Category Archives: Pete Egoscue

Podcasting and Ballet

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Adult Ballet, Dance, Pete Egoscue, Philosophy, Podcast

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So I have posted episode #4 ‘Inventing’ – If woman had invented the world.

Will post #5 ‘Saddest History ever!’on the weekend and have just recorded #6. It takes a few hours to write each 15-18 minutes piece, the recording is reasonably quick though I do have to work around planes, trucks, dogs, leaf blowers and construction noise. It takes Patric and I about 8 hours to add the music and sound effects. My plan is to string them all together in one piece once it is complete so it plays like a 2 and half hour radio play or rather monoplay that delivers a download from the premise ‘everyone’s first home was a woman’s body so what the hell happened’. Then I am going to get a bunch of people together to get high/or not, lie on the floor and listen to the whole thing. Then I will interview them. Let me know if you want to take the trip when it’s done.

If you haven’t checked it out you can listen below on itunes

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-woman-because…its/id1088536792?mt=2

or

just go to the podcast link  on this page. thanks.

http://itsabsurdtobeawomanonplanetearthetc.com

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Ballet. Lovely ballet. My body figured out the pain issues with the help of the Egoscue book ‘Pain Free’. A few things  made a huge difference;

1) realizing that basically the entire back of the body is for strength and the front for flexibility – it’s easy to check myself and remind the back of me to hold me as my default has been to ask the front of my hips to hoist me around (psoas) and that pulls on my lower back.

2) my lower spine functions better when allowing it’s natural curve – I had tended to tuck my tail under, even when hiking uphill and I see now how that forced me to use the wrong muscles.

3) the body needs space to naturally find it’s desired comfort place – every chance I get I allow my body to let go and take it’s comfort position as I can get stuck in a holding pattern which is not natural for easy daily movement.

I am going slowly.

 

 

Ballet.7 Pain and Beyond

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Adult Ballet, Align Ballet, Ballet, Pete Egoscue

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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.

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