And, in looking at that title, I’m thinking as you probably are, “What hooey!”  Yeah, I understand.  Completely.  A simple muscle that joins your lower rib to your pelvis shouldn’t have any bearing on your brain’s functionality.

Some people have a very intimate and familiar relationship with their bodies; they understand what it wishes and what it needs.  They don’t resent satisfying its demands or disciplining the mind to serve its whims.  That hasn’t been me.  For most of my life, my body has pretty much been a life-support system for my far more important brain.  I’ve felt it as a huge encumbrance that weighs down and limits my intellect: the tether at the end of the balloon string that’s attached to a giant block of cement.

The body that cages the mind

About eight months ago, I drowned in the depths of a deep depression whose root cause I won’t discuss just yet (maybe later).  I could barely move, and when I forced myself to take walks with my husband, he’d glare at me when I asked him to slow down.  I didn’t understand what was happening to me; my feet had always seemed to move at the same speed, and so far as I could tell, he was the one always speeding up.  Strange, that change!  I’d always been the faster walker, leaving him to choke on my dust as my long strides took me far, far away.  I’d been choking on my own mind’s metaphoric dust for two years.

To say that I was bound up to almost claustrophobic tightness is akin to claiming a mote of dust is the size of the moon.  I was beyond that.  If I could see beyond my inner nothingness when I woke up, it was a good and rare day.  I’d force myself out of bed, but that was about all I could make myself do.  My body weighed more than the sun, more than the black hole at the center of my inner universe.  My mind had turned to jello, and when I’d walk, my thoughts moved through me more slowly than a snail’s slimy wriggling.

Re-connecting

Finally, something sparked based on some of the best advice I’d ever received.

“You need yoga,” my mother said.

I’d been a yoga dilettante when I was thirty.  I’d purchased a full set of Kathy Smith’s New Yoga Basics DVDs and I’d done them sporadically, along with taking the occasional yoga class at my old gym when it wasn’t too crowded.  I’d burned out on running with a number of small ankle and Achilles’ tendon injuries, and hadn’t had a good boxing class in a couple of years.  I’d enjoyed the workouts, but I’d never enjoyed much more than a cursory sense of grounding or connection from them.  The one thing I’d noticed then was that my feet felt strangely rooted to the ground, and I could feel the totality of every phase of every footstep at the end of a practice.  Usually, I only feel the full impact of my foot against the ground, if I even pay attention to that much.

I hauled out my DVDs a week or two after my mother’s advice and “practiced.”  I managed a couple of days a week, and slowly I noticed my moods improved.  I still spent a good half of each day deep in the emptiness, but that was better than a whole day.  I started collecting DVDs: Rodney Yee’s Yoga for Beginners, Rodney Yee’s AM PM Yoga for Beginners, etc., etc.  I highly recommend his workouts, by the way.  I’d almost created a regular practice when I got a real introduction to my mother’s yoga instructor (Nancy’s utterly awesome!) and a new addiction.

Before the addiction came revelation on a warm, but not too hot day in early June of last year.  I walked the length of the Oakland side of College Avenue, seeking a little creative boost from the funky clutter-shops and art stores that make the Rockridge area so wonderful.  I walked, and for once I felt a breeze moving around me.  My hair followed behind as I moved, even though the air itself was still.  Not only did it it fall back, but it bounced with my steps.  Hunh.  I used to bounce when I walked.  The movement felt almost natural, but after a few laps from Rockridge BART to Broadway and back again, my calves started screaming from the unfamiliar movement.  But it felt good.  Really good.  I kept bouncing anyway, passing most of my fellow shoppers.  I took a short glance into a window, and noticed my strides were long again.  I felt the expansion within as I settled into the rhythm of the universe and the flow of all around me.  I could feel my inspiration slowly waken, and ideas danced just out of my grasp.

The next day, the smaller strides returned as my muscles ached, and inspiration took a short vacation.  I watched my feet in reflections as my stride shrank again.  I forced my legs wider as I walked for the next several days, keeping an almost obsessive watch over every footfall.  If my steps felt too short, I jammed my foot even more forward before I allowed it to make contact with the ground.  Slowly, I could feel creativity awaken, and a little more of the emptiness faded each day.  My stride length was a direct reflection of the state of my creative health.  My intuition.

In September, I started a real yoga class at my mother’s yoga studio, since the DVDs weren’t quite cutting it anymore.  Now I was yoga-ing in a more demanding way with fellow yoga-ees in a wonderful and supportive environment.  As winter descended, and the days shortened, I dreaded the return of the blackness.  Really, to pretend I was “all better” was kind of ridiculous, but though I wanted to hibernate, the true darkness and emptiness never returned.  I’d always surrendered to the season, and my mood had always gone with me, but this time, I didn’t.  Well, not completely.

And what about the psoas?

One of the things that we work on most in my yoga classes is core strength from deep within the body’s musculature.  We’d talked about the mysterious “soaz” muscle more than once, but I’d never really felt it, even if I’d felt myriad other benefits of a regular practice.  Practice had freed my body and had slowly re-integrated my mind with “holistic” me.

After today’s practice, I finally achieved consciousness of my psoas.  We’d worked the muscle heavily, including several isolating movements and exercises, but I hadn’t felt it.  Maybe it’s better to say that I wasn’t actually aware I’d felt it.  The psoas is one of the deeper of the body’s muscles, running behind the abdominals, and most of the yoga poses done to work with it also involve larger surface muscles like the quadriceps and hamstrings.  When you’re stretching your legs perpendicular to each other, for example, it’s the thighs and hamstrings that really demand your attention, even if the psoas is doing a fair amount of the work—not surprising if you know the muscle is the thickness of a woman’s wrist.

The muscle’s oddly fascinating in ways your abdominals or your deltoids aren’t.  When you cringe at a traumatic memory, Nancy told me, your psoas is the muscle that clenches your at your midsection.  When you sit too long at a computer desk writing or surfing the web (guilty! and guilty!), the psoas contracts and shortens, especially after repeated exposure.  When you suffer from a long bout of depression, good posture isn’t exactly your first priority.  When the world and the emptiness weigh you down, you slouch, as I know all too well from experience.  You cringe away from life, and your psoas suffers.  If your psoas contracts too much as you age, you lose your ability to stand fully upright, since your back muscles aren’t strong enough to counter the psoas’ pull.  This is especially a problem for women.

A supple psoas, she told me, lengthens a runner’s stride, and makes walking easier.  Suddenly, I understood why my stride had improved with even a small amount of yoga practice, and the muscle-body relationship came clear.  I forced a cringing movement to finally connect to the muscle and felt the contraction behind my abdominals.  Oh, that vaguely sick feeling is the psoas protesting! I thought.  As the muscle protested, so did my mind; yoga always leaves me vaguely euphoric but the contraction made me feel just a flash of dark emotion.  I’d actually felt the muscle before, but I’d never known what it was.  I still feel my psoas eight hours later—ouch!

Body and mind – all part of the system that is you.

Certain types of muscle movements change mood, this much seems to be almost scientific fact.  Studies have shown that the mere act of smiling can induce happiness, so it’s not much of a stretch to consider that the state of one of the body’s major muscles can have a huge impact on one’s mental state.  Movement and exercise are often prescribed to ease depression.

You aren’t just your mind, you’re body as well.  You’re the hormones and the muscles, the contractions and expansions that move and support you through the day.  That’s been a startling realization for yours truly.  Appreciating that connection, and that I can heal it if I’m aware and conscious of my physicality is even more staggering.  My body has usually felt like an afterthought except when a sickness forces my mind to halt.  Yoga has reversed a little of my obliviousness, though I still have a long way to go.  But the journey itself has been wonderful so far.

As Nancy says at the conclusion of every practice, Thank your body, mind, and breath for supporting you every day.  Even when your body isn’t at its peak, your bones and muscles support your mind, your thoughts steer you, and your involuntary functions like breath keep you alive.  Realizing how much I actually owe my body has made me renew my commitment to care for it.

A few random thoughts

• If you’re feeling mentally off-kilter, don’t discount that the source might well be physical.
• Appreciate the life and the health that you do have.  Be grateful to the parts of you that you don’t usually appreciate.  They’re sustaining you.  They are you.
• If you haven’t tried yoga, give it a shot.  Just once.

Namaste.