Welcome Home!!

Excuse me, but where exactly is that?

It seems an innocent enough question but when I ask people but it turns out to have an amazing number of different answers. Broadly they group into two main groups – home is a place or home is a feeling.   In both cases people are quite sure, “you know it when you’re home.” So, how exactly do you know it?

I am not being a smart aleck here; it really is a question I have thought a lot about because I believe that a lot of chronic movement and pain problems are caused in part by people not being home when they think they are. No, not the drunk frat boy sleeping on the floor instead of his own bed. What I mean is that people think they are resting when they are not, they are actively working their muscles and tissues and using energy instead of letting the body cycle down to minimum energy use for the place they are at.  

Why do we do that?

To answer that consider how we know we are resting. You can go through a very conscious checklist of your muscles and joints and make sure each is maximally relaxed. Very effective but that takes time and conscious effort. What we usually do is just drop everything into a state that we have labeled “rest” and if it feels like this expected state, we assume we are resting and put our minds on something else. It feels like “home” and so it must be “home”. There is no reason this could not work in theory. So, check yourself, how accurate is that shortcut for you?

If you are sitting quietly reading this then parts of you, like your legs, are resting. Can you make them be even quieter, more relaxed? Can you diminish the energy you are using as you sit there? Why didn’t you do that in the first place? I contend it is because you put yourself in a tension pattern that feels like you are sitting and your legs “resting” (“home”) but you have not calibrated that pattern in a while and it is no longer accurate.

So, you aren’t fully resting a part, why would that be a problem?  Maybe it isn’t. But consider that if you think you are fully resting you are also assuming your joints are at mechanical neutral, the alignment they go to when they have minimal stress on them. But they are not. Then, when you go to move, the joints are not where you think they are and so you have to do even more work to use them or grind them together a bit harder as you start your movement. Can you see how that may add up over time? Like a car (well, like cars use to be with manual transmission) you can grind the gears occasionally and it will work fine. But do it every day and the transmission will go out sooner, not later. This is why I think that not truly resting is a part of most chronic movement problems.

What to do about it? Clearly, how to recalibrate your idea of rest and actually resting is the issue and there are ways to do this. I have developed a technique called ReTensioning® which I talked about in my last post but it is not the only approach. A number of other techniques work to help people discover if what they are doing is what they think they are doing. The Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, many soft martial arts, and dance therapy are just a few of them.

The core issue, however, remains – where is “home” and how do you know you are there?