Tantric Yoga Techniques

Boom town Calgary, Alberta has kept me busy for more than a decade. Closing in on 20 000 hours delving in the tissues, of thousands of clientele, have revealed much about how we hold tension, how our posture changes, and what keeps our muscular system from freedom of pain and restriction, having balance and maintaining fluid movement.

There are many factors that lead to pain and discomfort. One obvious cause, and one that everyone attempts to manage, is stress. We all have it. We find ways to adapt, deal with or just plain avoid stress! Whether it is psychological or physical, stress finds its way into our lives from many sources. I mention stress because it affects everything else. Every contributor to postural imbalance is only made worse by stress.

Our predominate postures greatly affect how we feel, move, and cope with life. The greatest determinate of our posture, is our most habitual postures. This may sound vague, so let me zero in on the three habitual patterns which have the most impact on our postural reality.

There is nothing you do more each day than standing, sitting, and sleeping!

How you do all three of these things will have the greatest impact on what your postural reality is. Not even the bumps and bruises you receive along the way, the falls and accidents you might have, nor your genetic makeup has as great an impact as the three things you spend the most time doing. There’s barely an hour of the day not spent doing one of those three things! How do you sit? How do you stand? What position do you tend to maintain most while trying to get those 6-8 hours of sleep every night?

Most Massage Therapists’ clients have occupations that require them sit for many hours every day! This may not seem to be significant, but upon closer examination, we can see how this can add up. Even 4 hours a day, leads to 20 hours a week. That becomes close to 1000 hours a year seated…just at work! How many hours do you sit in the car, surfing the couch, at the kitchen table, or sitting in coffee shops, and restaurants? Obviously we could say another 1000 hours and still not be accounting for the countless hours spent in this postural altering position!

Two major muscle groups are held in a shortened position while you sit. The major hip flexors, the Psoas, and Rectus Femoris, are greatly shortened while seated. The former of the two attaches to the anterior (front) side of your lumbar vertebrae. After spending long periods of time in a shortened position, the Psoas becomes shorter and tighter. The problem with the hip flexors being tight is that they pull the lumbar vertebrae forward. This is a classic reason why many people experience low back pain.

Having your knees bent at 90 degrees, for countless yearly hours of sitting, also tends to lead to incredibly tight hamstrings! No wonder as we age it gets to harder to touch our toes! Sitting is also hardly kind to our neck and shoulders.

People seek massage therapy to address the muscular imbalances developed from sitting daily at their computer. Having their hands in front of them on a keyboard, often with one hand outstretched onto a mouse, while their head progressively lurches forward toward the monitor, leads to structural changes, which for a low impact occupation, have quite the big impact on how we feel.

Another posture we do more than any other is standing. Each of us have a very unique standing posture. We rarely bring our conscious awareness to how we do this simple thing, but we can clearly identify some habitual aspects to how we maintain this dominantly held posture.

Simply glancing down at your feet periodically, without adjusting yourself to some ideal pose, reveals what is likely a reoccurring theme. Are your feet consistently in a similar position every time you look down? Is one always out in front? Is one always rotated in the same direction? These consistencies reveal muscular holding patterns that are having their way with your skeletal structure. You may notice the bodies desire to shift weight more to one side. This too relates to certain muscle being held in more contracted states, than their opposites. Massage therapy looks to reveal the imbalances within our muscle groups and restore it.

Every muscle in our body has an opposite. If one has to contract, its opposite must relax. Our bodies function optimally, when our muscles are balanced in length, strength, and flexibility. When a muscle and its opposite are out of balance, we have less pain-free, fluid, dynamic movement and function.

Massage Therapists’ assist in revealing our habitual patterns that contribute to the postural distortions. By introducing opposition to our habitual postures, we can begin to bring awareness to the balance that lies between the two. Here, freedom from our discomfort and postural strain awaits us. Unfortunately, sleep is not an escape from postural strain.

Sleep is a very habitual act as well. Do you tend to sleep on the same side of the bed every night? Would you or your partner be keen to switch side of the bed? Likely not. Why? Because we are habitual beings. We do things quite habitually, and we move in habitual ways. Even our sleep is done in a very habitual way. Some people sleep on their tummy side every night. Their habit, has them rotating their neck to one side more than the other while being laterally bent to rest on a pillow, for many hours a night.

Did I mention six to eight hours? So maybe side sleeping is better for the neck? Maybe, but what is happening to your shoulder against the mattress? What are your legs doing? Is the bottom one straight while the top one is bent at the knee and the hip? How will that long held position distort your proper anatomical standing position? The body tends to adapt to its own sense of what normal standing is based on what the body wants to do. It wants to move into the position it spends the most time in. Your every instinct, understanding, and programmed sense of what normal standing is, competes with predominantly held postures. This is perceived as strain.

Your Massage Therapist will focus intently on those muscles that are strongly pulling you out of balance. Once these muscle have tension released, your body will begin to experience the fluidity of your new range of motion. You will be taught to move daily into ranges and stretches which oppose your habitual patterns, and encourage an ongoing state of balance. With a little assistance form your Massage Therapist, you will begin to discover how your habitual postures affect all of your postures. Through massage therapy you will encounter new ways to help bring conscious awareness and balance to your body.