Interoception in Movement

Chapter 1

What is Interoception?

Welcome to Polonious anytime. I'm Elizabeth Larkam and I'm Tom Myers. We are so happy to be with you back with you for a third workshop. Tom, I've really been looking forward to being with you because I know that you're the man. I can ask my questions about interoception. Well, I must say that this is the first time that I've put this out in a public setting, so all the information is tentative is temporary in that the research is really coming in thick and fast. As you pointed out in these books, there's only a little bit written on into reception and our listeners and viewers can look forward to more books coming out on this in the coming years.

I'm quite sure. Yes. Recently when you and I met at the Fascia Research Congress in Berlin, I mentioned to you in our elevator conversation that I was so looking forward to learning about Intero ception from the presentations and I came away thinking, oh, well it's just you and me. We will go forth. Yes, but it's important that people understand how they perceive it's important for you as a [inaudible] teacher to perceive how your clients are taking in the movements that you're giving them. You may be giving them and just the proper way and they may be being received in a different way because of how people proceed into receptively.

Yeah. When I listened to your lectures, to your discussion about the, uh, the scientific background of intraception, then I realized that now that there's a, there's a language and a research process in science that can, uh, give some, some shape and some grounding to what I've been trying to do with movement in my own practice and to facilitate the wellbeing of my clients. And we've said a sense of movement has to do with where your body is in space on a, we'll discuss that in terms of proprioception, but you're always checking whether your body is okay or not. And it's these into receptors that check out whether I'm okay or safe or unsafe, uh, doing well or not doing so well. All of those things are from interception.

You can imagine not being able to see being blind. You can imagine not being able to hear and still having a very full and wonderful life, but it's really hard to imagine that you have no sense of movement, no sense of your body and still perform a productive life. It's not quite the same as the other senses. It's something so basic to how we are physiologically and we're just beginning to get the scientific basis on which we assemble that feeling with the specificity that, um, I search for in movement in the [inaudible] environment. I always that it was the specificity, the accuracy of the appropriate perception that facilitated a sense of safety, peace and wellbeing.

But now I realize that they're listening to your lectures. It may be beyond the specificity of proprioception. There may be other mechanisms involved. Yes, sensual touch and slow touch is something that comes in on intraception comes in on very slow nerves. It might take a second or two for the interoceptive data from a nice your mother soothing you from an [inaudible] on your skin to make it to your brain.

It's not the fast thing that tells me, Oh, I'm being cut. Oh, I'm under danger here. It's the slow thing that says, Yep, we're okay. Yep. That was nice. Yep. Ooh, that was really nice. All of those things are of course appropriate, deceptively recorded, but also intraceptive Lee felt that makes me wonder how is it possible to design the [inaudible] environment and how is it possible to refine our queuing and teaching styles in order to support, facilitate and encourage the, the timing and the depth that interoception required? Hmm. So that will reflect on the plot. Teachers' use of their voice. It will reflect on their use of touch.

For those of you who do use touch in your practice and it reflects on the timing and, and, uh, tuning into the feeling that your client is having when they're doing whatever, uh, exercise or emotion you're having them do. Yes. Listening to you explain those necessities in order to support intraception I feel a little bit of a sense of conflict like, oh, in a 50 minutes session or a 55 minute session, how is it possible to give the, uh, the demand for a variety of movement at the same time to support the intraceptive timing and processing. It may be new that we're finding out scientifically about interoception, but interceptions have been part of our body. And you, so you've been working with Inter reception the entire time that you've been doing pilates or yoga or massage or whatever sessions you're doing because the interceptions been in there whether we knew about it or not. So the kinds of things that, um, you would do the really hard part in the upper middle part of the session and come back down into something more. I'm, I'm still more familiar with yoga. So back to the Shavasana style at the end of the session, we've always talked about that in terms of the parasympathetic system and calming down.

Now we know that that's intraceptive as well be as and as exhaustive and energetic as you want. In the middle of the session, but if you want people to feel wonderful about it, then we come back down into something that's slower and more refined and more intraceptive towards the end of the session or towards the end of any given exercise. We get into the exercise, make sure I'm doing it right, get some muscle involved in there and get some energy involved. But then you refine it. When you refine the movement, you're going more into receptive. When you refine the session at the end, you're going more into receptive. It's not that we've discovered this whole new thing that was never there before. It's that we're beginning to work with this thing that's always been there. Yes. And you will leave such a lovely job of being both proprioceptively and into receptively aware that I'm sure that we're going to have no problem with the exercises we're about to do.

Thank you for that vote of confidence. I have, as you know, prepared movement vignettes that I look forward to, um, to teaching and to sharing with all of our viewers and especially to sharing them with you to get your vantage point. Um, your global commentary on these moves. Great. I'm happy to do that. Do you want to say anything about these before we leave? Yes, I do. These are part of the reference lists that are included for your workshop and Tom, I'll just note that you I think are working on the fourth edition of Anatomy trains.

Yes. In between everything else that I'm doing, I am working on the fourth edition of Anatomy training, which will include some stuff on it. The reception there, you can see these little post it notes. These are the parts that are already talking about interception in these other books. There's nothing about interoception in my book that was written five years ago because we didn't know what I will explain in the lecture about interoception at the time that I wrote the book. So I'm including in reception in the fifth. Uh, I'm sorry, the fourth edition, which will probably be on the news stand sometime in 2020 my book has been out a year now and there's only, there are only a few mentions of Intero ception and inc. I included it in the and the clients sequencing charts. Um, but mostly because I knew it was a concept that was coming and I didn't want to go to press being so behind. Hmm. Um, we'll note that there's another edition coming out in fashion in sport and movement that will surely have more information. Your chapter in mind.

Yes. I um, my chapter is still going to be about anatomy trains, but I bet you have Robert in his chapter as well. Have a lot more about interoception and this comes out in its second edition. Yes. And when we were at Fascia Research Congress in Berlin, we met with Josephine Ki a physiotherapist from Australia. The last chapter of her book had to focus on interoception. And how about that? We both wrote, yes.

Well it's a small circle of people that are really looking how a Boothman as medicine is a thing. We've talked about how mood is a movement. It can act as medicine for people. I'm really on the movement as food, um, thing. That movement is actually a nourishing thing that we need. And that so many people in driving around and doing everything with screens, they are not getting a good diet.

And if you're only doing one thing, you're there like you're like your teenager who's on a mano diet who isn't eating nothing but pizza and peanut butter. Uh, if you're doing nothing but yoga or nothing but personal training, you want to make sure you get the variety in your movement plots is designed that way to make sure that there's a variety in the movement. But even then, you want as much rich diversity in your diet of movement, uh, as you can muster. Tom, this is fantastic. I am so excited to get to work in the movement studio. Let's go. Let's go.

Chapter 2

Understanding the Nervous System

Hi. I just want to offer my own little apology and introduction here. The first apology is that I'm just getting over a cold brought home by my favorite child from my favorite school. If you're a parent, you know what I'm talking about. So I apologize for my voice. But the second apology is that I'm about to talk about neurology.

If I'm known for anything, it's as the fashion guy and um, I know something about that. Uh, and what I know about neurology could be carved in large letters on the head of a pin. Um, and secondly, one I'm about to talk about is so new that there is not a lot of published literature on it. It's actual effect in movement and bodywork is not known yet. Um, so first I'm saying I don't know much. And secondly I'm saying we don't know much about this because we're entering the century where we're going to find out about consciousness. Now lots of people are doing research in consciousness and it makes you think of Michael Pollan and psychedelics and all of that.

And that's not what I'm talking about. Um, our consciousness of the body is the basis on which our everyday consciousness is built. And this is becoming so evident as we begin to study consciousness. Consciousness is very hard to study in any kind of objective way. The most objective thing that we can study is the consciousness that comes from the body because of the nerve endings that are in the body. We are about to go and explore that, but please understand as I go into this and I talk with the confidence that my father imbued in my voice that nobody knows this stuff yet.

Prepare to have your mind changed from what I tell you in this lecture because the research is coming hot and heavy and it's really going to change in the next 10 to 20 years. This much I can say with certainty, your consciousness is built on the feelings from your body and this intraceptive idea is how the body builds consciousness into the mind or the mind sucks consciousness around the body. However you'd like to see it. Okay, so let's start in on our slideshow, but with that proviso that a lot of what we know, we don't really know. This is part of what we call spatial medicine. It is absolutely all the new information about Fascia, which we'll just touch on here is absolutely relevant to movement but as important and as cutting edge is this idea of how we perceive movement. It's in general, under the subject of Kinesthesia, how do we perceive our body and movement and we've just gotten some new information in on this. I'm going to review some of the old information. I'm going to review it in a different way, thinking about the anatomy in a different way and then we're going to get into the new information. So, um, yeah, unfortunately all I know about and think about is Fascia.

So I hope you already have that information and you can get that information either from this place, anytime series a, we have other workshops available or on via my website, anatomy, trains.com the nervous system takes place in the fashion context. If we were able to take the nervous system out from the body or let's do it the other way, if we were to make everything invisible in the body except the nervous system, we would see the shape, the exact shape of the body, breast fat, everything. But the hair, uh, would show up in the body because every part of the body is somewhere near a nerve. The nervous system is maybe centered in the brain. If you think so, or centered in the solar plexus if you prefer, but it spreads out through the whole body and no cells can be very far away from the nerve endings because that's what coordinates the 70 trillion cells that make you up. All of those 70 trillion cells in your body have specialized functions. The first cell in your body had no specialized functions.

It had big generalized functions and that's the [inaudible], the largest cell in your body. If you took a sharp pencil and made a dot on a piece of paper, that's how big the ovum is. And the ovum can do things like contract. It has actin fibers inside of itself that allows it to contract and move and it has um, lots and lots and lots of proteins on the surface that are sensory proteins that are interfacing, tasting, if you will, smelling and tasting the outside world. It conducts a long the surface membrane, you know that as soon as the sperm hits the ovum surface a conduction, ionic conduction goes right around the membrane and closes off to any further sperm. So we know about the conduction across the membrane. The cell secretes all kinds of things in and out of its environment and each of the cells in your body, the four different types of cells, nerve cells, muscle cells, connective tissue cells and epithelial cells.

They all partake of that original function of the ovum, but they all emphasize one of those functions. So we go from ovum to stem cells and then into the differentiated cells of ectoderm as determine ended or not going into that. But we ended up with the four different kinds of cells. The nerves do conduction really, really well. They have lost other, um, functions. They don't contract well.

They don't reproduce well at all. Take away oxygen for a few minutes and the nerve cells lose it. But they do conduction fabulously. They conduct signals all over your body. We'll see that in a minute. How that works. The muscle cells obviously specialize in contraction.

The connective tissue cells, which is my area of specialty there I could talk for all day instead of just this few minutes. But the, um, connective tissues are building the material that, uh, allows your body to stand up and, uh, the epithelial cells, which are doing the secretion and absorption of all your food and lining all your blood vessels in your lungs and everything else. But we're today going to focus on the neuro system. But let's, let's look at how these systems Dysport themselves in the body. It's important to me. It's not important to your practicality. This is a concept, not a practicality, but play with me for a minute here.

The original system in your body was the digestive system. Your digestive system built you. You may think you have a digestive system so that you can get food, but from the point of view of your digestive system, it's the other way around. Your digestive system built you to get better food and better sex probably. But the, um, idea of your digestive system, this old tube that goes from mouth to anus, uh, is the oldest part of you and you built everything around it.

What did you build around it? You built a nervous system around it, which centers itself behind the spine. You built a circulatory system around it, which centers itself in the front of the spine and you built a fashional system around it, which centers itself in the discs of the spine. So can you see that we essentially have four tubes go with me on the tubes part that around the digestive tube we built a nervous system, a circulatory system and a fashion system, myofascial system, if you will, but that those systems are the three holistic systems of the body and we're talking today about the nervous system. All these systems are implicated in the symptoms that your clients bring to you. Whatever muscle aches or backaches or any other things that they've got going on. In terms of the domain that we work with and movement in manual therapy, those symptoms are always part of patterns.

Those patterns can be in the skeletal system. Those patterns can be in the neuro muscular system itself in trigger points or hypertrophy or are atrophy of the muscles. You guys who are working in plots are working very much with movement strategy. The movement strategy is how the nerves run the muscles inside that musculoskeletal system. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. How does your body tell your mind about how to move?

How does your body tell your brain about how to change behavior? Of course, the fourth leaf of this flower you're in, Tom Myers class is going to be the [inaudible] system, but for once, we're not going to talk about the fashion system very much except to realize that inside, um, your body's tissues, the nerves are spreading out into the Fascia and that the nerves are, that the nervous system, the brain is very interested in what's going on in your Fascia that we're going to talk about. What kind of information is the brain getting from the Fascia? The other system where there are two other systems, we've spoken a little bit, the circulatory system is very, very valuable here. You can't talk about the nervous system without including the circulatory system, especially in terms of the synapsis that we're gonna talk about in a little bit.

But that circulatory system and the fiber system are not going to be our focus today. The nervous system is when we think about this fiber system, we think about all the glue and the fiber that makes up the Fascia, but we can't separate that from the muscles. Do you see how the tissue coming up off the bone becomes part of the tendon, which becomes part of the muscle, which has flashed out through every little muscle cell, every little groups of muscles, they're all surrounded by Fascia. So the Fastenal system and the muscular system are so intimately connected that you can't take them apart. And the nervous system is just as intimately connected into this as we shall see.

What we haven't seen in 500 years of anatomy is the fashion system as a system. So here is um, a section of the thigh with the muscle in it. But what would happen if we took the muscle out, then we would see the fashion system as a system in 500 years of anatomy. We haven't seen this. There are reasons for that, but I'm not going to go into now it's difficult to show this system, this. I've been showing this image now for 25 years and I still haven't gotten a better image yet of the fashion system as a system within the body.

Imagine, imagine, please that the nervous system is going out into this like a set of flower endings blooming out into neurological endings in your myofascial system to tell you where you are. We pretty much knew that how you were doing on your insides. We pretty much knew that and now what we found that's new is your insides and your outsides in the sense of your musculoskeletal system are intimately linked. Stay tuned. Here we go. So now our focus comes in on the nervous system.

Your nervous system is a sin city and what do I mean by that big long word? I mean a city of cells. I mean that the cells are all linked up across the body. There is no part of your nervous system that is isolated from the other part. There are separate parts of the parts that go to your organs. The, you could identify the Vegas nerve and the accessory nerve and all these different nerves, but they don't really lie separately.

They're all connected up with each other, and so the nervous system reacts as a whole. We try to break things up into their constituent parts. I'm going to talk about the anterior cingulate gyrus and the parietal lobe, but listen, these are human names on God's creation. God's creation is absolutely singular, unified and was never an unified. It's not like you had a nervous system in your arm and it grew together with the nervous system and your body, your nervous.

Our system has always been connected up with itself and with the Fascia for that matter. So what is the job of the nervous system? The nervous system's job is to create a picture. Hear me now to create a picture of your outside world, what you see here in smell, okay, and the picture of your inside world, how you feel, how your organs feel, how your tissues are doing, and put those two together to create a world. You've been creating a world since you were, I don't know. It's something that begins when you're born or even before you're born, but you don't have a lot of perception going on before you're born, but once you're born, you start differentiating yourself from the world and you create an interior world.

As long as that interior world feels safe, you will travel along that word enthusiastically a little bit, hesitantly, however you do a, but you will follow along as long as the internal world and the external world are in concert. It's when the internal world and the external world are not in concert that your nervous system goes into action to say, what do I need to do to make this safe? I'm going to change the world outside myself so it feels safe or I'm going to change my internal world to fit the outside world. I feel safe. Those are your two choices, except there's a third. The third choice is when you do not trust or do not act on the signals that are coming from your internal world and you have a constant feeling of not being safe, but that becomes your norm.

This unfortunately has happened to people in intraceptive perception and it is the cause of a lot of anxiety and distress in the world today. And finally, the job of the nervous system is to create a motor response based on that feeling of safety or not based on my curiosity or not based on what I need to do next. I create a motor response and I send that down from my brain or out from my spinal cord to the muscles to change my behavior. So create a world to sense the world, compare it to my inner created world and then create a behavioral response to that. That's the job of the nervous system. It does that in a place where you can see that the whole body is included in this nervous system.

Let's play a little bit with the specific parts that go, um, to all the organs. As you can see here, all the organs are richly innervated and we may find this is a picture from Jim Hoshman's book, energy medicine. You may find, we may find that there are direct pathways through the other tissues that are not nervous system modulators that are even faster than the nervous system, but not as precise. We're going to stay with the nervous system for the rest of the day and I couldn't resist. Just putting in that little piece that, oh, maybe there are connections and communication through the fashion system that doesn't even have to go through the nervous system. Now, the basic unit of the nervous system is the neuron. I know you'll learn about this in seventh grade science class, but we're going to review it just for a minute. All the same. This is your basic neuron on the board. You can see lots and lots and lots of dendrites here and you'll see there's lots of receptors. This is the receptive and of the nerve.

It takes in all the signals from these inhibitory neurons on these excitatory neurons and it sums up and it says yes or no. If it says yes, then an action potential goes down this long Axon, which can be up to one yard long up to a meter long, one nerve, which means it's very, very, very stretched out, which means there's a little bit of fluid and a lot and a lot of membrane. So the neuron is mostly membrane. And what happens on that membrane, these guys hit the membrane from the receptive side. Some of them excitatory and some of them inhibitory.

So depending on the sum total, the cell says go and has an action potential that goes down or doesn't. That may end on a muscle as in this picture or it may end on another nerve and the same thing goes on again and again and again. No. If you look, you can see how many studs do you see the little studs here on the dendrites. That's how many receptors this particular cell has. Some cells only have a few sums. ELLs have thousands of these receptors that are being affected by the chemicals coming across these synapses. So the nerves, interestingly, I said they were all in contact with each other, but I should have been careful there because they don't touch, they don't touch.

There's always a gap in between a synaptic gap in between. Let's have a look at that in context and for that we need a piece of paper. Okay, so we just talked about a neuron, but a neuron is just a little single ribbon. They're flashing away. It doesn't make a system. The minimum system for the nerve is the three neuron arc.

That's what we're going to talk about right now and what we can see is that there's one, two, three types of neurons and I have three different colors here, so I'm going to use three different colors. One are the sensory neurons and then there is always on or on at least one. I put the loop here for the interneurons to show that there's at minimum one, but there may be many, many in this part of the arch. This could go all the way through your brain and then it's going to come out the other end. As I said earlier in some kind of behavior. Now the motor nerves only go to muscles.

They go to the muscles that you use in pilates and they also go to the smooth muscles of your body. In other words, they're responsible for allowing the bronchitis and your lungs to open or a lot having the vessels and your blood system close. All of those things are happening when you're exercising as well, but you're not thinking about those. You're not thinking when you do the saw about how your blood vessels are opening and closing in different parts of your body in order to allow you to do that, it happens in the part of consciousness, which is the iceberg below the level of the ocean. We think about the movement and the iceberg above the level of the ocean. There is so much going on below the level of the ocean in the deep part of the iceberg. That's what we're going to explore today, but if we look at this three neuron arc, we would see a sensory nerve comes in from somewhere.

If you're talking about seeing, then the cells on the back of your retina are specially designed to respond to light and they go to a part of your brain that interprets those signals as light in your ear. The waves that I'm making through the speaker of whatever you're watching me on are making the air vibrate. That's making the tympanic membrane vibrate, that's making little bones go up and down. Those are making signals. That's exciting nerves that are going up your acoustic nerve and their, you're organizing that in your temporal lobe into sound. That's hopefully making a little bit of sense. Uh, as we talk about this and you have sensory nerves coming up from your body as well. We'll talk about all these propria receptors and into receptors that and the skin receptors that give you your sense of your body that comes into your brain.

Now, the simplest thing would not be to come to your brain at all. That's when the doctor takes a little rubber hammer and hits your knee. And just to check that your reflex works and what they are checking is a three neurone arc. It comes up from the sensory, oh, somebody hit the hammer on my knee. One Neuron, one neuron only. Nevermind the loop. Just wanting one neuron and then bang, it comes out in the motor. By the time your brain hears about it, you've already done that reflex. You can't stop it. It's just in your spinal cord. Other things like, Oh, do you really love me? That could go into that.

That's there comes in on the sensory nerves, but that could go into your interneurons and be there for a weeks before months, years before a reply comes out into your motors system. Right? So some things get lost in the interneurons. Some things can't get lost in the interneurons, like your knee reflex. So the rest of our responses live somewhere in between the it went in there and never came out versus the ups, it's going to come right out and only one neuron. The more you make your Polonious exercises your own, the more they become habitual.

The fewer interneurons are required to actually have you do the motion. That cuts both ways. That makes you competent at that movement ever more competent at that movement. The trouble is it also makes you evermore habitual in that movement, so when is the time to really keep doing your Kata? Keep doing your habits, keep doing your exercises until they're strong and well founded in your nervous system when a as opposed to or vice versa, you when you want to shake things up and not do things the way that you've been doing them before because you need new input into your nervous system.

This is a dilemma of yoga, polities, martial arts, personal training. Everybody has to contend with habit versus me over habitual. The strength of habit and the strength of being able to do things repetitively versus the not strength of being limited into certain channels of your movement. Okay, so minimum you've got these three things going along and why did I make it into a circle? Because when you change your muscles, you change what you sense. That changes your picture of the world. That changes what you do for motor.

This is a loop. It's called the sensory motor loop. Those of us who do body work are often reaching in to give us the same with you doing movements. You're reaching in to give new sensations which make new pictures, which organizes new behavior. Those of you who teach movement, it's difficult. This is a side note, but those of you who teach movement, it's difficult to teach a new motor behavior if they haven't had the feeling of what that is going to be. So what do you do? You take your clients, you take your client's hand and you put them through. You use your best words to have them change their behavior to come out. That's altering their sensory data to alter the motor.

It's really hard to alter the motor without first altering the sensory, but it's a loop that goes on here. So that's the minimum bet. You're trying to help people change their behavior. What we're going to be talking about today is almost all on this side of the ledger, but understand how that's going to affect how they move and even more how they appreciate how they move. If you get people to move differently, that's great. If you get people to appreciate how they move differently and how movement helps them, you have, it's a little bit the difference between giving a person a fish and teaching a person to fish. Yes. If you teach them to fish, they will get joy out of their body for the rest of their life. I am going to be 78 this next year.

I am having so much more fun in my body than I had when I was 50 or 30 and feel good. No problem so far. All right. What I want you to know about the in between here is that in between each of these there is always a synapse. I'm only going to do this once. This is a long lecture and but I wanted to make sure that we have it. Some of you will remember Candace perts book called molecules of emotion and it had to do with all the neuropeptides in our body. You've heard of endorphins. Endorphins is one of the neuropeptides, but there's 150 or maybe 200 by now of these neuropeptides that are not hormones and they're not neurotransmitters, but there are somewhere in between.

And they set the mood. So here is the end of the sensory nerve which ends in those little Butan, those little buttons that you saw at the end, the sensory nerve. And then there are dendrites on this inter neuron, which are somewhere near here. But I didn't mean to have them touch cause I wanted them not quite touching. And there's always a synaptic gap here. And the neuro, what shall I use? Black, uh, the neuro peptides are always coming through here and affecting the mood.

So did you have coffee this morning? Those neuropeptides are probably facilitating this synapse to make it more likely to fire. Did you take Valium this morning? Oh, that's probably the neuropeptides that it's not really neuropeptides. It's Valium, but it's still going through. It's not affecting the nerves. It's affecting the synapse in between the nerve. Likewise here at the end of the interneuron that will interface onto a motor neuron with the Bhutan's.

And the modern neuron will be receptive to this nerve and probably several other nerves and it will take all the summation from all those nerves and dependent on the neuropeptides that are going through here, which depends on your mood and the time of the month and everything else and that will affect whether this guy says fire or not. Fire and down it will go. It can have fire. It's like being a little bit pregnant. It doesn't work. It either fires or it doesn't fire and that's going to stimulate that end of the muscle because again, this has a little butal that is on the muscle itself. Use the same thing and then the muscle will fire.

That will change your sensory and around we go. It is important to me that you understand that the nervous system is not a computer, it's wetware, it's not hardware or software or it is both hardware and software, but mostly it's wetware and therefore the nervous system is always being modified by what's in the circulatory system. What's in your mood? Drugs have the neuropeptides, what's coming out from your diet, what's coming out from anxiety, what's coming out from whether you had an argument or a love making session with your spouse before you came to your [inaudible] session that makes a difference. And B to this chemistry that's running around here and therefore to your perception. So we're going to talk about the intra receptors and the appropriate sectors that are here, but I just wanted to set the mood, if you will, by saying the mood is set not so much by what's going on in this telephone system of your neurons, but what's going on in between the telephone system cause it's not a telephone system that the telephone system into which people are pouring hormones, neuropeptides and other chemicals that affect how you feel about what you feel.

Now we're going to talk about interoception. That's the subject of our talk today, but it occurs in a context. Now, interception itself is not new interception. Well, let me give a few definitions here. Kinesthesia sense of movement is the way that we feel our body. That's the whole thing put together.

That includes interoception and proprioception and what's called somosthetic or your skin's sensors all together, uh, produces kinesthesia. Oops. And I forgot the vestibular system where you have little canals in there and the little hairs are being stimulated by the motion of the water in the canals or the auto lifts on the bottom of the, of the semicircular canals. So all of those things are sensory data that you put together to know where you are in space, how you're moving in space and what we're talking about today, how you feel about all of that. That's really cool. Um, but we have to set the stage by understanding Kinesthesia is the whole thing. Proprioception we'll talk about in a minute. That's what we always thought. That how you know, where your muscles, bones and joints are in space.

And then there's intraception now the original name of interception applied to the feelings that you get from your guts inside. For instance, you know, you need to pee when the bladder fills up and that creates stretch receptors in the surface, create stimulation of the stretch receptors in the surface of the bladder. And that goes up to your brain and says, mark, can I find a place to be a similar kind of reception of Kinesthesia of interoception happens in your lung with every breath as your lungs expand and move out, you get more stretch reception in the tissues of your lung. Those into receptors go to your brain and say, okay, that's the full breath. Now let's stop and go back out again. You get down to the bottom, there is no stretch, Herceptin and the interceptors in your lungs and that tells you, okay, hey, time to take a breath in. Lack of intraceptive signaling in your stomach tells you you're hungry.

Uh, if you have a bad gas bubble in your small intestine, it's the stretch reception, the interoceptive stretch reception at the top of your small intestine that is saying this is painful. Could you do something else please? And all of those intraceptive bits, they're in your heart. They're in your lungs, they're in all of your organs. We understood that you were getting into receptive messages from those organs and that's what intraception was all the mostly stretch reception from your internal organs telling how they were. That was accepted as interception.

Proprioception is a little bit different thing that's out in your muscles, bones and joints and tells you how you are. You've heard of these things, muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, and then we have the rest of the Italian family, Pacini, [inaudible] and the Ruffini endings adding to Senor Golgi and his Golgi tendon organs, but then you have the free nerve terminals were headed for the free nerve terminals, but let's just look at a few things about proprioception since this is your domain. I'm going to pause here before I get to interoception with a little bit about proprioception. The first thing I'd like to say about proprioception is that it's absolutely lutely specific. Here is a muscle and the tendon going over to the bone and we thought, oh, well there's some muscle spindles in this part and there's some Golgi tendon organs over in this part, and they go to the reign and tell what's going on in that muscle. Nope. Right.

There are muscle spindles around these muscle groups saying what's happening in this group of muscles? Well, do you see how this is divided up into bundles? This is a section of the tendon. The tendon is divided up into bundles as well, and this bundle of this tendon is linked up with this bundle of the muscle and this muscle spindle and that Golgi tendon organ are linked up in the spinal cord. It is so highly specific. It's not muscle by muscle. It's almost muscle fiber to tendon fiber. The ones that are linked, it is very, very, very specific. You don't move proprioceptively muscle by muscle. You don't say, I'm going to use this superspinatus for the first 15 degrees of this abduction.

Then I will use the deltoid until 89 degrees. At which point the Trapezius will cut in for the remaining 40 degrees. Nope. You use individual neuro motor units. The deltoid is at least seven individual neuro motor units.

The pectoralis major is nine different neuro motor units. You think of those independently in your brain. You think you move muscle by muscle cause that's what the books told you that that's what your teachers have been telling you. You muscle by muscle and I need to develop my glutes. You don't use your glutes as glutes.

You use pieces of your glute and more pieces. The more you know, if you're doing one of those extension exercises on those stupid machines in the gym, you're going to build up your glute generally, but you're not using the whole glute at any given time because if you did lose the whole glute at any given time, it would cramp. That's what a cramp is, is when all those sections of the muscle go off at once and you have to grab it and stretch it because there's nothing else to bring it back. First thing I want to say about proprioception is these muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs we're going to talk about are fairly highly specifically mapped within the muscle, within your spinal cord and within your brain. All right, now let's go on and look at the endings themselves. So the main two pieces of proprioception, we're not into into reception yet. We're just talking proprioception. How do I know where my body is in space?

Are these two guys of the muscle spindle and the Golgi tendon organ? The Ma, this is a long thing if we really took it out, so don't worry. We're going to be quiet brief with it. You can see that the muscle spindle is within the muscle fibers. It's a cigar shape thing or a spindle shaped thing from the old loons. That's why it's called a spindle and into this nerve.

This is a sensory nerve comes these endings that are wrapped around these elastin fibers within the muscle, when the muscle is stretched, the capsule is stretched. When the spindle capsule is stretched, that stimulates these nerves. That sends a signal up to the brain. So if I took a book, I don't have a book and I drew up the book on my hand, my hand would go bump like that and that would be that muscle spindle being stretched and returning to its say length, the same as your knee does when your doctor hits, uh, the stuff patellar tendon. So these guys aren't telling you about how long the muscles are and how fast they're changing their length. That's what the guys on the left called muscle spindles do.

The guys on the right is the Golgi tendon organ. Those yellow fibers are the fibers of the tendon. The red fibers are the fibers of the Golgi tendon organ unit, which are wrapped into the fibers of the tendon, just like roots into the soil. So they're just wrapped around each other. And as the Axon and the nerve endings feel what's happening in these fibers, they tell you about the load.

So if you were hanging off the bar of a reformer and doing something like this or reaching back, I don't. What I know about the lot of these could be carved in large letters on the head of a pin, but if you were doing something like that though, weight of your body against your arm would be being registered by the Golgi tendon. Organs on the right, they would measure the load. The spindles would be measuring the change. For instance, in the anterior deltoid or the pectoralis muscle. As I shifted my torso away from my arm, so this is length and change of length. This is load. It's really important that you know about the load because look at the difference between these two Golgi tendon organs.

If you look at the one on the right, you can see that the fibers are almost straight. Unlike Shirley Temple's hair, they do not have a crimp in it. Whereas if you look over here on the left, you can see that that Golgi tendon organ, the picture we were looking at a minute ago has crimp, has curl, has a wave in the fibers. Please understand your sedentary students, your old students, your students who are coming off recovery from an injury, they will have lost the curliness to their attendance. They will have lost the crimp in the tissue and the Golgi tendon organs depend on crimp to tell you what the load is. So please understand when somebody to you who is old, who is sick, who hasn't been exercising for a long time, for whatever the reason, you have somebody who cannot feel the load on their connective tissue in the same way that a healthy person can feel it. So go easy. This will change. It's not a muscular change. It's a fashion change. It was, has just recently been shown to be even in all people like me, you can get that crimp back.

I have been running on my toes since I was 55 years old. That's just not allowing my heels to touch the ground, uh, as I run because I want to keep the crimp in my tissue so that I know where I am in space for any movement that I want to do to be supple and subtle in terms of my nervous system. If you don't have any crimp in your tissue, you won't be able to feel the load and thus you're more prone to injury. Be careful with those who are just coming off and give it a couple of months and they'll have more crimp. They'll feel more, they'll bounce more and they will be able to withstand more of what you have to offer. Uh, with them on the reformer and the Cadillac. Um, you are getting all kinds of information from the muscles and joints. We just went over the muscle spindle and the Golgi tendon organ. But please understand that as well as the Golgi organs.

You have three other sensors in your Fascia. Two of them are appropriate, receptive. The third one can be intraceptive. Let's go look. The Rafini endings and the Pachino endings, the upper right and the lower left. And that picture are arranged around the body. But I like this picture better to show you. Uh, the Pachino Ian core muscles are [inaudible] form as they're called.

Does that not look like an onion to you? Here's the nerve ending in the middle. And then there's layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of onion, like stuff. And that's in the interstitial space. Fashion and the fashion. And that thing is designed so that when you, if I had an egg or a, let's see, I dunno, a bit of a skein of wool. If I had a ball of wool in my hand and I pressed on it, it would get longer this way as it got shorter this way.

So I'm sitting on my Patina farm car puzzles right now I am pressing on them and that stretches the nerve and makes a stimulation. But what does my brain perceive that as pressure? Where do I have pitch in a farm cup or a core puzzles where I put pressure on my body, inside the joints, on certain tendons? I'm certainly in my glute here. Where I'm going, I'm going to have, I'm going to have these Patreon core puzzles in my body, in the places where I make pressure. Then if you look at the little purple thing in the slide, you will see a Ruffini ending. Now, this is the best picture that I've been able to find of this.

The Rafini ending DCLO fingers at the end of the Ruffini endings sticking out the nerve. Those little fingers go into one fashional plane at one side and another fashional plane at the other, and then if those two fashionable plans move relative to each other, the Rafini ending are specialized to feel sheer. No, we lose sheer between our tissues. When we get sedentary, when we get inflamed, when we get injured, when we get surgerized, we lose that ability to share between the layers and then we don't get that shearing information. This seems to met to my researchers. This seems to be crucial. We often talk about lengthening the tissues in Yoga and Palladio's and just stretching in general. We're, oh, lengthening the tissues. Actually, it seems to be that maybe you can't lengthen those tissues at all. Oh, don't kill me either.

All because that's what we've been thinking about ever since 1975 when I first started studying with her was that we were lengthening the tissues. But maybe, maybe we're not. Maybe we're just increasing the glide between the layers. Let me go back a slide or two. If you look at the upper right there, you will see layers that already he's together. They are not going to move relative to each other. And not only are they not going to move, but then you're not going to get that feeling of sheer by which the body knows where it can go and how far it can go.

And in the bottom one you can see that there's very little fashional adhesion and therefore the sheer receptors that might be crossing, say from the skin that's on the right to the muscle Fascia that's on the left would record that sheer as I move the skin back and forth. What can you feel? Everything that we've been talking about up till now is the, what can you feel? But now we're gonna go to that fourth type of receptor, the interstitial receptors. But what we're looking at here in red are the free nerve terminals.

These are called also called interstitial endings. They are interstitial meaning in between the cells but I would say in the Fascia, 80% of the feeling that you have in your body are coming from these free nerve terminals. Yes, you need the Patina farm core muscles. Yes you need the Golgi tendon organs and the muscles spindles in what did I leave out the Ruthenian but the free nerve terminals predominant and they give you a little bit of everything, a little bit of vibration, a little bit of shear, a little bit of pressure. They are going to go that and these are the only ones that give pain and these are the only one in the entire receptive quality because here's the big reveal for this. Yes, we've talked about interception being my reception of my organs inside about my bladder or about when my rectum is full or empty and when my stomach is full or empty and when my lungs are full or empty. All stretch reception in your organs and we've talked about the proprioceptors in your musculoskeletal body. The spindles, the Golgi tendon organs, and all these others, including the free nerve terminals. Okay, so let's put this altogether. We have talked about interoception and we said that the interoception was about your bladder, your lungs, all the things coming from your organs, even your blood vessels on the inside. Uh, this is what we knew into reception to be.

And we understand the interception is very motivational. If you feel your stomach contracting on a thing, you will be motivated to go and find some food. If you find you're getting a lot of stretch reception from your bladder, you are motivated to find someplace to relieve yourself. The proprioception, the other apart, uh, this of Kinesthesia, uh, we just had been talking about in terms of all those receptors, like the muscle spindles, uh, et cetera in the all the nerve endings in your muscles. Um, I should say mio Fascia. Um, but it's in the joints as well. It's all around that.

Proprioception tells me where am I? But it doesn't, all of these guys go to your parietal lobe. You've heard about that as the sensory cortex. And that's where these messages come to the prior to lobe. The interoceptive ones don't go to the parietal lobe.

They go to the insula and into the much more limbic system, motivational part of the brain. I'm not going to do brain science one, I'm not good at it. And, and uh, two, I'm not sure you need to know it, but the point that I want you to make, the new thing that's coming out of the research is that there's another class of intraceptive receptors that crosses over here. And those are into rose hep doors, which are all the free nerve terminals, those free nerve endings, but they don't go to the parietal lobe of the brain. They go back to the insula. This is something new. It happens in primates, but it doesn't happen in the rest of the mammals. And we have taken it to a large degree because of our social environment.

These go, and these are very motivational in your outer behavior. So it turns out that you have all kinds of interest chapters in your muscles and Fascia and skin that we didn't know were intraceptive. We didn't know that they went to the middle of the brain. We didn't know that they were sold there and so motivational. This is your body's response to homeostasis.

How do you know that you're okay? How do you know that your tissues are okay? Temperature, I'm not just talking about the temperature of your skin. I'm talking about the temperature inside your body which has to stay at 98.6 that's how they discovered these inter receptors in the rest of the body was by looking at temperature regulation, but now they've found their in the Fascia all over the place and they're highly motivational. They are telling you how you feel about what you feel. This is so important.

If you are going to motivate your people to move, that you understand the things that motivate. This helps us understand why a child runs on that internal sense. I've come to feel that it is really not great to tell your child, go ahead and hug uncle Charlie when they don't feel like hugging uncle Charlie. That feeling of not hugging uncle Charlie is coming from their intraceptive self. From the checking in with the inside, we call them gut feelings and hunches. We now have a neural substrate to think about those gut hunches.

You probably know there's lots and lots and lots and lots of nerves around your gut, and they are connected to these inter receptors that are all over your body in creating a gut feeling. If you tell your kid to go ahead and hug uncle Charlie anyway or somebody that they don't particularly feel like doing, you're asking them to override their inner sense. Now we all have to override our inner senses. Sometimes we are in a hurry. We want to get there. We still stop at stop lights because we know that it's better off for us to put down our feelings of being in a hurry in order not to get creamed as we go through the intersection. Yes, so we all make those kinds of choices, but if we make those choices in contravention to our emotional feelings all the time, we begin to lose confidence in our own inner feelings, our own emotions, our own senses being interpreted as an emotion.

Okay. It was Matt Terana who said the physiologist, Humberto Marturano, who talked about we think of the immune system as identifying the foreigner and killing the foreigner that's in our body, som invasive virus or bacteria, but he said the deeper function of the immune system is to identify the self, is to know that the self is okay. Yes, identifying the foreigner and keeping out what should be kept out, but that ignores the function of the immune system, which is to keep in what should be kept in what needs to be kept in. For me to be me, we now have a neural substrate for this basis of checking in with yourself and knowing whether yourself is all right, it is these interoceptive receptors. I can have you test this really easily while you're sitting there watching. Just put your arm out straight and hold your arm out straight here while I continue to wit her on right now your deltoid, probably your deltoid and a little bit, your Trapezius is holding your arm up and there is no problem at all with holding that up there.

And what I'm inviting you to notice inside your brain while you're listening to me and while you're holding your arm out there, is that increasingly you will get notices that say, can I put my arm down yet? Please. Nobody's watching me so I could put my arm down. This is getting tiring. I might be hurting my shoulder. I don't know what the messages are in your actual thinking brain, but I can tell you what the signals are that are provoking those behavioral messages. Is messages from your interceptors out here? Are you really damaging those tissues? No.

But are you going to damage those tissues if you keep your arm out there like forever? Yes. So your interceptors are saying, can we put the arm down please? Yes. Oh, it would be really nice if you put that arm down. I would feel much more comfortable if you'd put that arm down. You're getting not signals that you're getting signals from the appropriate sectors that are telling you where you are in space, but you're also getting signals from in your interest that fares, which may increasingly be saying, now this is burning, this can't be good. Can't you put your arm down and making all kinds of excuses for putting your arm down. This is maybe you're a biohacking, uh, and sort of challenging your nervous system with cold for instance, or challenging your nervous system with meditation or challenging your nervous system with [inaudible] or challenging your nervous system with kettlebells.

All of these challenges are interpreted not only appropriate, deceptively, not only by that wash of neuropeptides that we talked about earlier, which depend on your diet and your mood and the time of the month and a hundred over there things, but also from these intraceptive receptors that are in your skin, in your muscles. It's not the appropriate receptors that are going to be relieved when you finally put your arm down. But the interceptors in there that are going to be relieved to understand this as you go into your Palladia sessions with your clients is to place a little less importance. Forgive me if this is a counter to your culture image, but that's why you brought me in. Yes. To say something different. It's the precision with which they proprioceptively do. The movement is certainly important.

It is equally important, the feeling that they have about themselves when they do the movement. I love PyLadies. I think it is a wonderful system. I think lots of other systems are wonderful too, to be fair, but Palladia is, it's a really well worked out system. If I have a message to you out of this interoceptive thing, it is the feeling of people doing the exercise is as important as whether the outer form is perfect or not and in fact, if you get too focused on the perfection of the outer form and lose the feeling of the inner sense, I think your clients lose thereby because we live in a culture that is taking people away from the intraceptive feelings of their body, discounting them. Making sure that I have an ad that, oh, if you only you got this drug or this hair coloring or this car, your intraceptive feelings would be much better. That kind of subversion two, which we're all subject today, takes us away from the genuine feeling of our bodies. Polato has such a potential to bring us back into the feeling of being ourselves, a feeling that would have been natural to us certainly 20,000 years ago, even 5,000 years ago when we started going up with our sides to cut down the crops and maybe even when we had a job in a factory, but now that we are attached to our screens at precisely 30 centimeters away from our eyes, one of the things that does is take away some of these proprialceptive bets.

One of them, just a really easy one, is take your thumbs and put your thumbs in under your skull. You have to kind of sneak your thumbs in under your skull and not against the back of it, but up under the bottom of it. And now whether your eyes are closed or open doesn't make any difference. Just look left. Look right, look left, look right. Do you feel those muscles changing tone onto your thumbs? If you don't, your thumbs are in the wrong place.

If your thumbs are close to touching and in under your skull, you will feel the oculomotor reflex. It's a proprioceptive reflex that as you move your eyes, it moves these muscles in your neck as it moves these muscles in your neck. It prepares your spine for the movement that you need. Next, however, I don't know what happened to you, but when I was six I went to school. They put me out a little metal desk and a little metal chair and I sat down little metal desk and somebody said, Tom and I went, yeah, and lost that connection between my eyes and my neck and my spine. That's proprialceptive when at eight I struck out for the third time on the baseball team that happens at our noon recess in my little school in Maine when I was growing up, the feeling inside as I came around striking out for the third time and saw my team captains are rolling his eyes. There it goes. Meyer's striking out again, my whole intraceptive feeling inside the emotional feeling associated with that movement became very strong and I abandoned movement for my body.

I just said, okay, you play the physical games and I will play the mental games and we'll see who comes out on top. Do you feel the anger in that you feel the defiance or the going back against defeat? Good for me for coming back against a feat, but I lost my body for the next 15 years or so. If I hadn't run into this old lady named Ida Ralph and gotten started on the body work business, I might still be, I don't know, a businessman in Boston or something like that. Without that interoceptive feeling. It was such a boon to my emotionality, such a boon to my life with my body to reconnect with that intraceptive self and I just think that's such a great value in Peloton and too bad if it gets about being about doing the emotion proprioceptively perfectly, but intraceptive Lee in a very impoverished way better I think to not worry too much about the proprialceptive perfection and to really pay attention to how movement soothes the savage beast inside there is a lot more to the nervous system.

This kind of intraceptive numbness has been implicated in anxiety, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, and a number of other what we call stress related diseases, fibromyalgia and various things on that score. I don't know whether that will be born out or not. Generally speaking, stress is implicated in 99% of all disease, so is how much of this is the real connection? I don't know, but I sure know from my years as being a body worker. The more you can get people centered inside themselves, the more the movement that comes outside themselves will be integrated, effective and it will feel like it's theirs rather than imposed from outside. So that's my little message to the Polonius community. I know that many of you are doing this already. Um, so maybe I'm speaking to something that has already passed, but I hope you will be able to use this information, uh, in your practice and that it's been helpful to you. Thank you

Chapter 3

Hands to Feet

Tom.

I'd love your commentary and your perspective on these moves that I practice for my feet and that I teach at the beginning of my classes and sometimes give as home programs to my clients. There are six different variations of hands defeat in the first one. The opposite hand is sole of foot fingers interdigitate between the toes as if you could shake hands with yourself. Pleased to meet you. Have we met, do I know you? And then using the shoulder, having the idea that this shoulder blade, the scapular motion is responsible for encouraging mobility of the ankle. Then I change it up instead of the thumb being on the outside. Now the thumb is on the inside, which feels really different to me in terms of the movement of the, the possibility, the movement of the ankle and the transmission of force from the shoulder blade to the foot.

Good. Let's just stop there for just a second. Cause you do this a with several of the sequences. Just put your hands in together like this and notice that one thumb is on top. So take your fingers apart from each other and put them back together with the other thumb. On top means all the fingers have to change. Do you feel how unusual that is? You would never do that.

You would always let us pray. You would put your hands like this. This is anatomically equal. Some people do it this way. Some people do it this way. It doesn't depend on whether you're right handed or left handed or any of that. And that is what we were talking about, about an unusual movement.

B, make sure that you do it in the unusual way. So your first way would be the most, the more usual way that people would do it. The second way would be unusual and I just want to notice while I'm, I want you to notice while I'm talking here is that she's getting right down to the base of her fingers. If you can do that between your toes, between those styles that have been clumped into narrow toe toe box shoes that you will get really nice stuff for your toes if you get down to the base of your fingers. Another possibility seems to me is to use the same side hand to foot. So this was the opposite hand to foot in order to encourage, I'm hoping a flow or communication from one side of the body to the other.

Then focusing on the same side. Um, now the, it's different surfaces instead of palm to planter. Now this is palm to dorsal section of the foot and a pivot on the ankle to incur a pivot on the heel to encourage motion this way, change it up as you suggested to the unusual, the non habitual way. And the last two variations are opposite hand to top of foot. This one and this one. This would be called contralateral and some kind of circle.

Okay. And the Houma lateral on the same time. [inaudible] the same side. What I notice when I do these moves myself is that I feel a sense of Oh, safety, security, groundedness, almost as if I have saturated my proprioceptive sense with detailed information from hands and feet that I code as being an indication that I exist and I'm safe. So you're out at your edges, aren't you? You're at the edge of the surface that usually interfaces with the world, the fingertips or the palm, the sole of the foot. Um, so when your edges are safe, you are safe. The difference between the hands and the feet is that we so often in our society take our feet and stuffed them in sensory deprivation chambers called shoes and that therefore we don't have that proprioceptive and interoceptive reassurance from the feet.

So it's great before you require the rest of the body to act in a very precise manner that you get that into your feet. There are approximately 70,000 nerve endings just in the feet. So they use up a lot of real estate in your brain's body image, the image of your body that you have in your brain. The hands are big, the feet are big. And I have this argument with the both the lattes and the yoga people. The mouth is huge.

More exercises for the mouth other than talking, but a and other than the lion, you know? Okay, you can stick your tongue out. But actors, actors can teach you a great deal about the face because the face is very big and the hands are very big and the feet are very big in your brain. Good. Stay tuned. I've got some good exercises. Cues for the tongue. Okay, great. I knew you were

Chapter 4

Prone Reformer Sequences

this reformer sequence I use to help organize the upper thoracic spine and the cervical spine so that the client will, the client and I will both get out of our tendency to be screen-based, um, focusing on our screens, our phones with a forward head posture. So I've noticed that when the upper thoracic spine area is well organized, then the cervical spine and cervical extension will be better prepared.

So let's take a look now at these particular sequences. Have a blue spring on the carriage, a blue spring on the heavy setting and along box your option for the foot bar placement. It can be low, middle or high. Um, when the client, this is as is accustomed to sitting for a long period of time and accustomed to sitting, may be focusing on their desktop, their laptop with perhaps a forward head. It'll be easier to start with the foot bar lower. And then as the client becomes more accustomed to move in the direction of hip extension, then you can bring the foot bar a little bit higher. So push the box out long and climb in with your feet on the frame initially and snuggle on down the front of your hip joints are on the front edge of the box.

When you first start the movement, place the front of the heels on the foot bar with your heels in line with your sitting bones. One Hand is on top of the other, the habitual hand or the new hand, and place the middle of your forehead on the back of your hand. As you exhale, glide out, knee extension and knee flection. As you exhale, glide your shoulders down. As you inhale, aim your elbows up. As you exhale, lift your chest bone, keeping your forehead on your hands while you're up here. Touch the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth behind your upper teeth. Want to close up and have your eyes up underneath your eyebrows. Looks odd, but it's effective for getting us into extension and then come down x hale shoulder blades wide. Inhale, elbows up.

Exhale, chest bone, hands and head. Come up, tongue up, eyes up. Gaze up and come down. Change now to the balls of your feet and the souls of your toes onto your metatarsal heads and put the new hand on top. As you exhale, slide out into Dorsey fluxion and then glide this your forehead along the back of your hand. As you inhale, lengthen the side of the neck to which you are going. Exhale to come center as you inhale, lengthen the side of the neck to which you are going.

So lengthen the right side of the neck and have your ear, your right ear. Listen towards your right elbow. Exhale to center as you inhale. Lengthen the left side of your neck so your left ear listens past your left elbow. So that's a lateral translation of the upper thoracic and the cervical spa. Moving on. Now as you exhale, drive out into Dorsey flection. Inhaling, rise to your toes, lateral translation and come down.

Exhale, lateral translation and come down. Pressing through your right ear listens towards the right elbow. Exhale, press through your heels. Left ear listens past the left elbow. Next variation. Changing your hands each time.

As you exhale, drive into Dorsey flection. Inhaling elbows up, heels up. Exhaling tongue up, eyes up, and tread in place with thoracic extension and come down. Now there are two additional variations here. One being, um, side bending, lateral flection, and the other being rotation. And each of those you can facilitator cue with the movement of your tongue and your eyes.

So as you exhale, drive into Dorsey flection arising to your toes, elbows up, tongue up, eyes up, gaze up and rotate. Eyes to the right, seeing the right elbow, rotate eyes to the left side, bending eyes and tongue to the right and side, bending eyes and tongue to the left. Okay. You can hear in my voice that I should practice this more often because this is such a demand. Uh, I feel on the thoracic extensors. Let's hear what Tom has to say. So there were a couple of things that I would like to come in on and this exercise as you push the box forward, be sure you're watching, I'm talking to you as teachers.

Now be sure you're watching with your client that they do not at the full extent of this movement, go in to an anterior tilt of the pelvis. What you can notice with Elizabeth is the hip joint is staying fully open. That's an active motion of the hip joint. When she gets out to full extension or pushes on or our toes as she is now, the tendency would be for the hip joint to close. Can you make sure that their hip joint stays open?

That's a proper job use that has nothing to do with Inter reception per well. That's something to do, but it's, it's just more about the proper use of the hips. Now if we look at the two different movements here, the first one is that she is taking the thorax and translating it left and right, and of course the one ear is going closer to the other shoulder. But if you watch my fingers here, you will see that she is also translating between the thorax and the pelvis. The way she's doing that now and that's going to stimulate and give feeling into the appropriate receptive and interoceptive area of the Thoracolumbar Fascia.

This big diamond of Fascia here, right now, she is moving the chest on the pelvis. Oh, why is this important? Because in our driving culture, we spend a lot of time with the chest fixed to the pelvis and we don't move it much. So just notice that this motion that Elizabeth is doing is translating the thorax on the pelvis. That's still, but when she progressed the motion into her knees. Can I get you to start doing that? Now we're moving the pelvis on the thorax. In fact, we're doing both. We're moving the thorax on the lumbars and the pelvis on the lumbars.

It is this ability to give way. Do you see how my thumb is going closer to the foot and now my index finger is going closer to the foot. In that way you can see that the pelvis is moving away from the lumbars and the thorax is moving on the lumbars and the thorax is moving relative to the pelvis. This kind of motion through the waist is one very stimulating to the organs and to make sure that you have not just range of motion but range of movement through the whole body. The second thing I'd like to point out while we're here is that this extension of the hip that we mentioned before, when you couple it with lifting the thorax off the table, woe, putting that demand on there, having the open hip in the front of the body and the demand on the erector spina in the middle of the body is a corrective for the head forward posture that we just fixate onto in the Wa 200 times a day that we check our phone, which doesn't count as at the Times that we're checking our computer.

That fixed eye motion is ending up fixing our bodies and these kinds of exercises are how we fixate our bodies into a more label adaptable, ready for life kind of situation.

Chapter 5

Supine Cadillac Sequences

This movement sequence on the trapeze table with the stability sling is useful for articulating your cervical spine and incorporating movements of the eyes with the cervical spine movements as well. Some of the value of this is that it can help to um, get your, your eyes and your spine. Um, unstuck from our screen-based focuses that uh, reduce the mobility of the thorax and the cervical area. So you can see that the stability sling is set up with two long yellow springs from the overhead cross bar. You don't have to have a stability sling. You can use two long padded loops, um, connected with the Caribbean or, and then you can pad the, the double loops and the Caribbean or in order to make us secure hammock for your head and the, the base of your skull on the trapeze table, we have two reformer boxes set up in the lengthwise.

So there's a platform from which you can be suspended. I recommend testing your long springs to see which springs be it a long yellow or a long purple or some other springs you're using to make sure that your head and your neck are supported in a neutral position. A, this is not a neck strengthening exercise per se, so it's not valuable. It's actually counterproductive if you have springs that are so heavy that it requires a, um, a pressure downward, uh, that would, that would not be beneficial. So come to lie on your back initially, you'll have the bottom of your shoulder blades just at the edge of the box and then cradle your head in the sling so that the headset that the sling supports the back of your head, not the back of your neck, because then your head will fall backwards. Instead support the back of your head as if you could support the back of your brain.

Now place the heels of your hands against the uprights so that the pressure from the heels of your hands against the uprights helps to encourage some, some stability of your shoulder girdle. And that will also help to facilitate the connection between your low ribs and your pelvis, which should be an activation of the intercostals and the upper abdominal area. It's not appropriate. Hello. It's not appropriate here to be into a thoracic extension and a gapping the distance between your low ribs and your pelvis. A stay neutral and connected at the Thoracolumbar junction.

So once you are organized here, half your thumbs with your fingers, the thumbs opposing your fingers will put more tone in the upper trapezius area. And in this case it's probably best to have, uh, the tone be in the, um, more in the scapular depressors. So as you exhale, have the idea that you could lower the back of your brain down an elevator shaft, relaxing eyes in the recesses of your eyes, sockets as your head descends. Increase the tone just a little bit at the lower rib area so that the thorax stays fairly steady and it say a cervical and upper thoracic motion rather than a lower thoracic extension. Now side bending. So you bring your ear to listen to the same side.

Shoulder lengthening the left side of your neck. Draw your right ear towards your right shoulder, lengthening the right side of your neck. Draw your left ear as if to listen to your left shoulder. Now you have mo eye movements that are optional and complimentary here. When you bring your right ear towards your right shoulder, glide your eyes up into the left.

Exhale center. As you inhale towards your right lung, left ear listens towards your left shoulder and eyes glide up into the right. So in this case, the eyes are going up on the diagonal, opposite the direction of what your ear is listening. Now your eyes can also go down on the diagonal as you lengthen the left side of your neck, right ear listens towards your right shoulder and eyes glide down to the left and center as you lengthen the right side of your neck, eyes, side, bending with your left ear to your left shoulder. Eyes glide down into the rye so that side, bending hours of entertainment. Don't do too many of these, but just note the ones that are a little less habitual, a little more difficult, and then note to self practice those with some more ease.

Next we'll go after side bending. We'll go to a lateral translation as you inhale, lengthen the right side of your neck and bring your right ear to listen further to the right side. Exhale, center as you inhale laterally, translate the upper thoracic, cervical, and head areas so leftier listens left as you inhale, as if to fill up your right lung. Press a little more strongly with your left hand and you'll glide to the, as you inhale to your left lung, press a little bit more strongly with your right hand and lengthening the left side of your neck. You'll glide to the left. Add the eye movements opposite the direction in which your head is moving. When your head translates to the right with your right ear listening right, glide your eyes to the left and as you translate your head, your neck left.

Glide your eyes to the right eyes, Gla and had transfers. Eyes look opposite the direction in which you are going. Following translation, following lateral translation, there is rotation, so position the sling at the back of your skull, the back of your brain so that your head and neck are supported but not a stressing a to be in neutral. Now in rotation, as you rotate towards the right as if you're right ear, we're going to listen towards the ground. Your eyes could lead towards the right as well.

So it initially your eyes are the advanced team of the spine and your eyes encourage your spine to rotate in the direction to which they are turning. As you inhale, have the idea that your left lung is heavy so that it serves as some of a ground force from which you can turn your head, your neck, as if the right side of the brain were getting heavier towards the ground. As you inhale, have the idea that your right lung is the heavy lung and now as your eyes go left, your left side of your brain is heavy. Having used the movement of your eyes to facilitate cervical rotation in the same direction, now you'll differentiate the rotation so that your eyes glide opposite the direction in which your head is turning. As you inhale, left lung is heavy head turns, right and eyes glide to the left.

Exhale, center as you inhale right lung as heavy head and neck turn left, eyes glide, right as you turn your head to the right, you glide your eyes towards the left corner of your eyes, sockets. And as you turn your head to the left, you glide your case towards the right corners of your eyes. Sockets the, uh, the last variation of the cervical and upper thoracic articulations, um, involves making a, uh, making a circle or an, an oval actually, um, towards the floor laterally translating towards the ceiling and laterally translating. This is more even more demanding for the control at the upper obliques and the intercostals. So it would be towards the ground laterally, translate towards the ceiling and laterally translate brain is heavy down the elevator shaft, right ear, listens to the right head, translates to the ceiling and then translates.

Left reverse the direction. Right hand presses, um, pardon me towards the ground, right hand presses translate left, come to the ceiling, left hand presses translate right and come down to the ground. Oh, okay. I'm glad to be able to comment on this. The first thing I want to comment is proper biomechanics. It is so easy in this kind of position that when you bring the head back up, come those ribs there is very little into receptive or appropriate receptive, uh, benefit to this. The idea of keeping your respiratory diaphragm and excuse me, your pelvic diaphragm engaged while you're doing this is essential to getting the head out of a neck you could think of for so many people today in driving and computers, et Cetera. The neck is pulled down into the thorax.

This is the most amazing exercise and she's doing it so well. Your clients won't do it this well. Um, to slide the neck back on the thorax, so the thorax is staying where it is and if you look, I'm just going to have your right hand come down so they can see your neck moving in. This bit where the head is translating back, it looks like Balinese dance except front to back instead of side to side. And this will exercise the scalings and we're not going to go into all of this anatomy, but especially the anterior scalene is attached to the top of the lung. If you stick your ribs up, you are not going to get that benefit. If you keep your ribs engaged with your pelvic floor, then this has to lengthen here for this exercise.

And it is so good to get people into the bottom of their neck where they actually allow the lower cervical spine, the lower neck spine to come out of their thorax and get independent. It is one of those things that we did in years of reading in years of getting, uh, about our exams. Um, and you know, performance anxiety tends to show up there and these are really opening it. No, that was the first exercise when we get into the subsequent exercises of using your eyes and your neck going into the other places, we're still asking these scalings here to act in a new way and in a different way. This box provides the stability for the ref thoracic spine. So the neck is really moving on the thoracic spine and all the eye movements that you did. She's really bringing felled in Christ into the [inaudible] world, which is great. What that does is open up the muscles here in this oculomotor reflex area at the top of the neck that we were talking about in the lecture.

When you use your eyes here, you're freeing up the neck and freeing up that neck, freeze the whole spine all the way down to the tailbone and connects it so that the eye neck, spine connection is intact. This is a wonderful exercise for getting that going by using the eyes the way I was with told you to use them. This links into also to what we were talking about interoception because as you drop that head back and you feel the pull on the anterior scalene, it actually goes into the upper lobe of the lungs. The lungs are suspended under the scalene Fascia so that as you bring your neck back, you may feel it in the top lung lobe. That's good.

That means your intraceptive Li opening up that upper lobe of the lung. An unexpected benefit of this cervical exercise. The second part of this exercise with the um, cervical sling is to scoot further off box so that the edge of the box is closer to the bottom of your rib cage. Now more of you is unsupported. So there's a lot more demand placed on the upper obliques and the intercostals.

Also the motion of your head and your neck supported by the sling. The motion will not be so much in the upper thoracic as in the middle thoracic area, even getting closer to the lower thoracic. So now rather than differentiating the cervical spine from the mid thoracic, it's a lower pivot point that puts more demands on your stability around the Thoracolumbar junction as if the back of your brain could lower, uh, towards the ground and then come towards the ceiling. Exhale to lower and inhale to come up inside bending or lateral flection. As you inhale to fill up your left long, have the idea that you can fan open your left ribs, making more space between your ribs below your armpit and that will facilitate, um, thoracic side bending, bringing your right ear to listen towards your right shoulder.

As you inhale, filling up towards the right lung, fanning, open your right ribs, lots of space between your ribs so your left ear listens towards your left shoulder, inside bending or lateral fluxion. Your eyes can move in the direction to which you are side bending. So when your left ear listens towards your left shoulder, your eyes can glide to the left. Okay. Also, when you're writing your listens to your right shoulder, your eyes can glide up and to the left.

It's my observation of my clients movements and of mine that lateral flection is going to be more accurate when the eyes glide opposite the direction to which the ear is moving. So if the right ear listens towards the right shoulder, glide your eyes up and to the left. What I notice is that when the right ear listens to the right shoulder and the eyes glide down to the right, there's a tendency to also rotate. So I suggest, I prefer that when the right ear listens to the right shoulder, the eyes glide opposite the direction in which the ear is listening. In lateral translation. As you inhale this time, have the idea that you can fill up your right lung and your right lung helps you travel or translate towards the right, but eyes glide to the left. Exhale, center. As you inhale, lengthening the left side of your neck. Ear Listens, left and eyes glide right.

Inhale to the right lung eyes glide left and center. Inhale as if to fill up the left lung eyes. Right now in this translation of the upper and mid thoracic area, you'll need a ground force so you can find. You can facilitate that with your tongue. Press your tongue down to the left.

Okay. When you inhale to fill up the towards the right lung and pressing your tongue down til the left will help to keep your left pelvis area fairly steady on the box. Okay. It's hard to put your tongue over there and articulate your voice at the same time, so tongue goes down to the right. Inhale to fill up the left lung eyes glide.

Right tongue helps to facilitate the ground force and eyes help to differentiate the lateral translation of the thoracic area. In cervical rotation, you could have your eyes be the advanced team of the spine, so when your eyes glide to the right, you turn your head, your neck to the right to follow the direction in which the eyes are leading and now it's not only the head, the neck and the upper thoracic area, but also the mid thoracic area which is suspended off the box. As you inhale, eyes glide left and you turn your head, your neck, your upper thoracic and mid thoracic area to the left. In contrast to that as your eyes glide left, turn your head, your neck, and your upper and mid thoracic to the right. Exhale, center as your eyes glide, right turn your head, your neck, your upper and mid thoracic to the left. All the while I'm sustaining stability through the upper obliques and the intercostals.

Okay. I'm really eager to come in on this because I can imagine that some of you out there are saying this isn't really very athletic and I would say one, it's very rich, proprioceptively and intraceptive Li and two, it's what I call pre athletic. If you get your body set right by the time you do something athletic, you're not going to injure yourself. Your body is going to cooperate in the thing and you'll have so much fun doing it. Instead of that feeling of, ah, what am I doing this for? So this is, I won't keep you there too much longer. Very rich. As you can see, and I echo what Elizabeth said about keeping your integrity between the bottom of the ribcage and the top of the pelvis, but now the whole ribcage is moving.

Not only is that about your intercostals, it's about your lungs themselves and the feeling of even the Oregon's in here. If you look at this part of the body, what are the organs in this part of the body? The organs that assimilate the organs that take things in, the diaphragm, the spleen, the stomach, the liver. Are All at this level of the body so that as you move either side, bending, rotating, going back and forth at above this level, you are stimulating all the interoception of all the lobes of the lung. Notice that the heart is in the middle.

That really is in a cage all by the fact that the rib cage is a cage around the heart, but it's not a cage around the lung. It's a basket around the lungs. In fact, it's like your mom's old wicker basket that she used to put the laundry out in kind of bendy a little bit quickly, but still holds the laundry. Your rib cage around the lungs is a very mobile thing if you keep it mobile. This is a beautiful exercise that keeps the core steady on the box, but allows you to have your eye movement and your shoulder movement and your chest movement come together. So the heart is an organ that is connected with the spine.

It's there's one heart, there's one spine, but there are two lungs and two shoulders. So the lungs are the organic support for the shoulders. When your lungs, I know you're looking at my rib cage, but when the lungs fall out from under those shoulders, they lose support and can't be as effective as they can be otherwise. So with your hands on, I agree with Elizabeth. Keep your thumbs with your fingers to have this be the most effective, but with your hands on the bar, you can play into your lungs from the bar using your hands instead of waving your arms on the chest. That's good too. They want to play for a second.

Take your hands off the bars. Yes. Okay. Now you can. By moving your head, you're moving the lungs on the spine, right? The spine has now become the center. As soon as you come back and put your hands on those bars, go ahead and put your hands on the bars in any way that you want to. Yeah. Now you can use the shoulders to wake up your lung area, to use the steadiness of your hands to build in perception interception in the spine, ribs, lungs, and chest.

Chapter 6

Wunda Chair Sequences

These movements sequences on the chair will give you a lot of opportunity to connect your hands and your feet, your periphery, your distal areas with the proximal ones.

You could think of these as movements for your arms and abs of course, and you could also consider these movements from the perspective or the vantage point of a, the movement around your lungs and your organs. Let's give them a go. Now I have two heavy springs, one on each pedal, but no dowel between the pedals. If you'd like to make the exercise more demanding, more difficult for your arm and abdominal strength, actually your whole front body strength. Then make the spring a little bit lighter, so facing the chair, push one pedal down, place your hands on the far back corners of the chair, and then the other pedal comes down so you have a is v or a little bit of external rotation of your legs. Nestling the heel of your hand over the back corner of the chair so that you have a strong ground force from the heel of your hand up through your arm into your shoulder girdle and your thoracic spine.

As you shift your weight forward, you could have the idea that you aim your sitting bones up back and wide behind you coming out of a posterior pelvic tilt in spine flection in the direction of a uh, a spine more neutral on the way to extension, pressing from the little finger side of your hand, draw your pelvis up, sitting bones up and wide. And it's probably four of these would be reasonable for now hovering the pedals just above the floor of the chair. Then change one arm to the one hand to its front corner. So now you have a diagonal relationship between your hands and those ground forces from your hands into your arms. We'll put a different vectors through your trunk, changed to the new diagonal, doing your best to hover the pedals, doing your best.

She said to hover the pedals just above the floor of the chair. So that's three variations so far and then bring both hands close to the corners of the chair, top closer to the pedals. All the while reminding yourself to stay broad, wide across your collar bones. Now land the chair pedals and bring one hand to the same side as the other. So now you're in a side bending or a lateral flection of your thoracic spine.

Shift your weight forward to the far hand and bring the pedals up. Now the question is always we ask in Palladio's, how am I breathing and would it be beneficial to inhale going up or would it be beneficial to exhale going up? Change to the other side and we'll continue the discussion actually each way has its benefits. If you inhale on your way up, it's likely that you will inhale wide to the right side of the lung here, which will facilitate the side bending. If you exhale going up, you would exhale towards the left lung, which will also facilitate the side bending. So do both.

When in doubt, do both bring your forearms onto the chair top. Now interlace your fingers as if you're going to do a headstand, but you won't do a headstand. So it's a foe headstand, a false headstand, shifting your weight forward, sitting bones up and back behind you. Pressing your forearms down into the chair top and drawing your elbows wide on the diagonal. So that I believe are, those are seven different variations of connecting the uh, the hands, the arms, the upper body Meridians into the trunk, the core and connecting with the feet, the legs. Let's continue now with two more, uh, different orientations.

A stand so that you're at the side of the chair and the leg which is closest to the chair, that foot stands on the back chair pedal. And then the leg which has left, the one that's furthest from the chair stands on the front pedal. Both hands. Each one goes on the front corner of the chair. Now shifting your uh, your whole weight towards the chair to load the back hand more. Lead with your sitting bones up and back behind you.

Inhaling to go up will facilitate the motion of the ribs. Exhaling to go up will facilitate the motion, the action of the abdominals leaving the close hand where it is. Move the far hand to the back corner. And now your torso orientation goes towards the back corner of the chair, a different set of vectors coming into your thoracic area and your abdominal area. The hand closest to you goes to its neighboring corner and all the while you are moving from in side, bending towards towards your left side.

The back hand moves one corner and your thoracic area adjusts accordingly. And then the front hand comes to the, uh, the available corner. And now there's a lot of fanning open on the right side of the ribs. Your gaze is towards your right thumb at the back and there's a fair amount of compression forces between the left long and the pelvis. Undo some of that compression now by bringing your hands, uh, both to the close corners and then bring your forearms, your elbows onto the chair. Top.

This last variation is the only one in which your cervical, your thoracic and your lumbar spine are inflection. Otherwise, in all of the other ones I was intending to move the lumbar spine and the thoracic spine in the direction of extension. Sometimes good intentions are sufficient. Now the same, um, series will continue on the other side. Humans are not symmetrical. Uh, not from the very beginning of our embryological development.

Have we been symmetrical? And so why after so many decades of life in the body would be symmetrical. Now let's feel on the new side how the exercises are feel different. The leg which is closest to the chair, stands at the back pedal. The further leg stands at the front pedal and this arrangement of your legs is such that it's encouraging the pelvis to rotate towards the right towards the back leg.

This facilitates the side bending of the spine, uh, side bending in the direction of the right as well. Pedals come up sitting bones spreading wide and collarbones spreading wide. Also change the far hand, appreciating the different sensations in the abdominal area based on the ground forces of your hands. Each hand takes a turn to move one notch and then you do four pedal lifts until you get to the most extreme, um, side bending. Then you undo that side bending just a bit by having your hands on the close corners.

And finally your forearms on the chair, top back of your neck, long and gaze towards your knees. Yes, there is one more variation of this orientation. Again, you face the side of the chair and this time it's the outside leg. The leg furthest from the chair that stands on the back pedal and the leg closest to the chair. The inside leg stands on the front pedal. This orientation of your legs is turning, moving the pelvis as if to face to the right to face towards the back leg that goes counter to the lateral flection or side bending of the thoracic area.

So this will be the most challenging of all three variations. Your hands are over the, the chair corners as before, nestled between the Thien are and the Hypothenar Eminence. Shift your whole weight towards the far hand and then hover the peddles collarbones wide sitting bones wide as well. Land the pedals and shift one hand adjusting your thoracic orientation so that the light from your chest bone falls between your two hands. Continue making your way around the chair, top feeling a little as if you're playing the um, party game of twister with yourself.

The backhand moves. Okay. Not only is this, um, uh, moving the thorax opposite the direction of the pelvis, but also as your pelvis, uh, accommodates the position of your arms of your hands. It makes a very strong demand on the medial and lateral hip glides. So if you're feeling, um, restricted, uh, during this course of events, there's always the question of where is the restriction coming from other now the outside leg stance on the back peddle, the inside leg stance on the front pedal.

Most everybody has the direction of ease when it comes to rotation of the pelvis. And when it comes to side bending of the thoracic spine, it's likely that these, uh, that this movements sequence on the chair will expose or bring to your attention a, a kinesthetic blind spot, a place that's a counter to your habitual movement patterns. And, um, uh, there are a lot of different emotional responses. One can have to that depression, frustration, anger. I recommend curiosity go. Wow. How about that? I didn't realize that side bending in this direction was a not so available to me.

I wonder how is it possible to improve that and what, um, benefits might that have to my life. Don't forget in this orientation what I might've forgotten, which is the, the last two variations. Hands close to you and forearms on the chair top. Yeah. Can't wait to hear what Tom has to say regarding these various, um, movements.

Okay. If you could get back on to any one of those positions, one of the side ones would be great. The hardest one? Sure. Thanks Tom. Yes sir. Okay, let's revisit that hard one. Shall We? Okay. So the hard ones here by putting the load on the spine are into receptively. When you move from that place from comfort to challenge.

Now this is of course going to be different with every client where they are in the comfy place and we are there in the challenging place. So when you're in that challenging place, the interoceptive level of safety is likely to, the level of threat is likely to go up. Level of safety is likely to go down. And so, uh, it's really good to watch your clients and see or watch yourself for that matter, to see when you go from that into receptive feeling of safety. This is fun. This is in my comfort zone in to the place where intraceptive Lee, you begin to not be able to concentrate on the pleasure of it and you're concentrating instead this detail or that detail because look at the challenge and her spine with that.

If I could get you to change to the original thing you did facing forward and your hands like in an easy place, ah, you mean back to my comfort zone? Back to your comfort zone. Yes. Just to understand that when you're working into receptively, which is our subject for today, of course you want some challenge. If you go to a class and it's all comfort, you won't feel challenged and you won't feel you've done much by the end of the class. If you go to the class and it's all challenged, you're going to feel like you just got rung out and there wasn't any place for you to feel familiar. I love the concept that in between comfort and challenge is the place of play, so can you be in that place of playing here?

It's maybe simpler. Not For me. I would have trouble maintaining the integrity that she maintains through her hips as she does this. If we were getting intraceptive. Think about your kidneys for this exercise. The integrity that Elizabeth maintains through her lower body as she goes up and down requires a lot of both proprioceptive and intraceptive awareness and the place that's getting stimulated both by the twists and by maintaining your spine as you go up and down with the legs are the kidneys, is the kidney meridian. For that matter, which is what Tom Calls the deep front line.

This is a good deep front line exercise.

Chapter 7

Side Lying Sequences

The purpose of this exercise in sideline is hip mobility and the alignment of your whole leg with your pelvis. So here you are in sideline and you can have your a foot. Either you can wear a sock or you can put a towel underneath your foot next to the foot plate or for that matter you could use a a rotator disc that has velcro attachments to the foot board to the jump board starting in parallel, you just track to make sure that your knee is tracking directly forward over your third toe with the hip joint in neutral. Now EQ sternly rotate and sustain external rotation during knee flection and then internally rotate and sustain internal rotation and knee extension.

So it's swivel and fluxion swivel extension. And the other variation would be maintain internal rotation during knee flection and go to external rotation and knee extension swivel, then swivel press. Now these different orientations of the hip joint with respect of the neck of the Femur, the head of the femur with respect to the Acetabulum makes different requirements on the all the different vectors through the connective tissue through the neuro mile fashional system. I find that this, uh, this exercise sequence is very useful for clients who have had hip replacements for clients who have had a posterior approach in, um, hip replacements. We focus on external rotation for them and also on parallel for them. But for some of those clients with the posterior approach of the hip replacement, we avoid the internal rotation with flection.

Let's do this now. On the second side, hit this dance that we were talking about before between comfort and challenge. Look at the, um, balance here between the comfort of being able to lie into the carriage and let yourself rest there as if you were asleep versus the legs that are working with the challenge. Um, you assume that she's working against resistance here and she is in fact working against one blue spring. And I happen to know that Elizabeth is way stronger than I am and probably stronger than you are too. Um, but uh, you can adjust that to your own lights. Uh, what I invite you to see in this is the push with the hips. If you think of that, that is uh, a power pattern of powering yourself into something. It's also the power you use to get away from something.

So if we're talking about the interoceptive quality of this, be aware as you're a teacher, you can also be aware as you're a student to this, but is this my comfort zone or is this my challenge zone? And those who have some, this, this intraceptive thing is very motivational. That's what I want to emphasize here. This is a motivating move. You are pushing off the ball of the foot from the hip. You are warm pushing the torso away from something or as I say, towards something, but be aware of the intercepted meaning of these kinds of movements that occur in Palladia.

They're not just to exercise this particular muscle or that particular joint. They are also something that has a whole behavioral component to it. So as you look at this, push this, jump, this awe, taking me out of the situation that I'm in now, be aware of the behavioral motivational part. That's the intraceptive part. The rest of this, how you place your feet and all of that. It's important but it's proprialceptive as opposed to this program. We're emphasizing the motivational intraceptive feeling part of these exercises.

Really Nice to lie down on the carriage, really interesting and with a different psychological feelings for different people. This feeling of jumping

Chapter 8

Semi Circle Variations

variations on the semicircles is an excellent way to make a whole body, um, connection between your feet, your hands, and the entire structure. Um, in between. Start with your heels wide apart and I recommend starting on the low bar initially leading into the springs with your Coxix, you will encourage lumbar extension and then sitting down in the springs to quote Dov Cohen now from Australia, spring cleaning, push back and then internally rotate at the hip joints. Come forward in spine flection. Externally rotate, move in the direction of spine extension and then pushing the shoulder rests away. Internally. Rotate, come forward and spine fluxion as she pushed the carriage back. Pour your pelvis into the springs, connecting lower ribs to pelvis and then internally rotate with spine flection.

Reverse. Now it's internal rotation with spine extension leading the pelvis into the springs and external rotation with spine flection coming up. As you exhale, lungs go in the direction of the diaphragm in the direction of the pelvis and then pelvis leads the way up into spine. Fluction. As you exhale, push the shoulder rests away and as she inhale, come right on up. Now add to this a rotation of the pelvis and the spine such that um, as the pelvis turns towards the right both legs aim to the right and the right greater trow cantor sits down into the screen, rotate and come up.

Swivel spine extension, connecting left ribs right pelvis, swivel, connecting right ribs to left pelvis. Swivel spine extension and swivel spine fluxion swivel spine extension, swivel spine, fluxion swivel extend and flection and extension and flection. Reverse both knees and the pelvis. Turn to the right spine extension and collecting ribs to pelvis flection. Push back, come for once more. Push back.

Okay. Come for reverse pushback. Come for pushback and come for, you can see that when you give yourself a wider base with your feet, it's a little bit easier to navigate the internal and the external rotation of the hip joints and connect that with the mobility of the lumbar spine and the lower thoracic area. Yeah. When we were watching Elizabeth earlier, we made the point when she was moving her hips relative to our rib cage, that this motion, I'm moving my ribs on my hips in a lateral section is not a an equivalent motion to this where I'm moving my hips on my rib cage in lateral flection, the muscles that are moved are the same.

The tissues that are stretched are the same, but the way that it's organized in the brain is not the same. Can you see the triangle between her mid thoracic spine and each hand that triangle isn't moving? You're making that triangle a good solid base of support while the hips and the pelvis are rotating in various ways coordinated with the breath. But notice that interoceptive Lee, you are a making a base, a strong part out of the upper body, out of the triangle between the two hands in the mid back and then allowing the lower body to move and be moved on. That that's going to change how the load is perceived for the person.

And well I just love watching Elizabeth do these motions cause I'm supposed to be, I'm standing here like the resident expert. I can never move like this, but I can talk about it in a learned way. Um, maybe that's intraceptive really good for me, but the um, let's just say that you have to move like this on the reformer, but there might be other times in your life when you might move like this. Well, this, when I make a triangle, I'm holding on to the sheet of my boat and I am or going this way. This is a very functional movement for me, a on my sailboat. So I don't have any problem with that. I just, the beauty with which your spine stays straight and where is the flection occurring at this part of the spine, right? This is where she's working. If we were looking at the glands, you know, they talk about in yoga that you're stimulating this gland or that clan, the shoulder stand goes to the thyroid and the thymus.

I would imagine that this exercise would be good for the thyroid and thymus too, but I don't have any evidence for that. That's just the part of the body that is getting exercised, juiced up and lit up in the brain.

Chapter 9

Standing Reformer Sequences

Let's continue our exploration of proprioception and intraception this time in standing reformer variations. As you exhale, press out with rotation in the direction of your gliding thigh, the gliding carriage and inhale to come up. As you exhale, map your rotation of the Thoracic area right down the center of your legs. So that was the first, um, position of the feet.

Now take your carriage foot back and your supporting leg forward and keep your orientation with your pelvis straight on, straight ahead. As you exhale, rotate the thorax in the direction of the carriage leg. Inhale to come off as you exhale, rotate. It's as if the left long could come in the direction of the right inner thigh. So that was the second stance, the split stance.

Take your third stance. Now the carriage foot, forward the platform foot back. And as you exhale, now it's your right lung that approaches your left inner thigh. Inhale to come up, arriving at your central axis with knee extension. And then when you rotate towards the standing platform, make sure that the left sitting bone is drawing back because the fact that the left leg is forward in hip flection would tend to make the pelvis rotate towards the right. So we've had three stances now, a parallel stance, carriage leg, back platform, leg back. Maintain this current orientation and rotate just slightly towards the foot bar.

So now your center of your pubic bone is towards the corner of the at the corner of the frame. As you exhale, right sitting bone pulls back in order not to rotate the pelvis towards the left. Inhale to come to vertical. As you exhale, it's the left lung that comes in the direction of your right inner thigh. Now you'll take a rotation in the direction of the carriage. This is slightly more precarious, caution, slightly more precarious because you have a narrow base of support. So as the carriage slides, you also have the restriction of the Dorsey flection of the back foot. Keep your back heel anchored for safety purposes.

Just notice that you can still have the intention of bringing your right lung towards the left inner thigh and your left sitting bone back. But it'll be not such a deep squat. The same would be true as you turn away from um, the front leg in the direction of the back leg. Now change your orientation so that the carriage foot comes back, the platform foot forward and make a quarter turn towards the carriage. The previous threat of precariousness is over onward now to the motion, turning towards the carriage, the right lung towards the left inner thigh and come up to vertical and the left long towards the right inner thigh and come to vertical.

Now this time keep the same, um, like positions and rotate in the direction of the standing platform, a narrow base of some more narrow basis support than we've had previously. However, the motion of the carriage moving back will allow, um, greater range of motion in terms of Dorsey flection, right sitting bone pulls back, she said to herself. And then as you exhale, the carriage starts to slide and the left long turns in the direction of the right inner thigh, making sure that the back foot has affirmed platform and it's not, um, d compensating into pro, into pro nation. So this is one side, seven different orientations with regard to standing legs, slides. Let's hear what Tom has to say about all these standing weight shifts.

So as Elizabeth does these sets of movements from the other side, I invite you to notice two things in particular, obviously standing up so that the challenge is more than it has been when we've been lying on the reformer, uh, or working closer to the floor. So there's that challenge of standing on the movable carriage. Um, but the two things that I would like you to notice, one is that every time she does the rotation in the easier direction, first in the more comfortable, the more likely to be interoceptive lea receptively received. Um, because it's the easier twist and then the sack and twist is going to be away from the natural twist of the pelvis and therefore offering more challenge to the spine. So make sure you're doing the easy one first with your clients so that they get to experience the ease in the movement before they experience the challenge. You'll get better on the challenge side that way.

The second thing I'd like you to notice is that this is really a deep front line exercise that we are reaching into the different part of the abductors so that the cue that she gave you about the sits bones is really, really important that as you go into this sequence, the sits bones have to stay true to the pelvis and true to the rotation that you're putting in there. Because that way the deep front line comes down into the rotators. Here. Their rotators are, I'm sorry, into the adductors. And the abductors are really two groups of muscles. The posterior ones that are more like hamstrings and the anterior ones that are more like hip flexors, they are so like hip flexors that they are hip flexors.

So when you're working into the flection like this, you are working the post area adopters. When you're coming back up into extension, you're asking the anterior, uh, doctors to do their work. So this is really a, an exercise that exercises that deep frontline from the inner arch right up to the pelvic floor. I would enter receptively recommend a sequence like this as part of your postpartum restoration for the pelvic floor.

Chapter 10

Standing Weight Shifts

One of our workshop themes is certainly the interplay, the interrelationship of proprioception and Intero ception both anatomically and also in terms of experience. What I have observed for myself and with my clients is that this particular movement sequence provide some appropriate septic feedback at the Thoracolumbar junction and at the sacrum. And that, uh, many of my clients, um, observe that they have a feeling of, of, of safety and of security and of being supported such that they feel more comfortable in their, a standing weight shifts.

I've noticed with clients who are anticipating hip replacement clients who have had hip replacement clients with, with spine conditions such that they are not at ease standing for long periods of time and also clients who sit for a living or who sit recreationally and are not so secure in their standing weight shifts. So in this six spring exercise, at the end of the trapeze table, you see that there's a stability sling attached to two long yellow springs from the top of the table, the top of the trapeze table, and that is nestled around the lower ribs around the Thoracolumbar junction. And then there are long purple springs that go around the second stability sling that nestles the sacrum supports the sacrum and around the area of the greater trocanter. And then there to a short yellow springs with handles or loops as you like. So as you inhale, push with your left foot and shift your entire axis more to the right foot.

Exhale, center. As you inhale, push with your right foot and shift over to the left. So initially it's a lateral translation keeping both knees bent and yes, sitting back into the sacrum sling and keeping the back of the ribs cradled the back of the lungs cradled by the Thoracolumbar junction sling. Now you could add some rotation to this push with your left foot as you turn to the right, turning your ribs, rotating the thoracic area to the right. So shifting to the right and rotating to the right and similar, shifting to the left and rotating to the left or shifting to the right and rotating to the left might feel more secure because there's a counterbalance shift to the left. A little bit more unusual in terms of coordination perhaps, but maybe more secure in terms of the counterbalance. Shift.

Anchor and rotate, shift, anchor and rotate. Then continue with this, uh, this action of lateral translation shift. Create a ground force through your right foot and balance with your left foot towards your right ankle shift, anchor and whew balance. And that will be no surprise to you that a given the knee injury I had playing soccer when I was 15, that I'm such a lightweight and insecure in terms of proprioception on the left side. So sometimes I need a little bit of help to actually get over there. However, it's this little bit of help goes a long way in terms of my improvement in daily function.

You can add on your single leg balance, add the same side or the opposite side station, Schiff anchor and rotate. Now in addition to facing the trap he's table, you can angle, um, on a diagonal away from the trapeze table. Just adjust your slings and then get to your springs here. So now it's pushing off the left side in order to shift the weight to the right. Push off the left side, shift to the right and the sling around the greater trocanter will provide support for the pelvis and the sling around the lower ribs provides support for the thoracic area.

Shift anchor in anticipation of the single leg balance, adjust your supporting foot and still get your weight shift over. For those of you who are interested in the um, proximal control of Gait, where the movement of the thorax is the driver of gate, can find that this particular angle in which the thorax, this particular angle with respect to the trapeze table in which the thorax transfers translates first and then the weight shift with the pelvis follows second, ah, that can make a, a revolutionary change to someone's motor control when they have the confidence and the support to realize that the motion of the thorax preceding the pelvis can be beneficial. Let's just see if my, um, uh, enthusiasm transfers to the other side. If not, I'll go home and practice. All right, so shift the right foot, pushes the thorax transfers and then the pelvis sh push shift and then organize yourself. She said yes please. In order to balance on the one side, on the left side foot with the thorax shifting to the left. So that's facing the trap. He's table to each angle, fe from the trapeze table. And you can take that, uh, similar, those similar concepts and, uh, transfer your weight directly side, um, with your torso perpendicular to the crossbars here and the other side.

Now you also have the option of turning away from the trap piece table and shifting and shifting and shifting and shifting. I'd love to hear what Tom has to say about these from a standpoint of interoception and proprioception. So this is really fun. On an interoceptive level, this works in two ways. One is people are off their feet. That for some people will be a balanced challenge and something that makes them feel a little less safe. Obviously, any of these things where you're not letting your weight come down through your feet. But the other thing is, look at those springs and imagine them as the in circling arms of your mom, uh, reaching down to hold you. So other people will have an intraceptive sense of, ah, I'm resting into someone's arms.

I'm resting into something that's very secure. So you have to have a watch. You have to watch on yourself to see how you feel when you're going in there. But if you're a teacher, you have to have a watch on your clients on how they feel when they're going in there. Some people will just go, ah, into this and have a really easy time of it. Some people will be more anxious, therefore more tight, therefore less able to go into all the variations that Elizabeth is suggesting for this. So sometimes it takes a little bit of getting used to, to fall into the trust of the equipment or indeed into the trust of somebody else's arms for that matter. I hope you've enjoyed.

Chapter 11

Final Thoughts

I always enjoy, uh, working with Elizabeth cause because she's so in her body and doing this and she talked about a body map and I really want to commend to you as a teacher or as a consumer of PyLadies that uh, we're not only strengthening our muscles and strengthening our joints and getting them to center on all of the things that Pilati is we'll bring you into in terms of the correct biomechanics and the proper usage of your body, but that you're bringing yourself into a complete body image. And that we now understand that hope, uh, the lecture got somewhere to that, that the complete body image is not only a proprialceptive in image of knowing where my body is in space, but knowing how I feel about where that body is in space.

Can you, if you have a subtle sensation, know the difference between butterflies of being scared, something that you miss. Eight acute gas treatise, uh, some other feeling that is a warning in your body that kind subtle sense is also brought forward by [inaudible] is also bought forward principally by your attention. So we hope we've brought your attention to this. I really enjoy paying attention with Elizabeth and so hope you've enjoyed this program on interoception. Tom, I'm so grateful to you and also to Palase anytime for this forum to bring us together because, um, I, I just know that in the polarities environment, um, the movement practices that we have can be enriched and made even more valuable for our clients and for ourselves. When we take this information about the relationship of Intero ception and proprioception, I think that it will give the, the mindful movement practice of [inaudible], um, a whole new lease on life and there'll be lots to celebrate in terms of personal evolution and evolution of our field. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Pele's anytime. Bye for now.