Having a conversation with my deep tissue

Over the last few months I've been going to a guy called Giovanni Felicioni to be Rolfed. Rolfing Structural Integration originates from an American Woman called Ida Rolf who died in 1979, and is all about integrating human structure and function in the field of gravity. This is done through working on the level of connective tissue (fascia) with touch and manipulation and through educating the person in their body use and sensory perceptiveness. It's fantastic!

Although the touch can often be very strong (elbow deep into the side of my thigh, for example), the work is surprisingly subtle. His fingers are doing something on my back, but it's not massage... Massage is about relaxing muscles and that I can understand. But with Rolfing, my mind is often filled with the question "what is he doing?" He also asks me questions, and they also often leave my thinking-mind reeling. Like a Zen koan, they can't be answered by thinking about it, but only through feeling. While my rational mind is dazed and confused (and a bit put out that it's so useless), my intuitive mind is right on it. I often cannot put an answer into words so I say "I don't know" and Giovanni replies saying "don't know is a great place to be! It's a place of potential, of exploration."

I've come to see Giovanni's touch more like communication than massage. He's having a conversation with my body (through the fascia and tissues). What my rational mind can't work out is the language of the conversation – that's why it feels so put out! Besides the more direct work on releasing the unblocking the fascia in certain parts of my body, he's also helping my system to make new connections and relationships. Part of the conversation he's having with my body (I think) is about saying things like "hey, what about making friends with this part over here?"

I said to Giovanni at our last session that I understood our work to be on the level of connecting body and mind. He thought that was too simplistic! He thought it better to think of the work on four dimensions not two:

Physical tissues

This would be the muscles, fascia and bones that make up your body. The physical stuff.

Mind that makes sense of things

This is the part of the mind that likes to make sense of things, make storylines, and interpret what's going on. For example, "my pelvis has an anterior tilt (bum sticks out) because my hip flexors are tight and my sacrum isn't free to move easily", or "I round my shoulders forwards because I feel timid", etc.

Coordinative function

So we've got the physical stuff of our body, but when we bring that into movement that's a whole different story. How we coordinate our movements and actions are a function of things like who we learnt from, our environment, our habits, past injuries or traumas, etc.

Perceptions

This would be on the level of the way you perceive yourself, or how you'd like to be perceived in the world. For example "I'm a hurt person", "I'm a big tough guy", "I want to stand up straighter", "I want to be more confident", etc. These are the intentions or resolutions that we make that influence how we coordinate the physical tissues and how we make sense of all that.

I feel like I'm just starting on this Rolfing journey. It's a whole different wisdom which isn't yoga, but is. Ida Rolf studied yoga in her early life and yoga was a major factor in her understanding of the human system. Giovanni also teaches yoga based in the Scaravelli method.

---

I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Pass it on

Enjoyed this post? Then please tweet it, share it on Facebook or send it to friends via e-mail using the buttons below.

An aligned, relaxed body leads to the mind of awakening

Life takes place in this body, right here and now.

We experience the world around us through our body and its senses, so obviously how we use, move, understand and perceive our body has an enormous effect on how we live our lives. If we perceive our body as out of proportion, ugly, or incapable, this necessarily affects how we live compared to someone who is comfortable in their body.

Posture and alignment

Feeling pain, particularly chronic on-going pain, can very easily lead to negative feelings towards the body. One of the biggest causes of pain is bad posture, and the body area that suffers the most is often the back. According to the NHS, back pain is the leading cause of long-term sickness in the UK, and was responsible for a whopping 15 million lost work days in 2013. Sitting for long periods in front of a computer is bad enough, but couple that with bad posture and you've got a recipe for pain.

In meditation we also sit for long periods, so it's no wonder that meditation teachers have a lot to say about sitting posture. The famous 13th century Japanese Zen master Dogen wrote that to practice meditation one should "Sit ... with your [clothes] tied loosely and arranged neatly. ... Straighten your body and sit upright, leaning neither left nor right, neither forward nor backward. Align your ears with your shoulders and your nose with your navel." Simple enough!

When we start our meditation practice and bring awareness to the body, one of the first things we may notice are areas of stiffness or tension. These can arise for many reasons as I wrote about here.

One of the keys to releasing tension and encouraging relaxation is bringing the body into correct alignment (the subject of a wonderful little book by Will Johnson). But what are we aligning our body to? The answer is our innate sense of “up” and “down”, and this comes from gravity. If we can align our body around a predominantly vertical axis (whether sitting or standing), then the force of gravity will support us instead of weigh us down. Right now try leaning to one side. It takes a some work! So aligning of the physical body with the vertical allows us to relax and shed unnecessary tension. This is why sitting up straight is so important, and that's why doing something like yoga practice is also so important.

Upright meditation position

Firstly, yoga practice shows us where our tensions and imbalances lie. For example, almost all of us have natural imbalances in the hips which cause a slight scoliosis (sideways curve) in the spine, which in turn causes our shoulders to sit skewey and our neck and head to be slightly off-centre. Through correct practice we can learn to release and unblock these tensions and asymmetries so that both our physical and energetic bodies can come into balanced alignment.

However, it's important that the uprightness we cultivate isn't rigid. The strength to hold ourselves upright (especially in this day and age where we tend to slouch at every opportunity) takes time to develop, and it must come together with a sense of softness. This is particularly important in the chest and belly so that our breathing can be as unrestricted and natural as possible.

An aligned, relaxed body leads to a relaxed mind

A relaxed body, in turn, encourages a relaxed mind – one that is less distracted by pain and discomfort, and more able to feel and sense what’s happening in this present moment. Zen master Dogen said, "if one's body is straight, one's mind is easily straightened too. If one sits keeping one's body upright, one's mind does not become dull... One must be aware when one's mind runs around in distraction, or when one's body leans or sways, and allow body and mind to return to sitting upright."
In this quote, Dogen is making an analogy between present moment awareness and our vertical axis. As soon as the mind loses alignment to this axis (i.e. the present moment), we can say our mind loses balance and we start to wander off into memories or fantasies.

One of Dogen’s students once asked him “Do we find the way in the mind or the body?” Dogen answered "In the body." And in his famous book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" the 20th century Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said "The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is itself enlightenment."

I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

What's your experience of sitting up straight in meditation? How do you combine uprightness with soft relaxation? Leave a comment below, join the discussion.

Pass it on

Enjoyed this post? Then please tweet it, share it on Facebook or send it to friends via e-mail using the buttons below.

Releasing tension and stiffness helps us feel more

Tension and stiffness in the body create numbness. They create a barrier to awareness and the full experience of life. If we can’t relax, then life becomes dulled; the extra tension is tiring to hold and inevitably produces an undercurrent of fatigue. Look around you when you walk through the streets of the city and you'll see tension is a chronic condition. Happily through, yoga and meditation practice teaches us how to begin releasing all these tensions, better align and balance ourselves, and brings us to a new appreciation of the incredible vibrancy of life.


Perhaps one of the first things we notice when we start with our yoga and/or mindfulness work are these areas of stiffness or tension – and for some of us discomfort or even pain. They come about for a number of reasons, and can affect us on various levels: from the superficial to the deep. Causes include:

• our genetics (for example weak joints mean the muscles have to work harder, or scoliosis causes asymmetries in the spine muscles)
• past accidents (e.g. a broken toe meant you avoided putting weight on that foot and now the other leg feels overworked)
• past traumatic experiences (the body mirrors the mind in wanting to protect our soft vulnerable parts so often we end up hunching over)
• our occupation (e.g. sitting at a desk for long hours with bad posture)
• our hobbies (e.g. playing or doing an asymmetric sport like tennis or shooting)

So you can see that the reasons our body might be tight or stiff are intimately connected to our past, our upbringing, and our life choices.

I can see now that when I started my own journey into the world of yoga and self-exploration, I was pretty numb, desensitised, and tense! There were many blockages and tight areas, and I was nowhere near being able to feel the subtleties I'm now able to tune into. In the words of a good friend of mind, I was a brut... An insensitive, lumbering vertebrate with his heads in the clouds and a body that, if on a map, would be labelled “here be dragons”!

When we experience unpleasant sensations in our life, one of our strategies for blocking these out (after all no-one wants to feel unpleasantness!) is to tense up, because tension causes numbness. The body learnt that a long time ago!

Releasing the tension

For many years I understood in my head that yoga could help us release the tensions, blockages and imbalances, but I struggled to relate it to any actuality in my body. I could see my weight changing, muscles developing, and stamina improving, but had no sense of my body coming into better alignment or flow.

It took a sustained level of awareness and the keen eyes of my Zen teacher Daizan Roshi and yoga teacher Jonathan Monks to show me, on a physical body level, that this was actually happening. Through my yoga and meditation practice (and to some degree through my years of psychotherapy), I'd begun to let go of my body’s patterns of tension. Slowly, I’d begun to dismantle the layers of holding and blockages built up over years and years. With alignment, mindfulness and relaxation I suddenly found I could feel finer and subtler sensations in the body that I’d never noticed before.

One of the keys to releasing tension and encouraging relaxation is bringing the body into correct alignment. By aligning ourselves with the vertical, with our innate sense of “up” and “down”, then the force of gravity will support us instead of weigh us down. Right now try leaning to one side. It takes work! So aligning of the physical body with gravity allows us to relax and shed unnecessary tension. This is why in meditation sitting up straight is so important, and why in yoga we learn to move with gravity, not against it.

In the words of Will Johnson (from his lovely book Alignment, Relaxation, Resilience), I've started tuning in to the "fine, shimmering currents of sensation that constantly flow through the body”. As I described in this previous post, these are the shimmering currents of our subtle bioelectromagnetic field.

Spiritual energy by Alex Grey

Ki energy and intention

In this last few week's I've been thinking a lot about what people in the yoga and martial art world call energy, or prana, chi, qi, ki. In the first of these series of articles I was talking about my understanding of the ki energy phenomenon from a yoga and Zen practitioner's point-of-view, as well as my (ex)scientist's point-of-view. 

My main motivation was to understand the experiences I've been getting of waves or rushes, sometimes jolts, of pleasurable sensations in my body when doing certain yoga or meditation practices. I concluded that these sensations are the result of my body's bioelectromagnetic (hereafter bio-EM) field coming into coherence.

In the last article, I was thinking about how this makes sense when it comes to feeling and drawing on ki energy that originates from outside our system – like in plants and trees, and in the Earth. Since plants too have electrically charged cells, and also take in electromagnetic energy (in the form of sunlight) as part of their nutrition, I thought that the fact they could excite a response in your own bioEM field didn’t sound so far-fetched.

So why is it that not everyone feels these kinds of sensations? Or to put it another way, why haven't I always felt these kinds of sensations?

I think when I started my journey into the world of yoga and meditation, I was just too numb, desensitised, and tense to feel anything of this sort. In the words of a good friend of mind, I was a brute! An insensitive, lumbering vertebrate with his heads in the clouds and a body that, if on a map, would be labelled “here be dragons”!

If we’re too tense, out of alignment, or imbalanced then there are too many blockages, frozen areas, and too little sensitivity. In this state, I would think, there's no way our bioelectromagnetic fields can ever come into coherence! So one of the primary aims of yoga and meditation practice, particularly at the beginning, is to start unblocking and relaxing the body, and getting you to develop more sensitivity to your sensations.

Next question: now I can feel these pulses or shimmers of sensation, why don't I feel them all the time?

Thinking back to my experiences, I can see that just opening, aligning and balancing the body wasn't enough. It seems like a certain intention (i.e. directed mind energy or focus), often coupled with a physiological action, is also needed.

Let's take 'intention' to start with. What kind of intention? I think there can be many, starting with an intention just to feel something. Then there might be an intention to draw inwards, to follow the movement of the breath, to let go, to reach out. For any intention to be effective, it would make sense that we need to stay with it without getting distracted. Thus another central skill we learn in our yoga and meditation practice is concentration or focus. Most people are generally pretty bad at it... Our mind wanders like a drunk from memories to fantasies, from fleeting thoughts to emotions, and whenever we ask it to stay put on something it rebelliously does the opposite... Slowly, we can learn to regulate this concentration and sustain it for longer and longer periods.

So we've got an open and aligned body, and our intention is set. Sometimes this is enough. I've felt strong energetic pulses and jolts during sitting meditation when I've set my mind on letting go down into the floor. The physical reaction is then a response (muscle twitching, pelvic floor lifting, eyes crossing).

But sometimes, particularly in yoga, the intention is coupled with a physical action, and together this precipitates pulses or movements of ki energy. One example of a physiological action might be a muscular lift (contraction) of the pelvic floor muscles. If we're soft and sensitive enough in that area, this can have the effect of exciting a much softer inner "suck" that seems to be very effective at bringing the bioEM field into coherence. In yoga this is called engaging mulabandha (mula meaning "root", and bandha being translated variously as lock, or gateway; see my article here).
 
As I see it in all of this ki energy work, you have to want, or intend, for something to happen before it can happen. Far from being imagined or "all in the mind", the feeling and movement of ki energy seems to very much need this direction of the mind. I guess this is why my teachers have often said "energy follows intention" and "energy follows awareness".

From the ground up: legs and knees

This is the second in a series of articles I've been writing with my sister Kim, a physiotherapist in Stockholm, looking at how we can best take care of our roots. In the first article we looked at our feet – our sole mates (...groan) – and how we can strengthen them and work on some common problems.

In this article we're going to look at another part of our roots: the knees. But before we get onto that, let's talk a bit more about roots.

Do humans have physical roots? This might sound like a strange question. Of course not - we're not plants...

"Root"
pronunciation: /ruːt/
1) a part of the body of an organism that grows downward into the ground, anchoring or supporting the organism.
2) the basic cause, source, or origin of something

Don't we have a part of ourselves that grows downwards, supporting us on the ground? Thousands of years of self-exploration by various sages, yogis and spiritual practitioners have revealed that there is a very important area around your pelvic floor called in yoga the Muladhara or Root chakra. It is here that our roots begin, and extend all the way down our legs to our feet (and with our mind, out of the feet into the ground). Our roots and root chakra are associated with "things of the earth" – stability, grounding, physical health, vigour, nourishment, and is the basis of both our masculine and feminine energies. This means that having healthy roots is vital for living in this world!




The knees: Locking and overextending

You might have often heard yoga teachers talking about 'locking' (or not locking) the knees. You might also have been told that you are 'over' or 'hyperextending' when you think you are 'locking'. Hyperextension of joints is in fact chronic in the yoga world.

Locking and over/hyper-extending:
The knee joint is simple – it moves in two directions, bending and straightening. When the leg is straight the thigh bone (femur) and the chin bones (tibia & fibula) should be directly aligned with one another. When we push into (or for some people, relax) into the back of the knee, this is called overextension or hyperextension. The body's weight is no longer transferring directly through the bones one on top of the other, but is 'hanging' in the soft structures (ligaments) at the back of the knee. These structures are not designed to be put under so much pressure and so this can be very damaging for your knee (see this nice article for more info).

Try: standing upright. Now see if you can 'push' your knees back beyond straight.

Hyperextended knee joint

If you could, then chances are you don't naturally hyperextend in your knees. If you discovered you couldn’t push your knees back any further, then there's a good chance you were already 'hanging' in the ligaments at the back of the knee. It's important for the knee to be soft and not locked back so it's able to cope with impact and help us keep our balance. This is why in yoga teachers often encourage you have a 'micro bend' in your knees. You can also try this little test in a more challenging yoga posture (e.g. standing forward bend, warrior) to check if you are hyperextending.




Knee stability:
To give the knees the most strength and stability, we need to be engaging the muscles on the back and front of the thigh. Some teachers advise their students to 'lock' their knees in certain postures to presumably give strength, but the word 'lock' implies rigidity and blockage. Really it's the opposite that we're trying to do – it's the openness, strength and alignment of our knees that facilitates connection to the ground and allows the energy to flow (see below).

Try: Come into Trikonasana (triangle pose) as our skeleton is showing below. This is a pose that's particularly tricky when it comes to knee stability – especially the front knee. We'll now try to find how to engage those muscles on the front (quadriceps) and back (hamstrings) of the thigh to help stabilise the knee.

Credit: www.bandhayoga.com/keys_knee_hype.html

Bend the front leg slightly (as in the picture to the left) and draw your foot backwards against the friction on the mat. Can you feel your hamstrings activating? Now to find the muscle at the front of your thigh (the quad), straighten the leg again and try lifting your kneecap upwards. This should get it working.

You might need to practise this a few times to reliably find and activate these muscles. If you find it difficult try one at a time, with straight legs or bent. When you have found both muscles you can try activating them at the same time to stabilise your knee in all your postures (skeleton picture to the right). Your knee will thank you dearly in the years to come!


Knock knees or bow legs

Knock knees describes a condition where the knees fall in towards each other rather than staying neutrally aligned. Interestingly, most kids under the age of 6 appear to have knock knees, but grow out of it as their body shape changes. It can arise either structurally in the knee joint or the surrounding bones, and it which case it's just your natural body shape. Or it can arise due to a muscle weakness in the legs or hips: weak external hip rotators causing the thigh to internally rotate, weak hip abductors allowing your knees to drop in, or tight/asymmetric quads or hamstrings causing a misalignment of the knee joint. If you see someone who appears to have knock knees (particularly as they walk) and their kneecaps face inwards, then it's most likely down to muscle weakness.

Bow legs are much less common, and most often due to true structural issues in the bones. It's normal for babies to have bowed legs before the bones ossify (solidify). From a muscular point of view, bow legs can arise when the opposite of the aforementioned muscles are weak.

Unless your knock knees or bow legs arise from the shape of your bones or joint, it’s not actually the knees that are the culprit. The real culprits are their muscular neighbours: the thighs, hips and feet. The feet were the subject of the last post in this series, and in the next post we'll be looking at the top of our roots – the pelvis, hips and thighs – so stay tuned!


Knees and energy flow
Energy ('prana' in yoga or 'qi/ki' in Chinese/Japanese) flows around the body through certain channels known as 'nadis' in yoga or 'meridians' in Chinese medicine.
When our limbs are properly aligned through balanced muscles and correct posture, energy can flow like water or electricity, connecting and nourishing all the parts of the body. Locking (or hyperextending) our joints restricts this current, and like a kink in a hose, it can cause a build-up or blockage. In Qigong they say "When Qi flows freely along the meridians, people are free from illness. If the Qi is blocked, then pain follows" – so blockages can result in pain or illness (an obvious one is arthritis). One of the principles of Tai Chi and of my yoga practice is to keep the knees (elbows, and all other joints) soft (bent) for this exact reason.

In this system, the knees are one of the primary connection points between our upper body and the ground. This is why it is so important not to lock or misalign them, so that we can maintain that all-important sensitivity to and connection with the ground.

Come and join me in exploring your roots at one of my yoga classes at ZenYoga in Camberwell. See my website for my class schedule and more details.

I'd love to hear from you

Have you suffered from leg and knee problems in the past? How have you got on with these exercises? I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, join the discussion. 

Pass it on

Enjoyed this post? Then please tweet it, share it on Facebook or send it to friends via e-mail using the buttons below.