News flash for performers, dancers, yogis, gymnasts, and athletes…
1) INJURIES: Recruiting the psoas for stabilization is a common strategy used in dance, yoga, gymnastics, and exercise. Intentionally tensing, pulling in, and lifting up from deep within the solar plexus ignites the psoas in an attempt to gain inner support and sustain visual form. But recruiting your psoas misuses this uniquely sensitive tissue and is a sure recipe for not only a dysfunctional psoas but also incurring injuries. Over time, recruiting the lush psoas changes it into a cable-like tissue. Although the intention may be to gain control over muscle movement or to stabilize the skeletal system, recruitment is a misuse of the psoas, which ultimately disrupts core integrity and invariably leads to shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, and ankle injuries.
2) ENDURANCE: Whether you are a dancer, gymnast or athlete endurance is often a mandatory requirement for performance but endurance is impossible without a functional neuro-core, which includes your psoas. Endurance is ultimately dependent upon maintaining a healthy psoas while enabling the maturation of internal neurological proprioceptive cues. Years of misusing the psoas eventually dries, shrinks, inflames, and/or builds density in this fluid core tissue, disrupting not only proprioception but also basic movement patterns. Only a lush psoas conducts electrical and neurological impulses that can inform, orchestrate, and sustain your vitality for the long haul.
3) LONGEVITY: Vitality is determined by healthy adrenals, viable kidney energy, and a functional psoas. The adrenal glands and the kidney organs literally float on top of the juicy psoas. Misusing your psoas disrupts fluid core communication essential for incorporating longevity stratagems into your daily health and rehab program. Overuse, misuse, and abuse your psoas and it will become exhausted, dry, and constricted, eventually depleting your life force. The juicy psoas can be sustained by a judicious combination of hydrating and replenishing that makes sustainability and longevity a reality.
4) CREATIVITY: Settling and grounding into bones supports vitality, inner harmony, and trust that evoke curiosity and creative expression. The bird’s ability to fly is a worthy metaphor that expresses this grounded sense of freedom. For a bird to fly it must first press into the earth; only through touching down and landing can a bird take flight. To impress is to touch and be touched so deeply a force awakens within your core being that ignites growth, achievement, and creativity. Grounding through the proprioceptive neurological, kinesthetic system located within bones frees your fluid psoas to express your heart’s desire.
“The delicate, life-changing process of cultivating a responsive, coherent core enables a dancer to easily access structural stability as well as effectively accomplish any stylistic dance form. It is in the continuous loop from midline to extremities that a creative dialogue is created: the global and the local networks (physical and nonphysical) are constantly self-referencing within & without. All is needed is to forge a bit of spaciousness in a curious, attentive, undulating body-fullness.”
Quote by Adriana Pegorer ~ professional dancer/educator
copyright 2017 Core Awareness™
