THE POSTURING AROUND EMOTIONS

The body clearly holds our emotional state. Actually, it holds everything. Our opinions, our beliefs, our biases, our anxiety, our stress, our every thought.

Liz Koch writes about the psoas being the emotional muscle. There are many interpretations around this. I have my own interpretation. It is not that our emotions get stored in the psoas. Not literally, but they do physically. The reason they become physically stored in the psoas is that emotions enter our postural attitude.

Let's take the example of a child living in a family where the parents are often at odds with each other. The child hears arguments and feels the silence when the parents are too fed up to argue. They attempt to stay out of the parents' way. When they come into contact with the parents, the child tiptoes around them, as if walking on eggshells. They try not to be seen.

The posturing here is the tiptoeing, walking on eggshells presentation. This type of walking directly affects the psoas. In order to 'hide' and be silent around others, tension is created in the legs. The heels remain off or hovering over the ground. The child lifts up one leg and places it down gingerly. She looks around pensively to make sure nobody has noticed her.

In this posturing, the ribs and pelvis knit slightly together. The lifting of the foot silently, places stress on the psoas. It has to contract to lift the foot. This tiptoeing puts an end to the natural pendulous nature of balances psoas muscles. The tension in taking this kind of step extends to both psoas muscles at the same time. The leg that is down is held there as much as anything by the psoas muscle which is now also in contraction when it should be lengthening.

And so this sensation of tiptoeing is set up in the body and as the child gets older, unless their situation changes entirely, it becomes written in their body. Whenever the child or even the adult experiences something remotely interpreted as danger, their body will take them back into this tiptoe posture. Or even if the person feels they need to be polite and that means to tread silently in their mind, the psoas will become over-contracted.

Over time, this contracted state of the psoas sets in to the person and the very nature of the muscle may have the power to induce the feeling of emotion. The posturing around emotions comes to us in many forms. It becomes our pattern. This means that the body seems to have a mind of its own, but it is likely that it has been taught so well that the muscles contain a deep memory. This muscle memory feels like it is separate to the mind or our thoughts, but they are in a lasting relationship... at least until we have enough awareness around it in order for it to change.