What you Need to Know About Creating a Vibrant Life: How to Contract and Expand

Last year I was dealing with some health issues, and I felt that working long days was contributing to my symptoms. After much deliberation, I reduced my hours in hopes of finding some relief and more time for rest. At first it was great. I had more time to nap, rest, and do other things that felt restorative to me.

But it wasn’t long before I started filling that free time with more “stuff.”

Before I knew it, I had eaten up all that time with classes, volunteer work, and self-imposed deadlines and projects. I was just as busy (if not more so!) than before I reduced my hours!

Bewildered, I asked myself, “how did this happen?”

It was as if part of me could not STAND having time to be quiet and relax. There was an inherent guilt to resting, to having time that wasn’t “productive.”

All over again, I ended up giving away all of myself, to the point where it wasn’t sustainable.

It wasn’t my job that was draining me, it was my own inability to save a little of my power for ME.

You could even say that I was opening my heart TOO MUCH.

My life was missing a natural oscillation that is present in all of nature, that play of intensity and calm, of effort and ease.

It was seeming to me that my whole life, and the messages I was getting from the society around me, was all about effort and opening; doing as much as you possibly can…

without the bit about quieting, softening, and going inward.

Peter Levine, an industry leader in studying and treating trauma, describes this process as “pendulation.”

He believes that rediscovering expansion and contraction is the key to living a full and abundant life, with the ultimate goal of living a more expanded life.

Too much contraction is undesirable, this is established. Thinking too much, worry, fear, over planning, narrow focus (staring at a computer)… this creates a contracted state.

You can feel that contraction in your body- your neck, shoulders, face and maybe lower back become tense.

On the other hand, expansion is always desirable, and always the goal. This happens when you consciously relax your body, get a wider view (look out a window for 30 seconds and notice how your body changes), and settling into the present moment by noticing your breath and bodily sensations.

However, there is a trap that I call “FAKE expansion,” which is also undesirable and can even be harmful.

So what is “fake expansion?”

Over filling your life with STUFF and convincing yourself that it’s REALLY important (cringe, yup, that’s me!) at the expense of your own wellbeing.

Fake expansion is “opening your heart” in a situation where you feel exhausted and unbalanced.

It’s saying yes to so many things that you don’t leave any room to take care of yourself. It’s giving more than you have to give.

We do this ALL THE TIME. Sorry ladies, but women do this more than men, but the guys definitely do their fair share.

And maybe instead of asking how you can open your heart more, you should be asking “can you make space inside your heart for YOU before opening it up to everyone else?”

A.k.a. how do you keep some of that loving care and attention for yourself, so that when you give to and care for others, you can do it from a place of love and joy instead of burnout and martyrdom?

One way you can make space for your own heart is by physically changing the shape of your body to encourage more space in the BACK of the heart area.

Interestingly, as we open the back of our hearts physically, our decisions tend to reflect this and become more in support of self nurturing instead of over reaching.

Breathe into your Back

Our bodies are so fascinating. The sympathetic nerve ganglia, which is a fancy way of describing the nerves that make you feel anxious, stressed, worried, angry…generally amped up…live between the vertebrae in your upper back spine. So, if you are always “opening your heart” by pushing your chest up and trying to stand or sit up really straight and never going the other way (rounding your back) you’re going to have a heck of a time getting your brain and body to relax.

Not to worry! You can do a simple exercise to expand the back of your heart. Here’s how to open your upper back:

Re-Establish Physical Boundaries:

Another way to encourage healthy expansion is by re-discovering the boundaries of your physical body, which reminds the mind to keep a little of that loving energy for yourself.

By re-establishing the boundaries of our bodies, we learn to expand. Here are some ways to develop and be aware of the boundaries in your body. This embodiment of where you end and the rest of the world begins teaches your nervous system how to create healthy boundaries in your life.

Here’s how to establish the boundaries of your body:

Are you are needing to create a little (or a lot) more space in your heart for you, so that you can give from a whole and rested place? Or do you need to remind your nervous system what it means to have meaningful boundaries? Or perhaps you’re like me, and you really needed both.

Whatever the case, the fact is that our society drives us to do more, push harder, be better, all the time. And that doesn’t honor the law of nature, it doesn’t honor pendulation.

Try introducing a little more space for you into your life, and see if that allows you to expand a little more. We not only deserve some space for ourselves, we need it to be sustainable.

January 20, 2020February 18, 2020

3 Systems that Help You Balance (and What Happens When They Fail)

We rely primarily on three systems to tell us where we are in space and in relation to gravity. Basically, they keep us from falling over!

Visual System

One of those systems is our vision. Have you ever been parked in your car and slammed on the brakes because the car next to you started to move? Nothing else changed except your visual perception, which made it appear you were moving. As a result, your body reacted. These reactions are constantly happening on a smaller, subconscious level as we negotiate our environment. Don’t believe me? Try balancing on one foot. Now, try that again, but close your eyes. Once we take away the visual input, balancing is much harder.

Human Eye — The visual system is one of the ways that we balance.

Somatosensory System

Another way we balance is with our somatosensory system. This system is the information we get from our body of where we are in space, primarily our feet. All of our joints have specialized nerves in them that tell our brain their position relative to a surface. There is a high density of these nerves in your ankles. To experience the somatosensory system in action, try again to balance on one foot. Notice how much harder your ankle is working, with little micro adjustments, to balance when you have only one foot on the floor instead of two. That’s because you’ve reduced your “somatosensory input” by reducing the amount of contact you have with the ground. Just like our vision, our somatosensory system is constantly sending signals to our brain and making micro adjustments based on where we are relative to a surface. This is happening whether we are standing, sitting, lying down, doing a handstand, walking or running.

Vestibular System

The third system in our body that keeps us from falling over is our vestibular system. This system is usually the hardest to understand because we can’t see it, and we don’t notice that it is working. However, when it is not working, we really feel it.

The vestibular system is a small organ that lives deep to the ear, and you have one on each side. It is often referred to as the “inner ear” for its location, but you cannot get to it from your ear because it is separated by a membrane (the ear drum). It shares a nerve with the part of your body that manages hearing, called the cochlea.

Vestibular organ relative to ear. — The vestibular system or “inner ear,” shown above in blue, is located deep to the membrane of the ear drum.

The vestibular system consists of three semi-circular canals that are filled with fluid. When we move our head, this fluid is displaced. This displacement activates nerves within the vestibular organ and sends a signal to your brain with information about which direction your head is moving and how to adjust your eyes to account for this. This is a crucial function for daily activity. Think about walking. When we are walking, our head is constantly bobbing up and down with each step. However, we do not perceive this because of the vestibular system communicating with your eyes to account for this.

When Systems Fail

These three systems, visual, somatosensory, and vestibular, all have to work together. When they don’t, we can feel dizzy, off balance, or “not quite right.”

The system that is usually affected in feelings of dizziness is the vestibular system. A common cause of dizziness is called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or BPPV for short. This is when a small crystal of calcium-carbonate becomes displaced from another region of the vestibular organ and ends up in one of the fluid-filled, semicircular canals. Because the inertia of the crystal is greater than that of the fluid, the brain and eyes receive a signal that you head is still moving when actually it has stopped. Therefore, this type of dizziness usually occurs with head movements and creates a spinning sensation. It can be very uncomfortable, and is treated by a maneuver that positions the crystal back to its original location. Crystals can become dislodged during a head trauma. Also, as we age the crystals do not adhere as strongly to their original location and can come loose all on their own.

The vestibular system can also be damaged by a virus. Usually, someone who has this issue had a stomach virus or head cold up to two weeks before they started feeling dizzy. This person also gets dizzy with head movements due to the virus affecting the nerve that sends information from the semicircular canals to the brain, body and eyes.

Inflamed vestibular nerve — Our sense of balance can be affected by an infection that makes its way to the nerve transmitting signals from the vestibular organ.

When our vestibular system is damaged or not functioning as well, we rely more heavily on other systems of balance, usually our vision. We usually don’t rely as much on our somatosensory system because in our day to day we are far more used to using our eyes to stabilize (computer work, driving, watching TV) than we are to using our somatosensory system (walking on uneven surfaces, balancing, crawling). This can make us feel dizzy when we are in an environment with lots of visual stimulus, or make us feel off balance or dizzy when we are in the dark or low light. After a while, we might notice that our neck becomes stiff, because we also avoid head movements that may make us feel dizzy.

Our bodies and brains are extremely good at compensating, but we can only compensate for so long. For individuals who have dizziness or imbalance and try to “just deal with it,” their problems often become worse as the compensations only grow stronger. This is because your body will always take the path of least resistance, which means it will always preferentially use the systems that are already strong (usually vision) and therefore the ones that are weak (vestibular and somatosensory) become weaker and weaker. This creates an imbalance that affects us negatively in many ways, because there are many moments in life we need all three systems to be working well and harmoniously.

So what to do if you suspect your balance systems are, well, out of balance? The best thing to do is to strengthen those that are weak. You can do this by performing balance activities with eyes closed, or incorporating head motion into your activities. This way you will stimulate the somatosensory and vestibular systems, and with eyes closed the visual system will not be able to take over.

December 18, 2019June 24, 2021

The Illusion of Symmetry

From the outside we look symmetrical. Left to right, it seems that if you drew a line down our center we would get two equal parts. Most anatomical drawings present the human body in this way.

When we dig a little deeper, it turns out that right to left we are quite different, and these differences can have a profound effect on our physical functioning.

Often I have patients ask questions like, “why is it that only my right knee hurts with running?”

Good question! Some may say that this is due to handedness, with most of us being right handed. But have we ever stopped to ask why it is that most of us end up being naturally right handed? I don’t intend to get into a debate about handedness, but it certainly hints that there is something else at play, some asymmetry inherently present in all of us. These asymmetries are normal and natural. However, these asymmetries can become problematic when they become unbalanced.

This can occur due to external or internal circumstances. For example, your life requires that you do repetitive tasks to one side only, like reaching for the phone on the right, or getting in and out of the driver’s side of your car. It may also be something intrinsic to you, such as an injury. If you had an injury to your left leg, you felt more stable on your right leg as you were healing. That is helpful while you heal, but that patterning of preferring the right leg to stand on can remain long after the tissues have healed.

The Postural Restoration Institute has a deep understanding of these asymmetries and how they affect us. This institute is unique in that it addresses these complexities of being a human when creating a treatment plan, which I have not seen in literally any other course or training for physical therapists, even when I was in my doctorate program this was glossed over at best.

Let’s Talk Asymmetries.

The primary source of these asymmetries is the center of our body, the trunk. It is the generator of motion in our limbs and it is our center of stability. At the center of our trunk (the “core of the core,” if you will) lies the diaphragm, which is dramatically impacted by the asymmetries of our organ and lung placement.

The diaphragm on the right tends to be more domed due to:

lower attachments of the diaphragm onto the right side of the spine compared to the left.
The central tendon (which makes the dome of the diaphragm) is thicker and stronger on the right than the left.
The right diaphragm has the support of the liver underneath.
The presence of three lung lobes on the right and only two on the left to make space for the heart.

Radiograph showing the right diaphragm (left side of picture) being higher than the left. This is normal human patterning.

All these things cause the right rib cage to be in an “exhale” position with the ribs dropping down and into the body, and the ribs on the left to be in an “inhale,” an elevated and expanded position. Think of the left lung as a big balloon pushing on the smaller balloon on the right. This causes an orientation of our ribcage to the left. The attachments of the diaphragm on the spine cause the spine to turn right.

The Postural Restoration Institute has recognized this natural asymmetry and incorporates this anatomical variance into their training of physical therapists and therefore the treatment of our patients. When I first heard that everyone is biased one way, it was news to me. When I was in my doctoral physical therapy program, we learned all the asymmetries of the vital organs, however the influence of this asymmetry was not applied to physical function. Furthermore, the asymmetrical structure and pull of the diaphragm was hardly mentioned, if at all. I find this surprising now as the diaphragm is a muscle that we use all day, every day, and it has profound impacts on how we move and interact with our world.

So what’s the big deal about the diaphragm?

The diaphragm is huge! It attaches to our lower back spine and interfaces with our abdominals, low back muscles, and hip flexors. After I took my first postural restoration course, I was pleasantly surprised at the emphasis on diaphragmatic function and it’s role as a driver of human movement. I was also surprised at how “belly breathing,” which I taught and practiced myself, was actually detrimental to harnessing the power of the diaphragm. The inherent asymmetries within our diaphragm drive the initiation of human movement, specifically walking. Essentially, the stability of the right diaphragm supports right stance phase of gait (standing on your right leg and left leg swinging).

walking still shot in Right stance phase with left swing phase

The problem occurs when we go to stand on our left leg, but we are still in right stance with our supporting muscles. The left diaphragm is not able to support our body in this position, and our right leg does not adequately recruit muscles to swing the right leg. This occurs not just in walking but also during day to day tasks. This can create all kinds of issues, knee pain on one side being just one of them. Fortunately, this asymmetry can be addressed with specific exercise that is asymmetrical, and therefore corrective. These exercises incorporate the breath to achieve diaphragm function.

Once again, I want to reiterate that this asymmetry is not a bad thing inherently. It is in fact a wonderful thing as it initiates the walking cycle and allows us to begin rotating through our trunk and pelvis. Asymmetry becomes a problem when we get stuck on one side, and are not able to get over to the other side. Relearning how to transition from right to left, and then back from left to right, is how we get balanced again.

Are you transitioning well from right to left stance?

You may have difficulty transitioning from side to side if you:

Tend to always have tightness in one hip more than the other
Always cross one leg over the other (usually the left one over the right)
One leg feels longer than the other
You notice different wear patterns on your shoes or bike saddle

Try this simple exercise to test your asymmetry:

Stand with toes pointed straight forward (feet not turned in or out). Keep this foot alignment as you transition to standing on one leg. You can touch a counter in front for support. Now, turn your pelvis so that the zipper of your pants comes over your right big toe. Try the same thing standing on the left leg, toes pointed forward, knee slightly bent. This time, try to turn the zipper over your left big toe. Notice if you can do this on one side, but not the other.

If you find one side to be challenging, but not the other, that indicates you may have trouble shifting to one side. Because of our natural human pattern, it is usually harder to do this standing on the left leg. That doesn’t mean you can’t stand on that leg at all, but it means that when you are standing you aren’t using the correct chains of muscles, which results in pain and dysfunction. To address this issue, come see me or a PRI trained therapist near you to get properly screened and the tools to find better ease and balance in your body.