Mind Body Physical Therapy

Change pain by getting a refined sense of position and movement in your body.

Injury from physical or emotional damage can leave lingering effects of altered control in your muscle systems. There are likely areas that are over active and areas that are under active. Slight position changes can have a significant effect on your ability to increase your comfort but you can’t make little changes in a locked down system.

The common advice to just pull your shoulders back or pull your head back doesn’t work if the too tight muscles never lengthen.

There are endless streams of exercises that you might choose or be instructed to do to alter or improve pain, but this series is different. The focus here is not on certain exercises, or doing them right.

This series is about developing a detailed sense of the parts of your body and learning how to locate position sense and locate movement sense. These fundamental senses are often reduced by injury, habit, exposure to trauma, or never developed well in childhood in the first place.

Additionally, we tend to think of our muscles mechanically like big rubber bands or pulleys shortening lengthwise to move our bones. We have lost the idea that muscles can work in little bits, like a patch of well directed tension. We think of our bones as being one whole unit for movement when really, a bone will have regions of movement along its length.

You might be someone with low back pain. When you try to move your low back it feels stiff. When you get moving it loosens up but it doesn’t stay that way. Possibly some of the moving parts are doing all the work and the stuck parts remain stuck. In order to restore activity to the whole area, you need to develop a bit of a detective sense about what’s working, language for talking about this, and imagery that helps.

You have a built-in capacity for this but it often gets lost. There are many ways we can imagine our moving parts. This is a way to do it in imagery that is playful, useful, and linked to progressively greater embodiment and self healing.

I will be laying out some images, shapes, and language for the series. I will endeavor to give some basic ideas and then build more advanced ways to play with the ideas. But first, start getting the basics.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }