The Juice: The Heart of the Matter

We seek to maintain a degree of energy throughout the entire body at all times. It is fed and cycled by the pump of the breath. It is recycled through the rotation of the bones within the joints to create the gearing action and harness the power of return. When the entire body is lit, the action of movement or stillness, mobility or stability, becomes a simple binary situation and no longer a multitude of details to command.

When the entire body is lit, it attains stillness/ stability through the concept of the bandha. Simply, the balance of opposing forces. More involved, the support network of musculature and fascial web that hugs the bones and joints. Every joint has a bandha, a complex of soft tissue that directs the location of the bones in relation to each other at the junction, as well as the direction and rate of movement of each of those bones in relation to the other. 

Necessary point: when it comes to the conceptualization of the structure and movement of human form: nothing is inherently fixed. When we talk about a joint, we often imagine only one bone moving off of an anchored point, like a door on a hinge. Instead, broaden the aperture of your visualization and see that what we assume is “fixed” is only so because of the stability of the junction above or below it. Things are only fixed by choice. 

So, if all stability is created by the active engagement of the support complex at the junctions involved how do we then choose to move? How do I move my arm?

Each junction is a complex of support tissue. We do not need to know all of the details of the players involved just as we do not need to perform the calculus involved when we catch a ball. We just do. Or we don’t. When we chose, now, to move a bone it is a matter of adjusting the balance of the inward draw that created the stability. Stability is not rigid. Rigid implies a lack of movement. Which is why the translation of Bandha as a Lock is inaccurate. Instead Stability is an Active thing. Which means Mobility is an extension of, or an adjustment within, the Activity of stability. 

The adjustment lies in 2 directions: the increase of draw in the direction we intend to send the bone and the decrease of draw in the opposition. When I want to lift my leg I need to increase draw in the anterior aspect of the support complex (the Bandha) and decrease draw (holding back) of the posterior aspect. How quickly I choose to move my leg is dictated by the degree to which I move the balance in stability (50/50) to a bias in a given direction (90/10).

HOw to leverage the breath?

When we talk about the expansion and consolidation with regard to the breath we are acknowledging the cyclical nature of all movement in the universe. We are talking about perpetual motion, the generation and recycling of power, the living pump. 

Allow your visualization of a pump to move from a simple up/down or in/out to a figure 8. Watch not the moving object, watch the moving energy. From the heart muscle to an oil rig to a piston in a car all pumps work on recycled energy. The quality of our inhale is directly informed by the quality of our exhale preceding (ask any asthmatic). Even when the pump, as in a car, is sending most of the compression energy to the next gear in the system (the drive shaft), there is a degree of “blow back” that allows the piston to return to the expanded state. There is always a transfer, always a return.

Inhales, obviously, are the expanded state.  Inhales/ expansion creates space, decreasing the inward draw of muscle, and therefore bone, toward the Center of Gravity. (With the paradoxical exception of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles whose active draw spreads the rib bones and creates the vacuum which sucks in air. We will explore the beauty and appropriate symmetry of this paradox in another article.) 

Exhales consolidate. Exhales/ consolidation exaggerates muscular “draw”. When we intend to move a bone we both increase draw in the intended direction and decrease draw in the opposition. 

The direction of travel is not fixed to either the inhale or the exhale. The direction of force is. I can lift my arm on the inhale but exertion of power comes on the exhale. I can reach for the ball on an inhale, but I would throw it on the exhale. We can move a bone on either the inhale or the exhale, the difference is the amount of force we exercise in doing. Knowing that force must eventually be met at the other end. 

All force is both transferred and recycled (blow out and blow back). The degree to which either happens is determined by our intention and, of course, our conditioning. 

Point: the bones are levers. Levers are tools for the transfer of energy. Energy comes from the muscle and is amplified by the fascia or connective tissue. Muscles move bones. Bones move things. “Things” fall into 3 categories: lighter than ourselves, heavier than ourselves, or …ourselves. 

Remember, there is always blow and blow back. When our force meets something lighter than ourselves, the thing moves: force blows out. The lighter thing puts up less resistance and so there is more blow out. We may push or throw the thing with very little blow back. But there is always some. 

When we act on something heavier or denser than ourselves, we are less and less able to move it. It offers more resistance than we can overcome. Less blow out, more blow back. When we act on something heavier or denser than ourselves we are effectively not moving the thing, we are moving ourselves. Or not!

Inanimate objects have a fixed state of density. Animated, do not. We, as well as the rest of the animal kingdom, are animated. Which, among other things, means we can change our effective density!

Have you ever tried to lift a cat that didn't want to be picked up? Or move a mule? They do a thing called grounding. Which does have to do with the ground, but also has to do our internal ground. We can consolidate the deep core structure. The bandha for our center of gravity. In consolidating around our own center of gravity, we can leverage the gravitational draw of the earth's center of gravity. 

The reason animals can do this so much more easily and effectively than humans, is because they never forgot how. Without the couches and desks and tortured interpretations of “posture”, they never trained themselves out of the structural and energetic access to this inherent talent.