Ancient Medicine Modern World

Think about where your power is.

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……”