Becoming The Knot

For many years I was a serious and competitive runner. I ended up getting a scholarship and running my way through college and I continued on with training even after I graduated. Over time, my body gradually began to struggle to stay healthy but, as is the case with many runners, I kept running.

Eventually, my pushing and pushing caught up to me, and there came a point when I began to have a different sort of discomfort in my lower back that actually kept me from my regular routine for the first time. This was new and it was jarring. 

It got to the point where I had to stop running altogether because every time I went on a run my lower back would seize up and I’d go limping back to my front door.  After some time I remember getting x-rays and MRI’s which the doctor informed me demonstrated “normal” wear and tear, things like a bulging disc and disc degeneration. 

But no solution and no need for worry. This was “normal.” But I still couldn’t run. And I was still in pain. Not the customary aches and pains of tendinitis, shin splints, knee inflammation, and other common running ailments. This was different. I remember describing to a friend that every time I tried to run it felt like my body was having a trauma response to the idea of running.  

And now, years later, I realize I was right. 

When the body goes through a physical injury or repeated physical injuries, the brain, via the Central Nervous System, protects that particular area by creating a shield of tension around it. Tension here is defined as chronic involuntary muscle contraction. Meaning, you are “holding” and you don't even know it. Your body is doing this to protect itself.

Every time I began to run, my body rejected my effort through (involuntary) contraction of the muscles in and around my lumbar spine. And I couldn't release it because while I knew I was uncomfortable, I didn't know what was really happening. Over time, these contracted muscles begin to fatigue, harden, and send out signals of pain.

Thomas Hanna - a student of Moshe Feldenkrais and movement theorist coined the term “sensory motor amnesia” after observing this phenomena in his clients. He proposed that many of the most common physical ailments that we attribute to aging, and that the medical system fails to understand or heal (e.g. lower back pain), were related to the effects of habitually contracted muscles below the layer of our voluntary nervous system. These sorts of issues don’t show in imaging - and so more often than not the doctors send us on our way, even going so far as to refuse a follow up appointment or, worse, haphazardly scheduling the patient for an epidural injection.

Hanna’s solution, which I have integrated into my own yoga practice, is to bring this tension into our field of awareness, connect to it, and then as the Buddhists say “become one with it.” He believed that by responding to bodily discomforts with intelligent awareness and positive counter measures such as somatic exercise, we can improve the bodies ability to self regulate and in turn prevent this process of disfunction from becoming permanent.

It is through conscious movement that we can learn to sense and feel how and where we are holding. And it is through the reclamation of our attention that we can remember how to let it go. 

As a wise man once said: “to untangle the rope, you must become one with the knot.”