How we move is one of the main contributors to health and well-being, but it continues to be overlooked in the prevailing dialogues, especially around trauma (all kinds of trauma, including medical trauma). We hear a lot about how MUCH we move or don't move, but we hear little about how we move and, especially, how that connects to all the other things in life.
Try this*: If you were to describe what you see in the landscape around you on a day or in the moments when you FEEL calm, good, or in flow, what would that landscape be?
Now, keep one foot in that landscape and let yourself travel to its opposite. I call this place my "rut landscape" because it's what it's like for me when I literally feel stuck in the mud, or in a track, or repeating the same things in my head (see above).
Those words/phrases I used above: low energy, overwhelm, exhausted, no follow-through... are all states of mind and body. They are not just mindsets or thinking patterns. They are those too, but they also have their counterparts in joints and movement.
What I love about this exercise, which is adapted from Deb Dana's work, is that it shows how our mental landscapes are kinesthetic. They are affective-kinesthetic, actually, and we interact within these landscapes via our bodies and movement. When there is a problem, like in my rut landscape above, looking at the big picture of how movement holds the wiring of our nervous system is needed.
Doing The Body's Work
So, a body's work, or what I think of as "doing the work" in a way that also includes the body, is informed by evidence-based theories, including poly-vagal theory and the neuroimmune hypothesis. In our asana practices, we explore the vagal-skeletal axis, which is the intersection of the nervous system and the musculoskeletal system. In particular, we focus on neuro-articular (referring to joints) integration. In other words, the feedback system in the joints is considered through their complex connectivity with the nervous system. A way to think about this is that our major joints, especially the synovial joints (also called diathrosis joints), are in continuous communication. Though in Western medicine, they are considered isolated and enclosed in their distinct joint capsule, a more holistic view is that the synovial joints always shift and compensate for each other through neural and fascial pathways. Exploring this is work that needs to be done to shift out of unconscious habits and reactions that keep us in places we don't want to be.
There are two ways the synovial joints relate to nervous system arousal. One is in the maintenance of well-being in the body, and the second is in the signaling of disorder. These two functions rely on the same mechanism: full movement. Movement is how synovial fluid is produced, and synovial fluid nourishes the articular surfaces of the joint. Movement is also how waste from the joints is flushed out of the joint (and out of the body).
When joints compensate for injuries, habitual positions, and other life circumstances when our landscapes narrow, movement becomes limited. Our joints can run out of their ability to compensate over time. The signaling of this is usually in a disruption of our somatic sense of self, which is just another way of saying our affective-kinesthetic landscape. This might feel like a sense of stiffness, the diminishment of movement, or pain. But it might also feel like overwhelm, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, and procrastination. Because we work under the principle of what Ida Rolf said: where you think it is, it ain't; in neuro-articular therapeutic work, we go to exploring full movement in all the major joint spaces as a way of opening up our kinesthetic landscapes
A groove is groovy, but a groove can become a rut over time.
*This exercise is adapted from Deb Dana's book Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory (high recs 👏)
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