When people are over-working or putting too much of their energy into meeting work demands, I’ll notice that their spine tends to rotate to the right in their lower back. When they’re feeling like they need to present in a certain way or alter who they are in order to be accepted, their spine tends to rotate to the left in the low back.
Our third chakra, manipura houses our power and will power. It’s located in the torso above the hips and below the ribs. It’s the softest part of our body with the least amount of bones to protect and support it. I’m a firm believer in our power coming from our softness, so here it is reflected in the body.
As for the energetics, the back is where we store unconscious emotions and excess tension. You can see that if we’re uncomfortable about something and don’t have the capacity to feel that, we could easily hold enough tension in the belly to affect the lower back.
Often the idea of exploring what we’re feeling is more burdensome than actually doing it.
I’ll suggest to clients that it’s ok to talk about their fears or what’s bothering them. Sometimes I get the response that they avoid talking about their fears so they don’t give more life to what circulates in their head. I understand the thinking behind this, but there’s another side to this coin. When we unconsciously (or consciously) circulate, it’s worse than what the reality might be. Our brain takes our thoughts as truth when they’re not yet proven. This unfortunately ends up creating more fear than if we spoke those ideas out loud to someone else.
Many of us have ideas about crying or talking about something that’s hard or sensitive for us. We forget how much better we tend to feel after we have an emotional release like that. Our tears are biologically healing to secrete, yet our patriarchal society has shamed tears as a sign of weakness.
It can swing in the other direction too. We can of course not want to explore or express our anger for fear of getting fired up or not keeping the peace. It’s healthy to allow ourselves to understand our feelings and give space to our process. Our feelings alert us to when we’re not ok with something. Once we’re in a more grounded state, it’s important to communicate what happened for us. This gives space for more productive conversations and for the people we care about to understand that. We can work through our friction points, allow each of us to be heard, and find a compromise moving forward.
It’s great when we can be thoughtful about all these things. There’s also intensity and real life situations where we communicate in the moment when we’re in our feels. We can have space for both and work on how we share our experience when someone has hurt us or a situation triggers us.
If we’re in a space of not knowing what we’re feeling and not allowing ourselves to be honest about our reality, we can get a little stuck. There.could be something that we’re trying to figure out but just can’t seem to find a resolution that feels satisfying. Here’s where rotation can be your friend.
Rotating the torso can move stagnant energy. It uses the physicality of the body to get movement into parts of us that have slowed down for whatever reason. When we put the body in a twist and use our breath, it’s this cool point of end range friction that gently creates change.
When you think about wringing out a towel, you twist until you can’t twist anymore so that the moisture leaves. When I think about rotating the torso, you’re twisting the tissues, bringing the muscle end points away from each other, allowing a stretch while also using the breath through the belly to push against that stretch. This creates more space and moves what has been stuck. It’s similar to walking with ankle weights. There’s more resistance when they’re on and when you take them off, there’s way more ease and freedom in your range of motion. We need the point of tension to kick in the body’s responses that have slowed down.
There’s another option to move stagnation that can be done seated. It’s a yogic way of working with the breath that is very stimulating and great for the morning or when you need to reenergize yourself. It’s called breath of fire or kapalabhati. In this month’s video, I’m showing a lovely rotational stretch that opens up the front of the hips, low back and shoulders along with a kapalabhati tutorial. Enjoy and share with those it can benefit!