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

No other species limits its movement of expression or exercise to one muscle group. No mammal except for the human performs abdominal crunches. All life moves, unless compromised and injured, with integrity and full expression.

Having never been given permission to throw a tantrum, I suggested he stomp his feet. Lying on his back on the floor he pounded his feet and hands and made facial grimaces. When he stood up he was pleasantly surprised to find his clavicles and shoulder girdle had softened while he felt more grounded through his legs and feet.

Or: Will this form of exercise make me strong? Instead, we need to ask: How much somatic awareness can I maintain in any given position, movement, or activity? What sensory cues signal present space and time?

Vulnerable and abundantly energetic, children adapt and conform to social conditioning by learning to ignore the very internal signals that help prevent injury and abuse through our lifetime. Overriding internal signals disrupts our self-correcting reflexes, eventually inhibiting our ability to self-heal and be a coherent organism. Although this fo

BOB COOLEY, creator and founder of Resistance Flexibility Technology® (RFT) at The Genius of Flexibility Center in Boston, Massachusetts,

One example is in the area of our cultural belief in core strength. Believing muscular weakness to be the primary problem, we embark on programs that continually condition through building muscular control. However, growing density in muscle tissue, disguised as strength, rather than cultivating somatic intelligence simply creates additional armori

the ideas of Mabel Todd, Lulu Sweigard, Ida Rolf, F. Matthias Alexander, Elsa Gindler, Moshe Feldenkrais, Anna Halprin, Bob Cooley, Judith Aston, Thomas Hanna, Emilie Conrad, and many others have evolved into a vision of the human body as motion. The mechanical approach of body as object has given way to an understanding of body as a living process

The psoas is the largest core muscle and grows out of each side of the spinal midline vertebra. Originating at the twelfth thoracic (T12), the psoas continues emerging out of the five lumbar vertebrae to flow through the pelvic basin, surface over the hip socket, and grows back into the lesser trochanter of the femur bones.

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