Walk the Line

Annnnnnd on that note I'll get away from the mushy stuff for a while ;)

Alright, I have 15 minutes before my class starts again. I would like to explain a very incredible concept to you, simply because it is too amazing to not share.

Within the human body there is a natural mechanism that allows disturbed tissues to reset themselves. There are three stages these tissues have to go through in order to get back to normal: a balance point, a still point and the release. I want to demonstrate this through an illustration.

Tell me there hasn't been one time in your
 life when you feel like this....

Imagine a rope, stretched across two pillars. You are about to step out onto it, and walk to a point in the middle. You are a tightrope walking acrobat and are about to perform a flip. There comes a point where you stop on the rope, and sway. Forward. Backward. Right. Left. You are trying to find a balance point, that singular place where you can hold a position without tension pulling you one way over another. Once you've found your balance, you hold, perfectly still. Seemingly no movement. When in fact you are moving a lot! You're just moving against every force so that you appear motionless. You are simply building energy. You let it build, and build, and build till you crouch, and release the energy into the jump.

Now imagine you're muscles doing the same thing. When you engage a muscle to a certain point of tension it will start moving and wriggling beneath your grasp, searching for the balance. Once it finds that point everything will “stop”, but you can feel the energy within the tissue mounting. The muscle will give a final pull in, then melt into the release.

Understand this principle, and you can understand the first step in osteopathy. (If you don't understand, that's ok too haha)

So cool!

~SilverPheonix