I am constantly finding ways to allow clients to sense the back of their bodies. Then, last week, one of my clients who is also a movement and bodywork practitioner suggested that we have amnesia of the back of our body.
Indeed, this is true. And there are many reasons for this amnesia. To mention a few, we are forward focused, we spend much of our time on computers, at desks or driving. Our exercise regimes focus on the front body.
When I talk of the back of the body, I am not speaking lats or traps or glutei or erector spinae. I am talking of something altogether somewhat more mysterious. It feels like a connection. There is a communication system which may relate to the spinal cord being in the back body. And perhaps it has something to do with the 90% of the brain that keeps us upright in space and moving that is not a forward focused entity. Also, when we come into upright from the foetal position of babyhood, we come up through the back body. Like a flower opening, it opens as the 'back' of the flower unfolds and lengthens.
We have come to see movement as something of a state of contraction. We contract a muscle in order to move a bone or joint. These contractions we operate through the voluntary muscles or what some insist on calling the 'primary movers'. I doubt there really is such a thing, a prime mover. The body moves as one integrated, organic unit when it is ultimately ordered. The disorder of creating more muscle power in one area than in another, creates an imbalance. As we continue to contract the front muscles, the back of the body has to resist and fight back. Of course, we are entirely unable to feel this pull and push.
In my years of working with my own body and with clients, I have come to recognise the joints as a place to start to help the body integrate movement. So that the feet understand what the hands are doing. So that the knee is not inhibited by the hip and vice versa. And it is through the joints that we are able to reconnect with the back body. It is at the joint that we find space. It through the joints that we are able to find length and expansion. Joints are proprioceptive.
On the whole, we have a tendency to hold at the joints or to stabilise at the joints. It is common to find the muscles of the pelvis to be overworking. This is true of the pelvic floor too. This overwork leads to stressed fascia and unresponsive, fatigued muscles along with a holding around the hip joints. Bones are pulled out of place so that our relationship with gravity is challenged.
It takes some doing, but when we begin to move the joints differently, when we loosen our grip around them and allow the freedom for them to move in all designed directions, the amnesia we experience around the back body begins to reduce. And with the waking up of this connection, we begin to feel the ground, we begin to connect more readily with the earth and with each other.
The body, in its natural ordered state, is expansive. There is not shortness from one point (joint) and the next. When we insist on shortening between two points, the body loses its ability to communicate with itself. Its intelligence is challenged. That might be what a person wants in the activity he or she is undertaking, but it cannot continue forever without some form of injury.
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