The last three newsletters were about a kind of false alarm — the body bracing for a loss that isn’t actually coming, treating an ordinary disagreement as if it were the end of a relationship. Most of the time, that’s exactly what it is: a false alarm, worth talking your nervous system down from. […]
Your Body Is Talking Before You Say a Word In the last newsletter, I gave you a piece of advice for hard conversations: say the bond out loud before you say the disagreement. Tell the person plainly that this isn’t going to change how you feel about them, before you tell them the thing they might […]
Last week I wrote about a pattern I see constantly in patients: a lot of the emotional tension they carry in their shoulders, jaw, low back, and gut isn’t really about disagreement itself. It’s about the fear underneath it — that if you don’t come around to someone else’s way of seeing things, they’ll pull […]
Standing tall is something most of my patients want to be able to do. It is kind of like wanting to be able to tie your own shoes and dress yourself in the morning. It is not a major life goal, but something we figure we should be able to do without thinking about it. […]
We don’t like pain. That is a good thing, we aren’t supposed to like pain. Pain is the message our body uses to tell us something is wrong. If the pain is intense then it is telling us we need to do something about this problem right now. Some sort of damage is taking […]
Is stretching a good idea for us? Why would we want to do it? When is it a bad idea? Stretching has been standard advice in the physical culture world for hundreds of years. Currently, the stretching postures called asanas in yoga are all the rage. I certainly hear many glowing reports from clients […]
I am not like a normal doctor. I do not work on broken people. In fact, I go to a lot of extra effort testing and diagnosing what is going on with a new patient to determine if something is broken in some way. Because if there is something broken, I refer them out […]
Last week I spent 12 hours in front of my computer taking a continuing education class on muscle rehabilitation. Zoom is a wonderful thing in small doses, but 12 hours is a bit longer than my posterior appreciates. The essence of the class revolved around a physiologic fact that I have appreciated in the […]
Back in the old days, a head forward posture was the sign of a serious nerd or other types of bookworm or the special province of people over 60. Since the development of computers, and now even worse the cell phone, the head forward posture is a modern epidemic. Whatever posture we assume a lot […]
I have been noticing a lot of patients experiencing tingling or numbness down one or both arms lately. For even longer, significant numbers of folks are showing their neck sliding forward. This pattern is important because it creates degeneration of the lower neck vertebra and lots of discomfort and loss of function over time. Although […]