Errol Morris Essay

The link below is for an essay from todays Time's. I have always been a big fan of Errol Morris and now I'm really interested in the work of Paul Ekman. This covers a lot of painful and interesting ground.

The Most Curious Thing

How can walking help with Stress?

The quality of balance within an individual’s nervous system determines a great deal of that person’s character and mood. Everyone knows someone who is angry, or fearful, or bold. These traits are all manifestations of the endless dance of the nervous system as it tries to help us find center or homeostasis. The nervous system is housed in the skull and the spine taking the form of the brain and the spinal cord. The hypothesis of the FitzGordon Method is simple. Lengthen and align the spine and skull and free the nervous system to work at peak efficiency.

A balanced and aligned body relieves stress in a number of ways.

• When the body has core tone, you will be less fatigued at the end of the day.
• When the muscles of the pelvis and abdomen are properly stabilizing the spine and trunk, your nerve pathways are at their most open and free.

A great deal of the brains “nutrition” passes through the cervical spine (the neck). When the head sits properly atop the spine the front and back of the neck are even in length and tone, the brain feasts with every breath.

The Psoas Minor

The psoas minor is an interesting muscle, if it is in your body at all. Most anatomy books refer to this muscle as devolving and claim that only fifty percent of people have one.

But a few years back while attending a workshop with one of my favorite teachers Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (bodymindcentering.com) she said that in forty years of working with people she had never met anyone who didn’t have a psoas minor. That was good enough for me and I proceeded to teach accordingly often referring to the dichotomy between what Bonnie said and what the books said.

Fast-forward a bit to another workshop with Bonnie. While doing a partner exercise with one of her teachers we began talking about the psoas minor. She had had the exact response as I did when Bonnie said that everyone had a psoas minor until she went to a cadaver workshop where she mentioned this to the instructor. They checked all thirty-nine cadavers and only one had a psoas minor.

This again threw me for a loop until I was reading something by Tom Myers (anatomytrains.net) that referred to a fascial connection through the diaphragm, iliopsoas, piriformis and the obturators. He mentions how this connection would be responsible for the energetic feeling of the psoas minor being present and this is likely what Bonnie was referring to.

It is all so fascinating and confusing isn’t it?