It is well known that I help a significant number of people out of pain. This, not surprisingly has led to a number of questions about how the process actually works. Enjoy the following Q&A. I hope that it adds to your practice.
1. How do you work with someone with arthritis?
Susi’s response: Two key factors for helping someone to improve is to help them to better recognize how their body moves, holds tension, how they rest and recover, and how to better manage their relationship to their condition. These often go hand and hand, and in my experience, as someone improves physically they improve in both competence and confidence. They feel better and have less pain.
With arthritis (and any condition, really), each person is impacted differently, whether it is due to the actual degeneration and inflammation or whether it is due to how they are managing their condition. So, rather than having a template of exercises to choose from, I simply provide movements and breathing techniques that specifically support who they are and how they are moving on that day. This honouring of their body and their relationship to their body goes a long way to helping them to improve function and reduce pain.
The bumper sticker: Yes you can reduce pain and live a more functional life, even with arthritis.
2. How do you work with hip flexor pain?
Susi’s response: My experience over the past 30 years has shown me that the pain is not where the problem is. While there is often a degree of limitation or dysfunction of the pelvis and how the legs and spine relate to the pelvis (and this does need to be improved), there are often holding patterns further up the chain – in the rib cage, neck and head – and down the chain, in the legs and feet that need to be addressed. I do this by simply improving the quality and coordination of a person’s movement patterns. As these improve, their pain goes down, and we can then progress them to more complex and complicated movements.
The bumper sticker: The pain isn’t where the problem is. It is merely a sign of limitation and/or dysfunction.
3. So, someone does the small movements that you often teach in your therapy classes. How do they progress?
Susi’s response: My approach has arisen out of seeing that many people are unable to move into the classic yoga poses in a functional way (hence the rate of injury and strain in yoga). I would see that my students were unable to move into the pose functionally, so would break down the pose and see what the actual limiting factor was and improve that. All of the small movements I offer are simply that – component pieces of the classic poses. So, to improve, all you need to do is add more components of the what makes up the classic poses. Then, you can “hold” the position for a longer period of time, or add repetitions or add more load. Each of these will add more complexity. The key though, is that the person continues to move purely and precisely, so that the joints and muscles involved are doing what they are supposed to be.
The bumper sticker: Progress is very quick when you move specifically and thoughtfully.
4. When someone comes in and has a lot of drama and story related to their condition how do you work with them?
Susi’s response: I am really clear on what my skill set is. While I am not a psychologist nor a priest, I am a human. I use my ears and my whole being to listen to what they have to say because what they are saying (and what they aren’t saying), gives me a tremendous amount of information about who they are, the words they use, how they process information and what is important to them. I have also done a lot of my own personal work, so I am able to be with many other emotional responses. I think this is a key piece in that I don’t see someone’s story as a lot of drama. I see another human who is suffering and has a story to tell. It is amazing the healing that can happen when someone is heard and seen.
The bumper sticker: A vital piece to healing is the process of being seen and heard.
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This has been a month of Mechanics of Breathing Online Anatomy Course. The focus of the program has been the notion that before breath was breath, it was air. It became breath because our mechanical pump, namely the pieces and parts of our body related to respiration and ventilation drew the air in. From there, it became breath and then travelled through the various channels and structures to give us its life giving elements.
Take this moment now and notice your own breathing. Allow yourself to simply notice. For some participants in the Mechanics of Breathing program this “just noticing” exercise was profoundly difficult. They automatically wanted to use breathe high into their chest, or they wanted to direct the breath right to their belly.
What I offered them is what I will offer you – for now, for the purposes of this practice, simply notice how your body is moving as you inhale and exhale. Notice how the reality of your organic natural movement impacts how the inhale comes in and the exhale goes out. Remember breath is breath. It was air before it became breath. It was the result of our pump – our neuromuscularfascial system and how it connects with the skeleton to open and close the spaces inside your body. Thus, when you shift the pump, you shift the space inside and the breath naturally changes.
Said another way, if your rib cage is limited in movement, so will your breath. If your upper abdominal fibers are tight they will limit rib cage movement, if you hold your belly tight as you move through asana and use secondary breathing muscles to get air in, you won’t be efficient with your breathing, and you won’t get the benefit of easily moving and fluid respiration and ventilation.
Continue to explore breathing in this way, and share with me what happens in your body. Many of the participants were in awe of what occurred. Initially they were very tight and noticed how much they forced aspects of their breathing to occur. Then, a mere few days into the experience, things started to change and they could connect their breath to their chakras, and feel the subtler pulses…not by doing anything, but rather by simply observing.
That is the magic of this practice.
Have fun exploring,
Susi
