Our human skills and capabilities primarily emerge from the largest and most evolutionarily recent parts of our brains, which are collectively called the Neo-Cortex. These abilities are learned behaviors. When we learn a skill, essentially what we are doing is re-deploying a more ancient, reflex motor function to a new purpose. In the same way that tool use emerged from breaking open a nut with a rock, to hammering in bits of the Large Hadron Collider, the Neo-Cortex has learned more complex ways of interacting with the more ancient neurology of the brain stem and mid-brain. The Neo-Cortex does not in fact hold the hammer, but instead manipulates our Grasp Reflex to make holding the hammer happen.

What is the correct alignment for the structure of the human body in the gravity field?
It is helpful to use the landmarks indicated in the graphic below to find this alignment, which is the most efficient for our structure. When our bodies are aligned in this way, our muscles don’t have to “hold up” our [...]

I often encounter clients who complain of hip pain when sleeping on their sides. This pain usually occurs in the region between the top of the leg and the hip bone ( Greater Trochanter and Illiac Creest). There are small, powerful muscles in this area, with a lot of tendenous material, and my sense is [...]

Background
Moving around has always been at the top of every evolutionary “got to have” checklist. From Jellyfish to fish of all stripes, to land animals to us, improvements in locomotion confer survival advantage. It is challenging to find an adaptation with even a fraction of the impact on locomotion that the development of the vertebral [...]

Mammals still have the freeze response, however their additional, more complex responses to danger are layered on top of this primitive neurology. This is the part of the brain which we know as the Diencephalon, or Limbic System. Blending these two layers of neurology in our modern setting in ways that don’t create unresolvable stress can be quite a challenge. This is where bodywork can be effective at recalibrating the trigger points for these systems.

Our culture has replaced natural sources of stress, for which we had refined effective responses over thousands of generations, with the stressful aspects of modern living. Many of these stressors have emerged in our lifetimes, making our instinctive abilities to deal with stress nearly useless, and making stress a chronic epidemic. We feel this as hormone imbalances, chronic muscle tension, impulsive tendencies towards a ‘fight or flight” response, chronic fatigue, joint pain, fybromyalgia, sexual dysfunction, premature aging etc.