We’ve been working with the psoas muscle this week.
Attached to thoracic vertebra T12 it connects to lumbar vertebra L5 and then descends through the pelvic region to attach to the top of the thighbone.
The psoas connects the top half of your body to the lower half, allowing you to walk upright. So deep, so central to your core, in yoga we call the psoas, “the seat of your soul”.
From the spinal cord, through fascia, the psoas connects to the reptilian part of your brain and it is the first muscle to contract and the last to release when we experience anger or fear and our system moves into fight-or-flight.
Any attack, by someone or society at large, to our deepest essence and survival, will cause the psoas to contract and harden.
The upper attachments of the psoas are in the same region as the diaphragm, so a contraction in the psoas affects the diaphragm and causes shallow breathing.
Back pain, hip pain, breathing difficulties, bowel issues, so many structural problems can be explained by a dysfunctional psoas muscle.
In yoga, releasing the psoas is a multifaceted approach.
Our physical release would include learning to lengthen the psoas and perhaps strengthen it.
We would use neurogenic tremors to release long held trauma in this muscle and then we would use the breath and the mind to change our current reactive emotional patterns to stress, so that our psoas was not constantly triggered by modern life.
