back down into the feet in a complex exchange of biomechanical activity that prevents loss of forward momentum. With energy thus conserved, each successive step receives a boost from the one before. Spine, shoulders, arms, hips and legs all participate congruently, no one part predominating. When a body part does stand out, it is because the natural flow of walking has been interrupted: we recognize caricatures–a macho walk with top-heavy shoulder movement, the “John Wayne”, exaggerated sideways cowboy swagger, the “Marilyn Monroe” with exaggerated low back and hip motion.

Because 21st century work and lifestyles invite and require us to spend increasing amounts of time sitting down, people move their bodies less and less. Fascia (the connective tissues between our muscles) not stretched daily solidifies, inhibiting movement we take for granted. (see Gil Hedley’s “fuzz speech”.) With progressively fewer joints available to participate in joyful embodiment of life, in what form can the human spirit survive?

It’s to our peril that we ignore the relationship between a healthy sense of self and the ability to move. I think about how my confidence ebbs when I have a cold, how my thought processes are curtailed when I’m stuck in the middle airplane seat.

I reach my destination and deboard the plane, garnering myself to visit a loved one in a hospital, an encounter I’d rather not be facing. I sense my reluctance being expressed in a narrowed chest and fixed jaw that put internal brakes on the resilience of my spine. Holding back in this way, it takes more energy to move toward my destination. I know this so well, and yet here I am, inhibited by a projected future that is at least an hour off. I stop in the airport lobby to release my inner gripping and recall the pleasurable fluidness that is present in my body when I’m “in the present”.

I wonder whether I’ll sustain some joy of motion when I enter the hospital ward. Can my own freedom survive the mirroring of the pain that will surround me then? Like anyone else, I must “learn to walk all over again”. And I must learn it daily, again and again, because each day presents new ground on which to step.