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Stability is Freedom
A few months ago, a Facebook discussion on hyper-extended knees got me thinking about a stable knee. I didn’t post on the thread, because it was difficult to condense my thoughts. Then I made several attempts at the video posted above. None seemed adequate, but if you follow it, I think you’ll get the gist.
Then today, a student asked me why he couldn’t get into the twisting forward bend during Tadasana sequence. The question seemed to be about releasing a tight hip, but it was really about stability and freedom. He needed to let go of a gripping glute muscle that was providing false stability, to find true stability in the smaller, deeper muscle. Then the glute would be free to stretch into the position. As it was, that posture was literally holding the body hostage.
The student was going into a common pattern in which people squeeze their glutes forward and push the knees back. The glutes start doing the work of stabilizers. Then when we want to side bend, they can’t stretch because they are contracting. What’s more, when we do an action that needs the glute muscles to contract, they feel weak or immobile. They’re not weak, they’re unavailable. The glutes are doing the job of the deep stabilizer muscles, leaving them unavailable to do the work for which they were designed.
As you follow the video, remember, there is an ease in true stability. It is not gripping into a hard body. That ease is the small muscles working to hold a position leaving the large muscles available to move freely. The stable knee is at the heart of this concept. But the simple exercise of pushing your feet into the floor and moving up is the soul of it. You have to allow the posture to find itself rather than pushing and pulling forward and back to force the position.
Years of doing something out of alignment can freeze us up in two ways. One way is habit. The old path feels right and it’s hard to step off of it. The other is physical. The old movement pattern has created physical imprints in the body, that may be slow to change. You might have developed the pattern because various reason, like, for example, an overly rounded upper back. This “kyphosis” is essentially a tight chest. When you push your ribs up and forward and your hips chest remains tight, you just shifted the bones to look better. Sometimes this postures misaligns the low back and hips. When you stop the shifting, it may reveal true tightness. Changing that won’t be immediate.
True change requires patience and practice. Brute force will accomplish nothing and may create a new issue.
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Acceptance
I remember, vividly, the first time my heels reached the mat in downward facing dog. It was a Friday night yoga class.
The beauty in any yoga asana is letting go and allowing it to be what it is for your body in that moment.
I had long since given up on my heels getting to the floor and in this class, I’d forget it was ever a goal.
In this class, on Friday nights, it was easy to leave it all at the door. All the ambitions and goals, all the wants and needs, fell off me in the entryway. Once I was in the room I could just be in the room.
I didn’t so much get my heels to the floor, as I just suddenly realized they were there. I remember thinking…
“When did I learn to do that?”
The thing about this class, was that I had to drive in the opposite direction from my home to get to it at the end of a long week at a stressful job.
But as I unrolled my mat, I could unpack and put away my ego and expectations and then, just be on the mat.
And as I started to move, I could let go of my need to find the perfect position, I could just be with my body and my teacher’s voice.
I was too mentally exhausted for anything else. My only interest was in the release of the emotional and physical gunk that had built up through the week.
We are so caught up in our goals, in our ambitions, in our ego that sometimes they can trap us. We have been taught to value the end result and we often lose the perspective of the path and the process.
Yoga and pilates reward the process. They are disciplines that revel in the ability to observe and change on a minute level. But sometimes, we can even get bogged down in that well-meaning observation.
Sometimes you just have to be the movement and not stand in judgment of it. You have to give yourself absolute permission to ‘be where you are.’ Then you just work in that place without a thought for anything other than the step you’re on right that moment.
If you’re working one vertebrae at a time, you don’t even consider the next vertebra until this one has finished. And that work in the moment, be with that vertebra, without criticism or praise, without caring how much it moves.
That’s where I was when I realized my heals were on the floor, in a rare moment of absolute acceptance.
It is a paradox. The success that you seek comes when you stop searching for it. There is such beauty in letting go, if only for an hour on a Friday night, and there is a new realization.
The success wasn’t getting the heals to the floor. The success was getting to a place in the self, from which the heels could fall to the floor on their own, because they were no longer being held, they were no longer trapped.
Tensegrity
Tension is at the root of body dialogue. It is the language of conversation between muscle and bone. It is how the arm communicates with the heart, it is how the tongue talks to the toe. Tension is not stress, it is not toxic, it is connection. Cultivate it to create a better practice and more coordinated movement through life. Watch the video below for a further explanation of tensegrity. Click Video Classes to purchase a full-length practice.
Equilibrium
We talk so much about the body’s stabilizer muscles that it implies that the ultimate goal is stability. Yet, stable is not the word I’d use to describe the feeling that you get when you are working appropriately in a Pilates exercise or yoga posture.
The feeling you want in your body during a practice is not like concrete, firm and solid. It is, instead, more like a suspension bridge. It sways a bit in one direction, then the forces pull it back into another direction, keeping it centered.
An episode of John Leinhard’s “Engines or our Ingenuity” made clear my error in symantics.
The other side of instability is “equilibrium.” It is the loss of equilibrium that makes us fall. The presence of equilibrium keeps us ready to respond appropriately to forces or challenges.
In short, it’s not stability we seek, but “equilibrium.” And not even a stable equilibrium, but an unstable equilibrium.
As Lienhard put it, “A healthy equilibrium is one that rides instabilities. A little girl on roller skates, the man in the hand-glider, a person who can lose one job and find the next.”
A stable equilibrium, he explained, is like a marble in a V-shaped groove. If you jiggle it, it will fall back to the bottom. It is in an “uninteresting rut.”
When our bodies are in a rut, we wear out joints, overusing one area while letting another dry up. We open ourselves to pain and discomfort.
Even in life, sometimes I feel like we’re looking for a rut – a stable path on which we’ve traveled before and know what’s going to be around the bend. But even familiar paths have a way of changing on us, forcing us to find equilibrium.
My mother, who was always the healthiest person in the family – at 78, she took no medicines, had no conditions, saw no doctors. Then suddenly she’s diagnosed with cancer and we all have to adapt.
In equilibrium we fly like helicopters, always managing and adjusting to the forces around us to stay aloft.
And we need to maintain that equilibrium as effortlessly as possible, maintaining our energy reserves, so we can be ready for that next tightrope that we may have to walk.
Perspective
If you look hard at the picture. There's a tiny plane in the distance. As the plane took off I look out my window, against the back drop of the sunrise another plane took off on a parallel path. We rose together into the sky, the same in many ways then diverged in opposite directions.
I mused on the idea of perspective as it’s shape became smaller compared to the large wing of my own ride. I took a picture on my cell. On the tiny screen you could barely tell the spot in the distance was a plane.
The idea of the observer is ever present in yoga philosophy. In yoga, the mind is not the self, the true self is the observer.
We can employ this idea on a physical level in our practice. As you practice or workout, try to eliminate judgment and ignore your idea of what a pose should be.
Instead pay attention to what the pose is. Notice what you feel and where you feel it. See what the movement can teach you.
Then step back even further and take into account your own lens. What is your background, what have you done in the past and how does that effect how you view the movement in this moment.
Now squint. Not literally. In your mind try to feel the action a little differently.
Have you been judging the movement based on a pre-conceived notion of success?
In order to see truth, we have to take into account our own perspective and then try to see past it. It sounds simple, but its quite difficult. We are prisoners of our own knowledge at times.
Be innocent in a movement and experience it freely. See what it teaches you.