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“Physiologists tend to tell you that, in evolutionary terms, the upright posture is not been fully engineered yet.”
       
        MINDSCIENCE Charles T. Tart. Pg. 38

 5.  Having Legs to Stand On                                       3/26/03

I sat down to write about the use of our knees and realized it would be wise to also include locating the other joints of the legs at the same time. I don't want to write a long blog entry here so I will touch on how to locate all these joints and then discuss the knees.

In terms of alignment for the body one of the first principles to be viewed are the arches of the feet.

To continue the subject of alignment for the body some important points to be aware of are about feeling and moving the legs, as well as locating the joints of the ankle, knee and the upper legs. I feel that many problems and injuries occur from having a vague or inaccurate idea of the location of the joints of the body, especially the leg joints.

Locating these joints on your body is very helpful in understanding how you use your legs. Using an anatomy book, find and feel each joint location of the legs with your hands.

The ankle joint, once located, can be moved around so you feel the full rotation of this joint. Playing with this joint while standing and walking will give you a sense of how the weight of the body is effortlessly passed down to the feet and ground.

The upper leg joint is actually deep in the hip socket and I find the best way to feel the movement of this joint is to walk around with your hands on the outer process of the femur. The actual location of the joint is slightly higher in the hip then the outer process of the femur.

The Knees

You may note that the knee joint is a hard one to find and requires some exploration with the hands while moving this joint. Most people I have worked with have not located this joint for themselves. Usually people have an idea that the joint is right behind the patella or kneecap.

We may view how the use of the knees are an interesting point of self-observation when we walk and stand. The primary point I liker to emphasize is having our knees relaxed or feeling soft as one uses the legs.

A basic problem, I have found, is most often people lock the knees and keep the legs stiff. If you observe a child in the early stages of walking the knees are soft or slightly bent as opposed to locked. I would say that somewhere down the line they will learn to lock the legs from the many conditioning factors that surround a child’s free spirited motion.

From the “stop running around” to “stand still” etc. I’m sure you can come up with a few conditioning phrases attempting to freeze motion. They are almost unavoidable in this culture. When going to the Chinese movie houses in New York City it was interesting to see the children running around the theater and playing with other children, while the parents enjoyed the movie. For many children in our culture it must be as if life where one big library where they are given the idea that motion and sound is disturbing others. Birds don’t have this problem.

Standing with the knees relaxed usually will lead to finding that they may want to move back and forth in a playful way like teenagers often do. This is a play of energy and can be explored to release held energy from the body. At first this can become quite active if the habit has been to hold the legs still. Bodywork in this sense is play and exploration.

The habit we generally have in standing is to be on one leg or another, with one leg locked and the other soft. Nothing wrong about this, but when done all day long it is a holding still, and puts undue pressure on the joints of the body.

When walking, feeling the knees relax with each step, can lead to many playful, and interesting discoveries. I have given many sessions where people walk around the room and explore all the different patterns that can evolve out of letting the legs move and change by themselves, from marching, kicking or wiggling in unpatterned and spontaneous ways. Walking backwards a little bit can also break up some patterns. The point is to relax the knees and the legs while walking and enjoy the motion.

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Comments

What is the best way you have found, Harmon, for noticing when one is standing on just one leg for too long at a time? I fear I do this too often ... I am learning not to do it, from my work on the SpiritRiser mini-rebounder, but I think that, for example, when I wash dishes, I probably do this often, and it is probably on the same leg.

Posted by: Jordan on March 28, 2003

Jordan, it is a matter of first being aware of how you are standing, and feeling if you are holding something still in the legs. From there, standing on both legs with the knees relaxed, feel if the legs want to move or shake off, very much like swimmers do before an event.

This is exploratory in terms of what the legs will do, since it is always a surprise at first, at how active the legs can become in playing with motion. It is my opinion that the shacking off in the legs is a process of releasing tensions from holding our legs still as a result of conditioning or unfamiliarity with handling the body’s energy.

To me, children have to hold a lot of energy still while in school or being kept from the natural impulse to play and experience their bodies in motion. The body is always producing energy and many don’t have natural outlets for this energy. This is may be built in to the way people think in terms of adult and childish behavior, which has not to much to do with what I call natural body. We are physically dynamic beings and that dynamic seems to gets lost or redirected into red, blue and orange meme activities. Sounds like I'm slipping into a rant! So much of our energy is being distracted by suggested habit patterns.

I have some questions about your work on the Spirit Riser. Since you are making some alterations to how you feel the arch of the foot have you had any somatics in the hip joints? When people make a change like this there can be, over time, some aches in that area because the muscles are being used in a different way or muscles that were dormant or now being brought in to play.

Also, do you feel somatics elsewhere that you question from the discipline you are working with?

Posted by: Harmon Hathaway on March 28, 2003

Note; Article was written for Enlightenment.com web site which latter dropped  the Blog portion because of Spam problems.