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58 m a s s a g e & b o d y wo r k m a rc h /a p r i l 2 0 2 3 GOING DEEP The femur is one of the many bones we look at in our newest book, The Memory Palace of Bones: Exploring Embodiment through the Skeletal System. There is no doubt the femur is an engineering marvel in the human body, but we would argue that this bone is even more than that. As we take a closer look at the femur, each of us authors will explore the bone from their unique professional perspective. FROM JEFF ROCKWELL: THE ALPHA AND OMEGA OF THE FEMUR As we begin to talk about the femur, one of the most beautiful and sensuous bones in the body, let's revisit an old riddle—the riddle of the sphinx. During his journeys, Oedipus passed through Thebes, where the Great Sphinx sat and asked a riddle of everyone who tried to enter the city. If you could answer the riddle, the Sphinx let you in, but if you could not, then the Sphinx ate you. Nobody had ever solved this riddle: What travels on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening? The answer is a person: as a baby in the morning of our life, we crawl on four "feet"—our hands and knees; as an adult in the noon of our life, we walk on two feet; but when we are old, in the evening of our life, we walk with a cane, or three feet. When Oedipus answered the riddle correctly, the Sphinx was so upset that she fainted, and Oedipus went safely into Thebes. This answer to the riddle of the Sphinx leaves unexamined why we assume that in our later years we will be so decrepit that we need to rely on a cane to get around. The notion that we are doomed to age this way has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because many folks stop exercising or exploring movement, or even going for regular walks as they grow older, they lose what they don't use—the myth of aging is thus fulfilled. Many of my older patients—some only in their 40s or 50s— were told by their physicians to stop doing yard work because of their age. My favorite excuse: "You're not as young as you used to be." Heck, I wasn't as young as I used to be when I was 2 years old! Prescribing less movement or physical activity is sentencing a person to degeneration. The "third leg" mentioned in the answer to the riddle is reminiscent of a femur: a long stick or cane with a knob on top, a long shaft to reach the ground, and a f lared base for stability. In fact, our femurs are canes on which we are meant to walk, run, explore, and dance. This strengthens them and increases our odds of remaining mobile throughout life and outwitting the myth of aging. The femur is beautiful and, like anything profound, "contains multitudes." It is an entire human in miniature. Head, neck, two prominences or trochanters as arms; its long, sinuous shaft winding its way through the forest of the body; two condyles as feet (Image 1). The head of the femur looks like a ball and articulates with the socket of the pelvis, called the acetabulum. From within this joint exits the round ligament; this is not normal for a joint, but being such a highly mobile articulation, it uses this extra piece of anatomy to lend it extra stability. This ligament travels with its blood supply in a very confined area. Coupled with the fact that we sit so much, this makes it even more important that we move. A principle of bodywork is that what we imagine is what we touch. Like some version of the Doctrine of Signatures (which dates from the time of Galen, an early Greek physician, and states that herbs resembling various parts of the body can be used by herbalists to treat ailments of those body parts), when I contact a thigh, I am in 1