Core Awareness, Revised Edition: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise, and Dance

Repeat, pause, release, and lengthen. Each time your psoas releases, the leg will extend without dragging along the pelvis.

The spiral is one of the most powerful and pervasive patterns in nature. Found in shells, flowers, pine cones, ram’s horns, and the spiraling formation of hair on the top of our head, the spiral is seen both microscopically in the shape of DNA and telescopically in the swirls of the universe. The rotating Earth exerts a force that spirals the wind

Attention is not something to use forcefully; the work of awareness is light and fluid. Let your awareness spread like warm honey throughout your body.

Drink red clover, nettle, and oat straw tea with a touch of peppermint or fennel to replenish the adrenals. Eat and drink moistening foods such as chia seeds, aloe vera juice, artichokes, burdock root, cucumber juice, and/or slippery elm tea.

Rather than attempt to tear down armoring, focusing on sensation, awakening proprioception, and centering into the core honors the healing process.

Keeping your attention focused at your hip sockets, initiate movement at the hip socket, allowing one foot to glide along the floor. The pelvis stays centered and stable and remains part of the torso—only the leg extends. As the leg lengthens, notice sensations along your back. Any shortening in the low back (to accommodate the extension of the leg

Most of what is called aging might be more accurately understood as a process of drying. The juicy, plump psoas, through time, lack of movement, and lack of support, dries and shrinks. As the psoas dries, it begins to shorten. The image of a bent-over elderly person represents the dry, shrunken psoas. When understood from this perspective, the idea

We experience emotional and physical turbulence. Turning back on itself, bound-up energy may manifest in the form of muscular rotations, torsion in joints, pulled fascia, and taut ligaments. There may be small spirals within tissue, viscera, and organs or large spirals in connective tissue, fascia, muscles, and joints. However, no matter the scale,

Homeopathy calls that which stops the flow of life force a person’s essential wound. Armoring, such as of muscular tension, forms around our vulnerabilities and stops the flow of energy. It is muscular tension that limits movement, decreases the breath, and stops us from feeling. In the animal world, playing dead or freezing is an essential surviva