“Overall, these exercises are much harder work than the physio I was doing before, in that I have to really concentrate on small things. Can’t just put myself through them. Have to be present. It’s good. It’s why I sought you out rather than doing more straight up physio as I kinda knew this was what was missing, what needed to come next.”
This is an from an email sent to me by a lady that I am working with after, our second session.
We’ll call her Jean (not real name).
Jean is the epitome of the perfect student of exploratory movement, and I think the quote above sums up nicely just what that means.
When the body is in pain, generally there are three main systems we are working with:
- Muscles, joints, structure, biomechanics (MSK stuff)
- Mindset and emotions (perception of experiences, chronic negative emotional states etc.)
- Organ and systems health (digestive, immune, etc)
Of course, these three become an inseparable web called a “life”.
As a body-worker, some things I can help with, and some things I can’t. For the individuals themselves, one thing they can start to work with that doesn’t cost a thing is the mindset bit.
Jean’s mindset is on point with where one would want it to be to make changes and heal other systems, and I want to use this blog post to explain a little more about what I mean by that- having a mindset to change and heal.
Because “healing mindset” isn’t this woo woo, think positive, manifest good health and meditate on being better you’ll be ok… It’s about engaging with the work.
When the standard approach fails…
Jean found me through my dance blog that I’ve since taken a break from writing on (danceproject.ca), but she is not a dancer. She is a pianist and also participates in horse riding and dog sledding.
Jean is in her 50s and has been experiencing pain for many years but had stopped seeing her physiotherapist because it wasn’t doing anything. When I first met her she expressed that she was frustrated with the care she was receiving from physio because they were only looking at the parts of her body that hurt: Her right knee and hip primarily. But they weren’t looking at the rest of her body, and Jean had a strong intuition that this was the reason things were going nowhere. She felt very distinctly that there was something going on with her upper body that was related to her knee and hip issues, but no one was looking there.
Smart lady to listen and act on her intuition.
Looking at the location of symptoms as “the problem” and stopping there is the standard approach. The approach that says, “treat the symptom”.
Luckily (I think…) for me, I never learned the standard approach because a) I went to school for dance, not for whatever it is I do now*, and b) all my most influential teachers are out of the box thinkers, who don’t ascribe to the standard approach and aren’t afraid to go against the norm, old-school movement paradigm. Maybe I’m missing out? I’m ok with that.
Jean was pleased that our initial assessment looked at her whole body, from her toes to her skull. Isn’t it nice to be treated like an entire person? Don’t you hate it when people only see you for one aspect of who you are?
*What do I even do? I dunno. I work with bodies and movement. I get people to move their joints in specific ways. I sometimes massage them, Thai style. I sometimes have people deadlifting heavy things if they want to. But the end game is always for them to have a different experience of their bodies, push their comfort zones, and access the movements their bodies are currently missing. What’s my job title? You tell me…
Ready for an AiM-style geek out?
For the Anatomy in Motion (AiM) students like me 🙂
Here is how Jean showed up (some interesting distortions):
Pelvis: Right hike, left rotation (stuck in right suspension)
Spine: Right lateral flexion, right rotation (stuck in right suspension)
Right knee: Can’t externally rotate (can’t access right suspension)
Right foot: Can’t pronate (can’t access right suspension)
The story her body was telling me was that nothing from the hip down knew how to pronate, and her pelvis, spine, and ribcage were trying to make this happen for her. Or, maybe her pelvis, spine, and ribcage were trying to stop her foot and knee from needing to pronate because it felt unsafe?
Regardless of the story I choose to attach to her structure, what I was witnessing was an exchange (something I wrote about HERE).
We can consider that in the phase of gait in which the foot pronates, that the entire skeleton is organizing itself to allow pronation. It’s not just a foot pronation, it’s a whole body pronation. In AiM this whole body pronation phase is called suspension.
As mentioned above, while Jean ‘s pelvis and spine are pronating, she is missing some very important pronation mechanics below: Foot pressure not getting onto the anterior medial calcaneous, foot bones not spreading and opening on the plantar and medial surfaces, and femur not rotating internally over the tibia.
If things aren’t happening below, something up top may need to do this for her. In her case, I believe this is why I was seeing the type two spine mechanics (same direction lateral flexion and rotation), right pelvis hike, and left pelvis rotation. If you can’t pronate below, something must make up for it above, or next door. A useful strategy to help her make up for a hip, knee, ankle, and foot that don’t pronate, but not an efficient way for the body to move that will stand the course of time.
Want to try this for yourself? Stand with your feet side by side and:
- Put your weight primarily on the outside of your right foot
- Hike the right side of your pelvis
- Twist your pelvis to the left
- Twist your ribcage to the right
- Laterally flex your spine to the right
Not an effortless posture to hold! Feels pretty terrible for the right hip doesn’t it? No wonder Jean was having some issues, eh? But somehow this was the most efficient way her system knew to hold herself based on that tangly web of “life”.
So, we have really one of two options for how to sync her joints back up. We can:
- Teach her foot and knee to pronate to match the rest of her body.
- Get her spine and pelvis to experience the other end of the spectrum (left lateral flexion and rotation) to free up the opportunity for her right foot and knee to safely experience pronation.
Or, more realistically, probably do both (and we did both).
Anyway, that’s just a little bit of background on what she was dealing with to provide some context.
The mindset for healing
What I really think is beautiful to share about Jean ‘s journey so far is her mindset and attitude embracing the process that I suggested we follow.
If we come back to the quote at the top of this post, from the email she sent me, I’d like to break down what is so lovely to take from it, particularly if you are someone who has been in pain for a while, like her.
“These exercises are much harder work than the physio I was doing before”
In AiM, we try not to call the movements we do “exercises”.
This is partially because of the connotation the word exercise has for many of us.
“Exercise” brings up images of a gym, performing a set number of repetitions of a movement with the end goal of getting stronger, or more flexible, or sweating, or punishing ourselves for eating cake, or burning a particular amount of calories, or making ourselves vomit from effort, or escaping from reality, or for mental health, or cardiovascular health, or whatever our notion of what exercise is for may be.
And so the word “exercise” comes with undertones of needing to get something out of it, which is not what we’re trying to teach with the AiM philosophy. The goal, instead, is the process itself: Exploration and learning; investigative movement. To show the body a new way of doing things. Give it an experience.
How often do we go into an experience expecting to get something out of it, and missing the meat of the experience itself? Like going to a concert, and watching most of it through your phone to get that perfect video memory of it (done that…).
The movements are simply to immerse the body in an experience it doesn’t usually get to have. To access joint motions that are currently being avoided. To move into new airspace and dark zones where learning can happen. To open up new options for movement that had been denied. To reorganize the skeleton and resultant muscle tensions.
Per Gary Ward’s big rule of movement #2, joints act, muscles react (from What the Foot). We want to give the muscles something different to do by moving the structures they attach to, not by trying to strengthen and stretch the muscles in an attempt to control the skeleton.
To quote something Gary said on an immersion course:
“The presence of muscles that contract first before lengthening will always be present in a system that doesn’t flow.”
Some people report they feel “stronger”, or they are getting more “flexible”, or they have more energy, as a result of practicing the AiM movements, but these are only secondary to showing the body a more efficient way of moving.
How many of us have truly investigated our relationship with exercise? I did this in 2015 as an experiment and I would encourage anyone to do the same. I stopped anything that felt like exercise. I wrote two blog posts about it and the ensuing existential crisis here PART 1, and here PART 2.
Many of us are forced to investigate our relationship with exercise only when exercise has no longer become possible- after injury in particular, as was my particular case.
At this point we have a choice. To go back to the way of doing things before injury, or to try to understand that how things were being done “before” is what led to being in this state now.
“I have to be present. I can’t just put myself through [the motions]”
Not to go mindlessly, counting down the reps of the homework exercises until they’re done, but to be fully immersed in the experience.
In fact, I rarely give a specific number of reps to do. Why? Because the goal is not to get to 10 reps. The goal is to be immersed in the experience of the movement. Its not what happens when you get to rep 10, its what is learned in the space of reps 1-9.
There will be a distinct sense of “knowing” when you’re done with a “set”. You’ll feel something has shifted. You’ll feel things working that haven’t worked in a long time. Your brain and body will simultaneously say “enough!”. But to know when you’ve reached this point means you must pay attention to what you are feeling. It could happen in 3 reps, or it could happen in 12, but you have to tune in to this feeling.
In Jean ‘s case, the foundation of our process was to tidy up the coordination of the joints that were out of sync: Change the ratios and timing of pronation through her entire system, from her foot up through her spine.
It took a lot of focus and energy on her part. She had to tune into parts of her body that she had no prior awareness of and the movements they were capable of performing.
Just being able to feel where the weight in her feet honestly was through all the noise in her system proved to be a challenge.
“Where am I, and where am I not”.
Had Jean simply counted to 10 and gone through the reps without awareness, she would be moving too quickly and automatically to learn a new pattern or to feel whether she was moving the parts that we were actually aiming to move.
In the book Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett tells a story of how the remote Amazonian tribe he is living with, the Pirahã, do not use numbers or math. He tried to teach them simple addition, but they didn’t have any prior experience with the concept of numbers or adding and would not learn. What if for some people, areas of their bodies feel like math did to the Pirahã? They could learn math if they wanted to, they have the same brains as every other human, after all. But they have survived so long without it, found a way of living without math, why start now?
“I have to concentrate on small things”
We weren’t going for big sexy movements, but small, precise ones. She needed to tune into how things felt rather than just perform the motion.
For example:
- Can you get your weight onto the anterior medial part of your heel?
- Can you drop your right pelvis lower than your left?
- Can you feel your spine bend to the left when you reach your right arm up?
As a closed system, changing one thing about the body must cause an adaptation from everything else. One degree can throw the entire system off.
If the pelvis isn’t level by one degree, everything else will be off by at least that much, probably more. If you draw two lines originating from the same point, one degree apart, how far apart will the two lines be after 2 inches? One foot? 100 feet? One degree matters, especially if there is pain present.
So for Jean to accomplish just several degrees of movement from a joint she doesn’t normally even have awareness of, or feel a change in where she is weight-bearing on her feet, while subtle, feels like an entirely different place to put the body. Off balance. It’s only a matter of degrees, but the brain starts to freak out because it doesn’t know where it is, and this is where the learning happens.
It takes so much more energy to focus on and feel the subtle differences I am describing than it does to squeeze your butt 10 times while thinking about what’s for lunch, and so for Jean, our work is hard not necessarily for the physical effort required, but for the ability to tune in, cope with change, and integrate it.
Not a “fire this muscle” approach, but a “move your structures into new spaces” one.
“I knew that this was what was missing”
“What’s missing”. In AiM philosophy, it always comes back to finding what’s missing, and claiming it back.
In Jean’s case, what’s missing was all of the above: Having her whole structure addressed, being asked to tune into her body, feel the parts she wasn’t aware of, move in ways she normally does not, access joint movements she has not felt for years, and do this subtle work in a completely present way.
I think Jean’s experience rings true for many people, certainly for myself in the past: Get hurt and go about getting treated in a way that has no expectation for us to engage with the work and be a part of our own healing process. Lie on the table and get worked on, without an expectation to do any work.
People are rarely presented an experience that allows them to heal themselves, and many people will rarely look for one because they don’t know what they don’t know.
In fact, in our first session Jean said:
“I’ve experienced body work of different sorts. But body work is something being done to me. It helps to get things to let go, to wake up things that are shut down. It does not teach my body what to do when I get up off the table. I feel like as soon as I move I’m going right back to whatever caused the problem in the first place. I need someone to teach me how I myself can get my body to swap out dysfunctional for better, consistently, and long term.”
I knew right then that we were going to get along great.
Conclusions?
If things are not changing in your body, ask:
Are you treating it as a whole system, or as separate parts?
Are you being present with it, or just going through the motions?
Are you checking in with it daily, or ignoring it’s signals?
Are you moving with awareness?
Are you moving out of your comfort zone, accessing ranges that you don’t usually move into, or sticking to what you know and normally do?
Are you determined, trusting, and committed to the process, or feel doomed to be stuck forever?
The real healing happens in the space of engaging fully in the process. Like Jean’s begun to do.
Realizing that the process is the goal.
“It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top” ~Robert Pirsig.
Jean always mentions how because she is “old”, she is having a hard time at making changes. But I don’t think this is true. I think she is doing incredibly well at making changes because of the attitude she has towards her journey. Its not a race after all, and it will take the time it’s going to take.
Time doesn’t heal, but what you do with the time you have to heal, will.
