shut down the part of the brain that helps us make sense of internal feelings. In effect, we try to hide from our feelings. Although this may be useful in the short term, because those feelings may threaten to overwhelm us, in the long term it means we become unable to interpret our ‘gut feelings’ accurately.

Our ‘guides’ for identifying functional movement come from three main sources: scientific research on human evolution, developmental research on how babies have to organise their movements to eventually rise up on to two feet and walk, and ethnographic material that looks at movement from an anthropological perspective across different cultures.

Side-bending was still the preferred method of movement, however; fins eventually became legs, acting at the apex of the side-bending curve and increasing the leverage of side-bending propulsion. The intercostal muscles (the group of muscles between the ribs) in lizards act as both respiratory muscles and locomotor muscles for side-bending. This is

paying attention to things we have previously left unacknowledged and that we take for granted – the sensations we have when we practise.

has become more and more clear to me that bodies are shaped by the way we feel, by the things we do regularly and by conditioned ideas about the way we should look. All of these things are organised at a neurological level, not at a structural one, as I shall seek to show in the following chapters.

What previous researchers had noted as a discrete muscle twitch was in fact the tip of a movement iceberg. It was the pursuit of an anticipated concept – direct neuron-to-muscle relationships – that had stopped them seeing the overlaps they were getting for what they really were:

Longer legs enabled early mammals to move more easily over objects, and the up and down movements of the spine further developed. The diaphragm and soft belly developed firstly to enable respiration and movement to take place at the same time, and secondly to allow greater flexion and extension of the body – something necessary for swift movement o

every healthy human being learned to move without studying anatomy – as do all animals on the planet. While I have no

Our response will be noticed in our muscles, which will tend to tighten when our environment discomforts us, and relax when it nourishes us.