#structuralintegrationatlanta

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Anthony Goldsmith

This image says a lot about why posture is never just stand up straight. Both red lines are the psoas, the same deep muscle on each side of the body, but shown in two very different nervous system states. The psoas links your spine, ribs and pelvis to your legs and is deeply tied to stress, safety and survival. When the nervous system lives in go mode, this muscle stays switched on, pulling the body forward, compressing the chest, altering breathing and changing how we move, sit and even feel. Over time it’s not a posture problem or a tight hip flexor issue, it’s a regulation problem. You don’t stretch this away, you calm it, reconnect it, and give the body a reason to feel safe again. When the nervous system settles, posture follows.

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Anthony Goldsmith

Try this exercise: Lie on your back on the floor with your legs extended. Lift your arms overhead and interlace your fingers, then on an exhale, press your lower back into the floor and simultaneously lift your legs and arms off the ground, creating a full body float. Hold for 3–5 seconds, breathing deep into your belly, then slowly lower. Next, add a gentle twist, as you lift, rotate your legs to the right and arms to the left, then switch sides, like a full-body untwist. This is not just a core exercise, it lights up the nervous system, stretches and releases the psoas dynamically, opens the chest, and reconnects spinal and hip alignment in one smooth movement.

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“…when we reflect that muscle holding a chronic pattern of tension is working just as hard and requires just as much metabolic support as does muscle that is exercising actively and getting actual work done, it becomes clear why and how muscular tension plays such a large and diffuse role in our physical and mental health. Nor is it difficult to understand why body work which effectively addresses chronic and wasteful contractions can contribute so much towards changes for the better in our physical processes, our feelings and our behaviour”… 

JOBS BODY by Deane Juhan…

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[bodyalive]

"The human body is a Divine and beautiful vehicle of expression, a storyteller of sorts. For a dancer to move freely without thought or hesitation she enters a self-sufficient state of bliss, a vortex of magical energy that is very much a trance like state of euphoria. In this meditative space where time becomes still and the dancer’s movements are gateways into otherworldly dimensions, the human spirit is elevated to expand magnificently into the purest of Light and Love. This is the art of hoopdance. This is pure Love."

Catherine Flournoy

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"Healing comes when you see the opportunity for growth that a painful situation has provided."

Br. David Steindl-Rast

[bodyalive]

MUSIC IS IN THE PIANO ONLY WHEN IT IS PLAYED

We are not one with this world. We are not the complexity our body is, nor the summer air idling in the big maple without purpose. We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves as it passes through. We are not the wood any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage between the two. We are certainly not the lake nor the fish in it, but the something that is pleased by them. We are the stillness when a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists only in the singing, and is not the singer. God does not live among the church bells but is briefly resident there. We are occasional like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold on to the enterprise under way in our chest. Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat and giant sky, the sea stretching away. He continues past the nunnery to the old villa where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place, which is the difference between silence and windlessness. - Jack Gilbert soul clap hands soul clap hands