Yup, coming as no surprise to anyone, my back started to hurt in class.

I had a couple of classes where I felt my Psoas muscles were weakening and then my back felt nervy and the nerves radiated down my legs and aggravated an old knee pain. I knew exactly where I was. Back at my weakest link not knowing exactly what that was.

I went to the chiro and got acupuncture and that helped but I knew it was time for a reworking of how I moved. I had to either quit or uncover movement habits that had been set years ago. I didn’t know where to start but remembered an elderly friend telling me that she had healed a very sore knee by doing simple exercises in a book names ‘PAIN FREE –  A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain’ by Pete Egoscue.

I got instant relief from some passive exercises and began to translate what the book was telling me to my specific situation. Here are some bibs and bobs;

• If your knee is in pain it probably comes from your hip, ankle, back, etc. When we go to a doctor they isolate and fix a joint not considering that the pain probably originated in a different place in the body.
• The body is brilliantly designed and this idea that we have weak knees and ankles by design in a myth. Our distortion of the design is what creates pain and disfunction by muscles and tendons pulling on bones.
• The pelvis has two kinds of muscles – those designed for balancing and those for doing work. This one was a revelation as I knew instantly that I was asking my balancing muscles to do most of the lifting and that’s what caused my back pain.
• You can build your eg. quads all you want but if you haven’t first released your flexion muscles you won’t have proper access to your quads. Releasing those muscles habituated to flexion so the design can work as planned it key.

So I am doing the tedious work of figuring out how I am moving off the grid of ease by listening to my habits. I do have lots of new strength and movement from the classes but now I need to have a new consciousness. I am doing this on my own knowing that I need to always listen with discovery in mind. Bringing to surface life long patterns and building new ones with a new awareness is my task for at least a couple more weeks. A mission whose time has come.

Meanwhile I am looking to launch a theatrical version of the book in the late spring.