This first thing I noticed about Taiwanese traffic when I first got there was that it was all over the place. I’m not talking about the major wide boulevards that mingle scooters, buses, Mercedes and pedestrians in a slow motion explosion of movement. Or the way they manage to compress the traffic of 4 lanes into 2. I’m talking about the movement when at an intersection or merging. There was something that did not make sense and felt dangerous. Unruly, but in a non-aggressive way. Everyone else seemed to find a smooth glide flow. But, me, I constantly had the feeling I was riding a bicycle with a bent wheel.

Later, I figured it out.

In Taiwan, people do not cross in front of each other, they cross in back! Rather than do the little 4 way stop face to face with polite hand gestures negotiation that we are so fond of in the West. They just slightly adjust course and slip behind. I used to think it was about saving face, later I figured out is just easier and faster. When your world is Saturday afternoon at the Market crowded, you don’t have time for endless negotiations of space. Take the easy route, slip behind.

I suspect Japan, where SOTAI movement therapy originated, the situation is not unlike that of Taiwan. So it may not have been a giant leap to realize that the body kinks and stiffens when forced, but will unfold and smooth when lead into the direction of least resistance.

SOTAI, I have discovered after an introduction at a workshop last weekend, can unlock glued down hips, and vanish back pain with a few gentle moves. The trick is this: move into comfort and away from pain. It goes completely against our assumption of no pain, no gain.

It’s frightfully simple. And effective too.

Most people would say the hands, or our unique ability to walk upright thanks to those muscles in our calf that allow us humans the anti-gravity trick of balance on two feet.

Some would say it is the opposable thumb that allows to us grip, or the almost developed as a dolphin’s neo-cortex.

I was at a workshop this weekend that focused on balancing the “koshi”. It is that part of our anatomy that we as westerners don’t even consider until it blooms into “low back pain”.

My Taichi teacher in Beijing, Liu laoshi, was always telling me to relax my back. Not the upper back we love to complain about, but the lower back. That place where most of us, curiously enough, don’t have any feeling what so ever, unless it is a feeling of pain. I’ve been working for years to understand this part of the anatomy from the inside out. What it takes is several well drawn anatomical diagrams that brighten the light of understanding.

The real eye opener is the cut away anatomy drawings of the pelvic bones, attaching ligaments, and major muscles. It reminds me of the knotted elastic potential of the rubber bands that powered my childhood balsa wood airplanes. Only more dimensional. Something about the interplay of muscle
and bone that made me realize the treasure we all carry behind the navel and between the hips.

It’s a complex suspension bridge of muscle, ligament and bone. All of our movement, our ability to walk, balance, lift and even sit comes from this suspension at the bottom of our trunk.

Our high stress world usually has us thinking about our tight shoulders, but quite often, they are simply a reflection of this web of power that we carry in our belly and lower back.

It reminds me of how in the dark of the night I could tell westerners from Chinese, when I first got to Taiwan. How it seemed that Westerners strutted from their shoulders, while the Taiwanese glide from their hips. What I’d failed to understand, that I noticed this past weekend, is not so much that we move from out shoulders, as it is that we can’t move from the hips.

Gives a whole new meaning to “ankle bone connected to the shin bone, shin bone connect……”