Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1060121
3A 3B Yo u r M & B i s w o r t h 2 C E s ! G o t o w w w. a b m p . c o m / c e t o l e a r n m o r e . 69 3A. The cobra diagrammed from the side. Uniquely human, our psoas binds across the front of the hip joint and pelvis, going forward before it tracks back behind the intestines and kidney to join the diaphragm. 3B: In the quadruped, the psoas major does not even touch the pelvis. Most four-leggeds will refl exively retract if you move them even close to the kind of hip extension humans take as normal. 3B illustration by Shallu Narula. • The coeliac or solar plexus, the largest gathering of your "gut brain," also sits right in front of where these two muscles overlap. • The diaphragm is the central muscle of breathing, and if you can't breathe, as the saying goes, nothing else matters. • The psoas is central to walking, perhaps providing the initial impetus for each step, and certainly providing a stabilizing support for the lumbar spine. • The diaphragm is central to, and, to some extent, controls the functioning of the all-important vagus nerve. • The movement of the thin, strong diaphragmatic membrane moves not just the lungs, but all the organs of the ventral cavity in a jellyfi sh-like movement— around 17,000 times per day, every day. • The lumbar plexus of autonomic nerves sits within the muscle of the psoas major—the only autonomic plexus to lie inside a muscle. Thus, the health of your intestines can depend on the proper functioning of the psoas. • The psoas major joins the top and bottom of the body, being one of the few muscles to join the axial and appendicular skeleton (i.e., the spine and the leg). Almost any imbalance in the legs or hips will require compensation in the psoas, which often gets transferred up to the diaphragm. Ida Rolf would occasionally joke in class that the diaphragm is a muscle of walking and the psoas is a muscle of breathing, drawing these muscles together in our minds. These muscles are also frequent repositories for chronic emotional storage, as well as biomechanical adaptation. For all these reasons, it is worthwhile to learn how these two muscles work together, and also how to contact and work with them (not "on" them), even though neither of them are close to the surface or easy to touch. Note that both of them react negatively to being forced. I know, I am a student of Ida Rolf, and am no stranger to insistent attention to stubborn fascial adhesions. Rolf's work was jokingly tagged as "massaging the spine from the wrong side." Nevertheless, I am with Liz Koch, who appears elsewhere in this issue ("Wild Psoas," page 72), in approaching the psoas with respect and compassion, giving it the delicacy and sensitivity one might use with the "highly intelligent" tongue, hyoid, or suboccipital muscles, not the direct pressure that is so much more productive in the gluteals or hamstrings. THE ANATOMY OF THE "COBRA" The psoas major muscle attaches to the lesser trochanter, on the inside of the "7" shape of the femur. Because it blends in with the hip joint ligaments that wrap the neck of the femur, we could start our cobra image with the tail of the snake coming around the head of the femur to wrap around the