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

When we experience a block, we naturally compensate as a means of finding some form of expression. Like a tree that grows around a rock or like the blocked river that carves a crevice, the pulse of life must find a way to express itself or stagnate and die. In terms of human movement a leg lift or arabesque can be achieved by compressing the lower

When the iliacus fans open, the six outward rotators support the integral tone of the pelvis. These small but powerful muscles maintain integrity at both the hip and sacral joints.

Another internal rhythm disrupted by pelvic instability is proprioception within the neck-head righting reflexes and vestibular system located within the inner ear. Torqueing within the dura affects the skull and, in turn, can disrupt the self-correcting righting reflexes responsible for internal organization, sense of balance, and coordination.

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.

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

Homeopathy calls that which stops the flow of life force a person’s essential wound. Armoring, such as of muscular tension, forms around our vulnerabilities and stops the flow of energy. It is muscular tension that limits movement, decreases the breath, and stops us from feeling. In the animal world, playing dead or freezing is an essential surviva

Overextension leads to feelings of exhaustion and resentment, whereas reaching out from a supple dynamic core is a free exchange of energy that emerges from deep within.

The sacrum as part of the primitive core midline suspends between the two ilium. During a full-body orgasm, the midline’s undulating movement brings the two openings of the core’s primitive tube (mouth and anus) together in a fluid curling and arcing motion. This wave-like motion floods the entire organism with nourishment, energizing the cranial-s

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.