I study movement and bodywork for selfish reasons- I want to keep moving well into old age.Then I want to share what I learn with others. It’s my way of giving back.

What used to keep me moving pain free in  previous decades no longer works- trips to the osteopath,massage therapist or just the right stretch. Although I still use these modalities rather than being the main show they have been relegated to the role of backup singers.

I have painfully realized that it’s what I do the other 23 hours a day that has more ramifications on  how and why I am either moving efficiently and pain free or whether I’ve decided to wrestle against gravity and face humiliation.

There are things I  have learned over the years that were “just too boring” to practice that I have now developed an appreciation and an ability to discipline myself to do. Namely constructive rest position.

And what does rest have to do with movement?? If you are in the “need to move to burn calories camp you’ll be tuning out about now and lacing up your sneakers  but if you can stick with me one more sentence I’ll give you a thought to  ponder on your next run.

If every time your leg moves forward in your walk or run and instead of the ball and socket joint of hip smoothly operating the whole pelvis moves with the leg- then what do you think happens to the spine??

If both of your hips are balanced and mobile then your spine efficiently transfers the weight of your body symmetrically down through your legs. If not, the spine starts acting like it has Tourettes and twists here, translates there and generally does a whole lot of movement it really isn’t designed to do.

Pain , dysfunction and  loss of neural control is what I see in my clients and experience in my own body. But one way you can start sensing whether this is happening is through constructive rest .

Lie on your back- put a little pad under your head and place your lower legs up on a chair. The hips and knees should be at a 90 degree angle. As you lie there- 15 minutes at least start to feel your back on the floor- are there places that are pressing into the floor- are there places that are arched up off the floor- just notice. Don’t try to force anything down- just lie there and let gravity do it’s job. You can put your hands on your belly and do some breathing- but other than that just allow yourself to notice how much of your back is on the floor .

In some time your whole back will release into the floor and the twisting in your spine will diminish and so should the pain( if you have it). It’s what chiropractors do- their main work revolves around de-rotating clients spines. And if you are seeing a therapist of some kind this simple work will keep the changes you are paying good money for in your body.

I have just spent two weeks melting myself into a puddle. I must feel great right?? No I am in a lot of pain- the physical kind that results from our newest obsession on that we all need to release our stiff muscles, our stuck fascia, our outworn beliefs. It’s what has people flocking like lemmings to the high cliffs of yoga, rolling around on cylindrical objects trying to iron out their tight iliotibial bands or going to get released from their massage therapist, chiropractor or osteopath.

I know all of the above modalities have their place in the continuum of healing but I think it’s a cop out. The more I release the more I get into pain and the more I lose neural control over my joints,and my movement. I love the seduction of “if only I  could release my right tight piriformis I’d be fine”.

For my body it just doesn’t work and it’s the reason why my approach to how I work with clients has radically shifted from a release and stretch and extension model of movement re-education to one that emphasizes simple biomechanics awareness that teaches people how to hold their torso square and stable and then move their limbs without a lot of rotation or translation happening in the spine.

It’s not sexy work- but it does deliver me from the pain of a spine that would  rather corkscrew than shoulder its responsibility of translating the movement of my legs and arms down into the ground. Essentially I’m screwed!

The problem is that without a whole lot of time, some really good teachers with great eyes that have delivered themselves from pain and a touch of luck most people run around going from practitioner to class trying to find the balm that will deliver them from pain. You might get lucky- I hope so.

More likely you will need to educate yourself about your body and make some kind of commitment to creating a movement program( to be done daily) that will keep you strong and organized- not one that melts you into puddles. (You are free to read between the lines here).

As we age we develop  movement patterns that are clearly dysfunctional and we haven’t got a clue about what we are doing, where they came from or what they are doing to our joints or nervous system. Think sparse spruce tree hanging on a tall rock face in the prevailing wind of the North Atlantic. The tree has adapted to its environment- nobody is going to tell that tree it is crooked,side bent and that just wait for the right wind direction and it will be a case full of toothpicks.

That’s what we are like. As much as I’d like to be a sanguine lithe yoga goddess the reality is that the work I need in my own body is strengthening my core and then challenging it with simple movement with my legs and arms.

After two days of being home and back in my studio I have mounted my pilates equipment with the same fondness I have for an old friend. When I lay down on the floor my whole rib cage is now talking to the floor instead of the left side levitating towards the heavens. I am out of pain. Thank God.

I have never bought into the conspiracy that once you reach a certain age you have to accept that your body parts are going to start to wear out. I don’t know how many times I have been to a doctor in the past thirty years with some ache or pain and have been told it is some form of “itis” (arthritis).

The solution is to live with it, take pain killers,get a cortisone shot or eventually have some type of joint replacement. I preferred to always avoid that slippery slope. Especially since the success rate for all of those options is not in the percentile that I want to gamble.

We have been sold a bill of goods that says that our parts have a best before date and to just accept they are going to wear out. Well how come a person only gets pain in one knee and not in the other and then has to have joint replacement? Isn’t the other knee just as old?

Doesn’t sound logical to me. What does make a lot of sense is the fact that the muscles around that knee are not working in harmony and the knee is not tracking properly and it is causing friction on a certain part of the joint, causing inflammation(the “itis”). So the good doctor says take some of these, and when that doesn’t work  he gives the joint a shot of cortisone  and when that wears out he sends the patient to physical therapy  and the joint is exercised and ultra sounded. And when all that fails a referral is given for an orthopedic surgeon.

Most of our aches and pains  are the result of muscles that work too hard and muscles that don’t work at all. Muscles can be stretched and strengthened however it is the order that is the key to success and every person needs a different receipe.

What I’ve recently learned through  manual therapist David Weinstock creator of Neurokinetic Therapy is that to change movement patterns you have to change the pattern in the motor cortex of the brain. You can stretch and strengthen till the cows come home but if you don’t change the dysfunctional pattern in the brain it will stay that way in the body.

Joints move efficiently when the muscles around them maintain their proper length tension relationships. One muscle called the agonist contracts (shortens) pulling two bones closer together while another muscle lengthens- controlling the amount the other  muscle can contract. There are also other muscles that act in relationship to the agonist and antagonist called synergists. Their role is intended to be secondary to the agonist and antagonist but sometimes they assume the role of the former and that’s when trouble begins.

The brain  particularly the motor cortex likes things to work in a certain way, at a certain time and in a certain order. When injury, inactivity and poor movement training alters that order  we feel pain.

While massage, chiropractic adjustments, stretching and strengthening may give us some temporary relief- Weinstock’s message is that if you don’t change the ineffective pattern in the motor cortex your body goes back to engaging the faulty pattern.

You change the patterns through failure. Huh? Think about how a baby learns to walk. He falls down a lot. Then he gets back up and tries another time. In Neurokinetic Therapy you  find a muscle function that either doesn’t occur or that occurs somewhere else(compensation) and then release the area  of compensation and go back and test the original  muscle function. Usually there is a stronger response to the test.

Once the faulty pattern has been identified ( and people can have many) then the client is given homework  twice a  day for two weeks to put the pattern into long term memory.

The technique works  for manual therapists and movement therapists can use technique  rollers and balls for the release portion of the procedure and than small weights or body weight for the strengthening portion.

My first client that I saw after the workshop came in with a shoulder that was painful and the humerus was unable to internally rotate. It took me a while but eventually we found that his infraspinatus was inhibiting the internal rotators. I released the infraspinatus and tested for internal rotation. The arm dropped into internal rotation .My clients jaw dropped along with his arm!He had been like this for three years.

He went home armed with two exercises to repeat for two weeks and more importantly a big grin and a renewed sense of hope.

The debate following the New York Time’s article on the risks of yoga have sparked a heated  back and forth between yoga loyalists and those who are not agog with this ancient practice.

First of all everybody needs to understand where the article came from- mainstream journalism  and then you have to understand that journalists don’t go into a story to extol its virtues – they are there to uncover the skeletons in the closet .

When a  journalist sets out to do a story they usually have an idea that they want to develop and they will find all the people that will support that point of view so they can build a case. Often if they can’t find enough people to support their premise the article will hit the trash bucket.

Many have been quick to criticize the article as being too sensationalistic- but that is the way our mainstream news gathering sources get our attention. And in an age where there is so much competition for our attention it is going to get alot worse. We love when the media supports our position and is on “our side” but when it challenges our sacred cows- the yoga mats get rolled up and the sparring begins.

This is the banter not only allowed but permitted in countries  that allow free speech. We don’t have to read everything, we don’t have to agree and we are fully able to react and respond to what we read.

The yoga community is crediting the article for turning people away from yoga and that the article was unfair and biased towards the non-yoga camp. Yes it was- however I think the yoga community needs to look at the collective messages it sends out- particularly through it’s main media – Yoga Journal.

Every issue has incredibly stylized photographs of beautiful people doing extreme poses. We are sold yoga clothes, yoga mats, yoga clocks, yoga jewellery and most of all an image of peace, glamour and physical perfection that is anything but what yoga really is about.

The sages in India must be rolling over in the Ganges.

Our western culture extols the virtues of physical beauty,youth, vitality and shuns the  darker aspects of our civilization . However it is those darker aspects of ourselves that  the true study of yoga attempts to transform .That does not mean going on a diet,doing more sun salutations and looking good in your LULU pants.

There may not be so much that’s inherently bad about the practice of yoga as  much as our cultural interpretation of it.Yes people get hurt- they get hurt going to exercise classes,dance classes and all manner of physical activity. The problem is that people don’t know their own bodies and know what hurts them and what helps them.

Twenty-five years ago I fell in love. The object of my affection was yoga and I have had an on/ off relationship with it ever since. I opened my first yoga studio in Mahone Bay Nova Scotia seventeen years ago. It was way ahead of the curve .

Teaching yoga was an opportunity to share connecting with one’s body and then feeling deliciously relaxed afterwards on a physical level and on a spiritual level it steadied the body to prepare it for sitting meditation and the pathway for living consciously.

When I was younger and stronger my body could tolerate a lot of yoga but eventually my body developed a number of dysfunctions (pain) and the message I interpreted from my teachers was that if I practiced harder and was more patient eventually these issues would resolve themselves. Unfortunately they did not.

Various areas in my spine became hyper mobile and I experienced pain in my sacro-iliac joint on a regular basis. My neck became an issue and an X-ray concluded that I had compressed two disc and I needed a disectomy. This was in my mid thirties. I had ridden horses professionally, had fallen off , been landed upon and had lifted more bays and hay and shovelled more manure than I care to remember but none of that had put my body into the consistent pain I experienced from my yoga practice.

The more yoga I did- the stiffer I got as  instabilities in my spine caused my nervous system to brace and  create compensatory patterns. I thought that if I became more flexible, tried harder that I would get better. If I felt uncomfortable I stretched. It temporarily made me feel better but the pain would come back.

There was a very interesting article in the New York Times recently about a yoga instructor Glen Black who has been recovering from spinal fusion who has had the guts to come out and challenge the “yoga is great for everybody” fanaticism that has embraced the modern world. His classes- the article points out are less about performing acrobatic asana and more about learning to move our bodies in a mindful,conscious way that honours our own particular range of movement.

I’d like to work with him! There are others that dare to question the appropriateness of yoga as a panacea to all that ails us. Jill Miller  is another movement educator that has developed a body of work called Yoga Tune Up that explores yoga- like movements and release techniques that give you the benefit of yoga without the pitfalls.

The most disturbing message many hear is that you need to work through the pain in a posture and that it is there to teach you something. Sorry but the pain is there to tell you to stop doing what you are doing before you damage your joints. When the body is in pain our proprioceptive sense goes into lockdown . And when we can’t feel we are more apt to injure ourselves.

A good teacher of any movement methodology knows  how to distinguish between pain and strong sensation. Unfortunately most  students don’t. And as much as teachers implore us to work within our own limits the truth is most people don’t know what their limits are and get caught up in the aspiration to go deeper into a pose than they should.

One of the philosophical precepts of  the Yoga Sutras is the concept of ahimsa which instructs us to cause no harm to any living creature including ourselves. Unfortunately the sage advice that Patanjali offered some two thousand years ago is noticeably absent in many of today’s yoga classes where the form is more important than the attitude towards oneself. Good teachers know when to reel students back from the brink of destruction as much as when to encourage someone to go a little deeper into a posture.

Some of the best teachers I have worked with over the past twenty five years have studied other forms of movement and have informed their teaching with the latest in the movement sciences. The most interesting classes weave together movement,awareness, anatomy and create an atmosphere where you develop a kind friendship with your own body and mind.

I started teaching yoga in my mid thirties. I had students who were my age now (55) and thought that the cure to their stiffness and general inability to perform asana was remedied by doing more of the same harder.

I now know different. The body as it ages does need more activity to keep balanced, mobile and strong. But the difference in the type of movement that used to keep you firing on all cylinders in your thirties is very different than the type of exercise you need once you venture over the fifty mark. And believe me it’s not some watered down exercise classes designed for seniors

Many middle aged people who return to exercise find themselves nursing pains that prevent them from engaging in enjoyable physical activity. Some of this is the fact that you are taking an imbalanced structure and loading it and the nervous system can’t handle it- pain is a signal that either you are doing something wrong, doing too much of something or the activity you have chosen is just not suitable for your body.

We have all grown up with the adage” no pain no gain”. It may be necessary for professional athletes who need to push themselves past their pain thresholds. But for the average person once you get to a pain state you have missed a lot of the signs along the way.

Imagine going to the symphony and the only notes you can hear are the loud crashing ones that are at the heights of excitement in the music- what a disturbing experience that would be. So when the only sensations we feel in our body through our exercise or yoga practice is when it hurts we are having a similar experience. We lose our ability to feel. And when we don’t feel- our body goes into a state of confusion- bracing muscles for stability and we get stiff and sore.

Feeling or body sensing is something that we need to keep us knowing whether an activity is good for us . If we were more body literate we would be able to feel pose by pose, exercise by exercise whether what we are doing is helping us or hurting us.

As we age- and I’m not talking over fifty now- I see people in their twenties with faulty proprioception, our senses become dull. One student of mine was caught aghast by the fact that she used to be really ticklish on the soles of her feet and now she isn’t- voila that’s what I’m talking about- she was aware of just how insensitive she had become.

Unfortunately we don’t really notice it until something happens- an accident or we take up a new activity that calls upon our nervous system in a non-habitual way.

When I work with people one of the most important goals I have is for them to feel the shifting of their weight and how that influences their balance, their strength and their mobility.Often just by improving the proprioception  on the bottom of their feet they will be able to sense more balance.

We don’t just need to obey the “use it or lose it” rule- more importantly it is just as important to be aware of how we use our bodies and become more attuned to the subtleties of movement in order to have a healthy functioning neuro muscular system.

Heather Dennis is a somatic movement educator who  teaches yoga, pilates, MELT  Method and  Egoscue Posture Assessment . Her own personal movement practice keeps her physically engaged in life, hiking, swimming and biking.

“Deer Tale”

This  is a story first reported in the Sitka Gazette about skipper Tom Satre’s unusual encounter with  deer.

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Tom was out with a charter group on his 62 foot fishing boat when four juvenile deer swam towards the boat. “once the deer reached the boat,looking directly at us you could tell right away that the young bucks were distressed.I opened up my back gate and we helped the typically skittish and absolutely wild deer aboard the boat.In all my years I’ve never seen anything like it!” reports the Gazette.

Onboard they collapsed with exhaustion said Satre as he headed the boat back to land. All of the deer disembarked and wistfully looked behind them at their saviours as if to say thank you before bounding off into the bush.Except for the smallest little fella who needs to have some assistance in the form of  a wheelbarrow up the dock.

Both the skipper and his daughter  Anna admitted that they had never seen anything like this before. Quite the adventure!

1- Do work you love and you’ll never have to go to a job and you’ll never want to retire.

2-Look for the best in people and they will have faith in you.

3-Learn to listen and instead of telling people what you think ask their permission to understand more about them.

4-Put one foot in front of the other over and over again. It’s a great form of exercise and a good way of calming the restless chatter of the mind.

5- Shop locally.Support the economy in your own backyard even when it might cost a little bit more. Life is a two way street.

6-The act of giving to others without the need for acknowledgement is the highest form of spiritual service. Empathy and compassion are the true currency of humanity, more important than wealth,power and fame.

7-Manners are the backbone of a civilized society. The simple words of please and thank you are a passport to successful human interaction.

8- Don’t be afraid of death. Fear of death causes us to shut down our life force. Live big, live loud and tell the people in your life you love them every day.

My father was my greatest influence in terms of exercise. He used to walk  all over  Halifax every day. He walked to work, he walked home, he walked around Pt Pleasant Park. On weekends we’d go for walks after lunch on Sunday. Being outdoors  moving was just part of life. So when people are asking what kind of exercise program they should participate in it boggles my mind that we have become so disconnected that we even have to ask that question.

So much of exercise is tied to some unrealistic body image that we are trying to achieve rather than feeling our legs moving, our hearts pumping and the joys of being able to move through space. That we choose to exercise indoors rather than being in the fresh air and getting much needed sunlight on our bodies is another sad symptom of a culture whose heads are becoming increasingly disconnected from their bodies.

One of the major problems we have is that we sit  on our rear ends and end up developing weak gluteal muscles that usually end up tucking our pelvis like a scared dog. This does not bode well for locomotion. So walking running and all of the natural  exercises that we may have enjoyed as children become difficult or painful and we think we need to be in a controlled environment where someone is telling us what to do.

I have explored movement for thirty years and I believe the best exercise has us moving through space in some form outdoors. And I think it is the form that most people can sustain for a lifetime. Classes and fads come and go so having something that you can see yourself doing for the rest of your life serves you in maintaining movement in your life.

I live in a wonderful place for hiking, biking and swimming and I get outdoors almost every day. I teach indoor classes which help people find better alignment and stability and balance so they can go outside and scramble over the rocks and dodge tree roots. I teach  people how to reconnect to their bodies so they can go out and move them however they wish without pain and injury.

Over the years my body has been my laboratory. I have studied yoga, Pilates, Laban Bartenieff, Somatics, MELT, Gyrotonics and The Egoscue Method. Although I started out in the esoteric practice of yoga I hungered to understand the human body especially how it moved or in many cases didn’t move.While yoga allowed me to find home in my body sometimes that home was not all together a supportive environment and I started to develop weaknesses and chronic imbalances that caused pain. Pilates taught me about the importance of  stabilization. While too much flexibility caused problems- too much stability caused a myriad of problems as well. For a while I went back and forth from yoga to Pilates , trying to create a fusion of the two and really only confusing my body.

The greatest teacher about the body was my fall at Whistler three years ago. My self-agressive nature was put on notice that no amount of stretching or strengthening  would unravel the knots that three broken bones and a heapful of trauma had imprinted on my nervous system. For the first six months after I fell I lay on the floor sensing my weight trying to make small movements. I went back to what I had studied in developmental movement- learning to move like a baby learns to sit,crawl and walk. I tried a few yoga poses- even went to a few classes and all I felt was pain- I grew disenchanted.

I had heard about a woman in Los Angelos that was a renowned Pilates teacher Marie Jose Blom. She was a fabulous teacher that taught me more than I could understand at the time. And my type A personality once again pressed my body beyond its limits and I ended up with a hair trigger pain response that reacted to Pilates. I was mortified .

Was I too old? Or had I sustained too much damage from the accident that would prevent me from doing the things I loved- hiking,swimming,biking,yoga?

After a few more trainings in MELT, Gyrotonics that also offered glimmers of hope but no real understanding of what was going on in my body and no real understanding of what I could do to make my body stronger and pain free. Up to this point all of the systems I had studied had valid approaches, and all of them claimed success in dealing with pain issues but none of them gave me something I could sink my teeth into, practice and understand the cause and effect of movements on the body. It was like I had a whole bunch of spices and a flavourless soup and I just kept adding them until it tasted right. Some things worked with some people and some things didn’t.

Enter the Egoscue Method. A system based on posture assessment and then a system of determining which exercises will help restore  balance to the body. Far from a list of exercises to throw at a myriad of conditions the Egoscue Method taught me critical thinking skills. Rarely is the problem where the symptom is. In fact Egoscue says “it’s the position not the condition” . So while the body may hurt in a certain place it is most likely that the eight load joints of the body are not in their proper horizontal and vertical relationship and therefore the joints are not loading weight effectively.

When that happens muscles that should be going on a flight to Los Angelos are suddenly on a plane headed to London…. Compensations patterns occur and our neural wiring goes haywire. The body accomplishes the required task but at the expense of wearing the system down much like driving too far on your spare tire.

While the Egoscue system has even me a great tool to work privately with clients I have found that many of the sequences I have put together for them are useful for my classes. But the classes need a blend of work that creates balance around the joint, release of tights muscles and a reminder to the lazy muscles  of how to work again. I’m using slo mo balls and MELT to release the spine , hips and rib cage and then asking for the body to load weight through those joints once they have been repositioned.

Classes are a deeply personal experience with participants sensing their weight and movement and then testing out their new found connections through load bearing functional movements. While my work is not about”burning calories” it will make your body more balanced so that you can work out, run, cycle or dance  more efficiently. Classes will teach you about your body so that you become an expert in your own movement.