“Not everything faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” - James Baldwin
Which of your daily habits do you enjoy the most? Is it that first cup of coffee? The early morning walk with your dog? Perhaps it is the podcast you listen to on your way home from work or your evening power walk with your neighbor. Our daily rituals create the rhythm of our days, anchoring us in time and space. Not all our routines are pleasant—some are unpleasant but necessary. A daily call to your aging aunt with dementia may be tiresome but necessary for her safety and wellbeing. And who gets excited about taking out the trash? The value of our routines is measured not in how good they make us feel but in the level of stability they create in our lives.
Our daily routines are basically a collection of habits, those repetitive actions we take in response to the demands of the world we live in. Your morning routine may consist of a cup of coffee, a walk, and a shower before 7:30 am because you want to be alert, energized, and ready to start your day by 8 am. We maintain a habit because it is successful at fulfilling a need within the confines of our reality. But life is not static; it is always in flux, continuously changing and evolving. Our habits become ineffective, and can even cause pain when, as life’s demands change, they get out of sync with our needs. In your twenties, those two or three drinks you had several nights a week may have been an enjoyable part of your social landscape. This ritual can become a liability when, in your thirties, you are raising a family and building your career. Some of our habits are so deeply ingrained, with grooves cut so deeply in our mindset, that we are unable to navigate away from them, even when life demands we do so. That’s when a habit becomes a liability, creating tension and dysfunction in our routines and in our lives.
Our bodies follow their own internally constructed routines as well. Some of these routines are conscious, but most follow a rhythm that operates below our awareness. These are our natural circadian rhythms, the ebbs and flows throughout the day that influence our energy levels, mental acuity, appetite, and mood. Additionally, various systems throughout the body have their own individual rhythm; our blood pressure rises and falls throughout the day, our respiratory rate changes, even the lining of the nasal passages contracts and expands at different times during the day. Some of these changes are in response to self-induced demands, such as when we start moving and need more oxygen, and others are created by more subtle factors such as exposure to light, hydration level--even emotional stress.
Our posture is a living record of the habitual ways in which we move and hold ourselves throughout the day. It also reflects how we carry ourselves and adapt to the terrain around us on the outside as well as our inner environment. Just as our behavioral habits form the foundation of our daily routines, the habitual ways in which our muscles and fascia stabilize and move our body create movement patterns that help us navigate our world. Typically, we only pay attention to posture when we notice a slouch and our internal nagging voice reminds us to “stand up straight”. However, posture is about much more than how we stand. In truth, it is a dynamic process, reflecting our habitual way of being, and is a rich depository of information about the state of our muscles, fascia, and movement patterns. Posture tells the story of how our body interacts with our personal terrain, holding clues to our history and the ways in which we navigate the environment, hold tension, and respond to our world.
If you studied basic anatomy, you may have learned that muscles are attached to tendons, which are attached to bones. When the muscle contracts, the tendon pulls on the bone and creates movement. This simplistic representation of movement overlooks the vast complexity and interconnectivity between muscles, tendons, ligaments, and the surrounding fascia. Movement is not a stimulus--response event, but, rather, an intricate dance involving a host of different players who must enter and exit at just the right time. Additionally, fascia (the thin layer of connective tissue that surrounds our organs, muscles, tendons, and ligaments) is loaded with a variety of sensors that provide a wealth of information to the brain about our inner environment. These sensors have specialized functions, measuring variables such as load, pressure, speed, temperature, tension, and pain. This information is vital to the brain, which uses it to orient our body in space and create the patterns of movement that shape our lives.
We all know that the decisions we make in life are only as good as the information we use to make them. This axiom holds true for our bodies as well. The brain can only make adjustments and fine tune our movements with the information it receives from the tissues. Sensors located in the fascia become more sensitive and provide more data when they are loaded regularly (read: physical activity and exercise). Lack of regular movement in the fascia, either due to tension that limits the range of motion or a sedentary lifestyle, changes the fascia in ways that decrease the sensitivity of the sensors. With less accurate information, our movement patterns become dysfunctional, leading to tension, lack of balance, pain, and injury.
Dysfunctional movement patterns can eventually show up as tilts, shifts, rotations, and bends in our posture. Some of these patterns can be so deeply ingrained that we don’t notice them, but we become well aware of the pain they can cause. To heal we must first identify the problem—where are we holding, what is misfiring, etc. Dysfunctional movement patterns are, like bad habits, a poorly executed attempt to solve an existing problem. It helps to know what “problem” the body was trying to solve by creating the movement pattern. For example, painful arthritis in one knee makes it hard to bear weight on that leg. To work around the pain, the body shifts more weight to the leg without arthritis, especially when walking. This change can, over time, cause our pelvis to shift so that one side is higher than the other. This shift can be so subtle that we are unaware of the change, but the resulting compensation can lead to hip and lower back issues down the road.
Not all postural imbalances can be fixed. Very few of us are born with perfectly shaped bones and proportional limbs. Our bones aren’t crafted by a 3-D printer but are built with slight imperfections that contribute to the beauty and diversity of the human body. Postural imbalances start well before we are born, during gestation as our bodies grow within the confines of the mother’s womb. Given that we enter life with our own imperfections, it is unrealistic to think we can ever achieve perfect posture. Rather, the goal should be to establish healthy movement patterns that help us to move through life with mobility and stability, working within the confines of our body’s natural blueprint.
The first step in establishing new physical habits is to sharpen our kinesthetic awareness. Kinesthesia is our ability to sense the position of our body and how the limbs are moving in space. Usually this sense works quietly, under the radar of our conscious awareness. It is a sense that can be trained by becoming active, especially when we tune in and pay attention to body sensations. This awareness needs to be cultivated, especially in our current fitness culture that encourages us to tune out while exercising. We have at our disposal a wide range of devices that will measure data—heart rate monitors, caloric expenditure, pace, mileage, etc. This information tracks how we are performing but not how we are being. Kinesthesia is a felt sense, a subtle awareness that comes when we broaden our attention, tune in, and simply notice movement. The endless chatter and data we receive from these devices, although helpful for tracking and monitoring, creates noise that can overwhelm the subtle messages from this finely tuned sense.
Kinesthesia is developed when we are mindful, which is why yoga has a profound impact on changing unhealthy movement patterns. Our practice tunes us into our deeply ingrained patterns so that we can gradually start to move in more beneficial and healthy ways. We wake up this sense by preparing for, and then practicing, inversions, in which the head is held below the hips. Prepping for inversions requires core awareness, open hips, and strong shoulders. Although you may choose not to practice a full inversion, the poses related to the prep work, like the inversions themselves, help to clear and calm the mind, as well as center our attention. Finishing the practice with legs up the wall, a deeply restorative pose that can be done on a chair or a block if you lack wall space.
I invite you to come to your mat with an intention to tune in to a deeper awareness of how you move. Rather than focus on how a pose looks, shift your attention to that innate sense of how it feels. Which poses feel light, effortless, or strong? Notice the quality of your transition between poses. Which ones feel choppy, awkward, smooth, or gliding? Use your breath to notice when you hold and when you let go. Tap into your kinesthetic awareness to explore new ways of moving that become supportive, providing greater stability and ease in your life.
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