Deepening core awareness and the implications for aquatic bodywork: Part 2

This post is the second in a series of three on working with psoas trauma in the water.  Reading Part 1 first is essential (see link below).  You'll also find an ongoing link to Part 3 at the end of this post.

Part 1: Personal experience of psoas trauma

Part 2:  How aquatic bodywork can help with psoas trauma recovery

Part 3: Some ways of working with the psoas on land and in water

Deepening our core awareness we enter the influence of water.  It is imprinted in all form and it is by exploring ourselves as fluid beings that we enter into a deeper level of movement awareness and life. Liz Koch, Core Awareness:  Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance, 2003, p. 74.

PART 2:  How aquatic bodywork can help with psoas trauma recovery

The safety and sensitivity of water

In this Part, I describe some of the insights others have had into working with body-based trauma responses, and relate this to my personal and professional experience in the water.

Here is what Liz Koch has to say about safety when releasing psoas-affecting trauma, and the issue of repetitive behavior  (Psoas Health: Trauma Recovery Protocol, Massage and Bodywork Magazine):

Once instinctively safe, the body naturally begins to shake and discharge stored energy.  With deeper levels of safety, the body spontaneously releases deeper levels of holding.  Without the resolution, repetitive behavior is the only means for the encoding to attempt to release the trauma.

Palpating the psoas muscle of traumatized clients can immediately reevoke the trauma defense mechanism because the psoas muscle is still activated.  Instead of evoking relaxation, palpating the psoas due to its instinctive functioning results in a conflict of psychosomatic interests.  The client wants to relax into the healing massage of the psoas while simultaneously contracting against the invasive procedure.  This conflict causes a repetition of the somatic elements of the trauma experience.

Palpating this deep muscle is hard enough to do on land and perhaps impossible to achieve in aquatic bodywork since the body cannot be pinned against any surface or push against resistance itself (as in PNF - see Parts 1 and 3) and may easily escape from such an 'invasion'.  This suggests that working in water could be safer.  What can be done in water, is to enable follow-through (sometimes called unwinding) of the psoas's  influence on the body's structural integrity, and also to use energy-based touch to initiate and facilitate its releases.  I have found both approaches to be highly effective with psoas issues.

In her book, Core Awareness:  Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance, 2003, LIz Koch offers a watery metaphor for the difference between trauma-based and natural movements (p. 81):

To understand the difference between natural spirals and disturbed or turbulent spirals, nature offers a perfect example.

When a flowing river stalls against a rock or crashes up against a powerful current moving in the opposite direction an eddy comes into existence.  Differences in rates of flow cause the stream to trip over itself and curl around on itself.  A turbulence occurs.  This turbulence is the manifestation of a vortex of spiraling energy.

When our internal energy is disrupted and not able to flow freely a similar manifestation happens.  We experience emotional and physical turbulence.  Turning back on itself, bound up energy may manifest in the form of muscular rotations, torsion within joints, pulled fascia and taut ligaments.  There may be small spirals within tissue, viscera and organs or large spirals in fascia, muscles and joints.  Harmony is made manifest when all spirals flow like the river towards the ocean of life.

Working towards spiraling is a process of turning towards the torques, twists and turbulence being expressed within and without to unravel muscular, skeletal and visceral tension, Liz adds.  In my experience, this kind of repatterning is so much easier to achieve and support in water, and perhaps more effectively followed through and resolved.  The aquatic modality known as Healing Dance is particularly good for initiating and facilitating spiral movements of the body in water. 

Such movements are in fact something the body spontaneously wants to do if effectively supported and not confined by a practitioner's technique or agenda.  Here is another quote from Liz Koch about how to visualize working with the psoas that would make a good meditation or focus for someone receiving (and giving) an aquatic session:

Unraveling muscular, myofascial, visceral imbalances involves a constantly flowing inward/ outward movement.  Go in towards freeing the bones and core muscles and out to the surface to release outer muscular compensations.  Similar to breathing you will go back in toward the core and out toward the surface over and over again.

Spirals of energy (vortexes) which have their own pulsating rhythm are typical of water itself.  Perhaps not coincidentally, spiral movement is present in all living systems, as in the flow of  blood or sap.  Water that is stirred and counterstirred into vortexes is found to have superior vitality compared with still or stagnant water.  Our bodies, in fact, are in a constant state of liquid motion: joints spiraling, fluid pumping,  cells metabolizing, electrical impulses, biochemical exchanges. 

Illness or discomfort may be seen as an interruption of these natural spiraling or pulsing movement patterns - just as confined and stagnant water loses its vitality.  Wavelike motions, by their very nature, disturb linear behavior; rhythm and vibration are often experienced as threatening because they reduce the ego's control. In the water, many people come up against their resistance to change.  Those whose being has been frozen in some way by a past trauma event require special care when this happens.

Prenatal psychotherapist, David Sawyer, noted that the wide variety of movements possible in water stimulate and revive the brain and in doing so  frequently trigger emotions or memories that have been suppressed.  He makes an interesting distinction between shock (sudden or acute) and trauma (repetitive or chronic): an overly tense or active area in the body may indicate shock, while trauma is revealed when a part of the body is not inhabited or is dissociated.

As the account of my table massage session in Part 1 reveals, the latter applies in my case.  My friend noted that my psoas was not 'firing', that it had shut down on the right side and other muscles were having to attempt to support me in its absence.  While deeper meaning might be ascribed to this, there is also a purely physical or functional explanation for this kind of muscle exhaustion in more conventional stretch-oriented exercise and bodywork circles (see Part 3 for more on this).

Responding to an aquatic bodyworker who noted that she feels great compassion when someone in her arms has a trauma reaction, my colleague Diane Tegtmeier (who specializes in aquatic trauma healing) said this:

The compassion you experience charges the water, bathing your client's space with a transformative energy to replace what she's released. Without that, often the released energy is replaced by something of the same frequency and the client just has to release over and over again without real healing happening.  Some of us who know how to work with the meridians and points that are associated with intense emotional states can also assist in the release and integration.

Elsewhere, I have written more about the qualities of water that might be involved in enabling such a space to arise from the interaction between the giver and receiver.  What interests me here, is the idea that this 'setting' effect might be an important part of the resolution process, without which releases will keep on reoccurring.

Trauma and the body's reactions

Peter Levine looked at the fight-flight-freeze response of animals in life-threatening situations.  In the wild, if an animal cannot fight or flee, it will freeze - though physiologically it is still manifesting a high level of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system arousal. If the animal survives the attack, it will go through a period of releasing the arousal by trembling, shaking, running and deep breathing until it is calm. However, it seems that due to cultural inhibitions or neocortical suppression, humans will not often discharge like this but instead store the trauma as a 'body memory' that may be conscious or unconscious.

There is evidence that memories of the motor sequences of a traumatic experience may be stored in the limbic and procedural memory systems of the brain (Robert Scaer, 'Observations on Traumatic Stress Utilizing the Model of the Whiplash Syndrome').  Levine developed the method called Somatic Experiencing for desensitizing or deconditioning the autonomic nervous system and reducing the symptomatic load of a past traumatic experience.  The negative health impacts of physical and emotional symptoms of trauma are substantial and apparently cumulative in the nervous system with accumulating unresolved trauma events.

Not many of us escape trauma events that are truly life-threatening or are perceived as that by us.  When I turned 50 recently, I could name a few - a difficult forceps delivery at birth, several accidents before the age of five requiring visits to the emergency room, untreated whiplash from a car accident, being rescued on two occasions from a very disturbed fellow university student, a scary small-craft flight in India, three years in war-torn Israel, being a passenger in a vehicle that nearly went over the edge of the Grand Canyon, an unwanted abortion, living with someone I loved who used the threat of suicide  and violence to express his pain.

Here are some extracts from my personal journal recounting trauma events that clearly reference the core body impact:

I get into the front seat just in time before I fold up into a tight ball of grief and hear the terrifying sound that is my own voice.  There's a strong [abdominal] cord that connects me to the man I love and fear.  Now it's wrenching at my entrails and I feel I might die. 

[Liz Koch: 'As part of the instinctive fear reflex the vitality of the psoas muscle reflects your personal sense of safety. When feeling threatened it is your psoas muscle that propels you into fleeing or fighting or curls you into a protective ball. Trauma or chronic abuse can eventually cause the contracted psoas to lose its motility.']

and:

Because of this lack
a woman will turn inward
Slowly she will strangle
her own breathless voice
Like the voice of the unborn
it will not be heard
Until it is too late

and:

But I yearn
to translate
the strong clutch
of my insides
into seething chaos
into undulating pulse
To see diamonds
in my dreams
To be fearless

My relatively serene passage though these known experiences has not been without its price perhaps.  Certainly, I have had sufficient unexpected grief reactions to bodywork to know that there is validity to the concept of body memories that do not have an accessible or conscious element.  Apart from that flight in India when my knees were actually knocking together as we crossed the runway, my first experiences of body shaking (both waves and flails) came early on in my training in aquatic bodywork.  Did the water  discover my trauma and show me a passage through? 

Liz Koch's work has led me to recognize the involvement of the psoas muscle in many of these reactions in my case, though that might be extended to include the entire core of the body from diaphragm to pelvic floor, and from third chakra (power), through second (generative or creative) to first chakra (survival).

Energy systems, psoas, and aquatic bodywork

In Eastern healing modalities, energy centers (chakras) and energy lines (meridians) are used to access and influence the energetic patterns that are considered fundamental to the human body.  Harold Dull,  originator of Watsu (water shiatsu), the aquatic modality in which I first trained, based his techniques on these energy systems, drawing specifically from his studies of Japanese Zen shiatsu.  In the water, I have noticed that these kinds of energy patterns are considerably easier to recognize.  Simply by touching certain points on the body of someone I am floating, I have found a significant release of energy and shift in structure to be possible.

I notice also that after guiding a person's body in the water through a whole range of movement possibilities they have not experienced for some time, the psoas is more available for energy work.  Just placing a hand on the front or back of the lower torso can induce a release.  It can also happen when a hand is placed on the shoulder or neck area.  The release usually takes the form of a sudden strong kick of one or both legs and/ or a deep contraction in the solar plexus area that may be singular or wavelike.  The person often seems quite unaware of this.

Quite common amongst many who experience Watsu and related modalities is the 'bodywave' which mainly affects the spine but may also disperse through the limbs, engendering a powerful sensation of release.   Water seems to encourage this energy to move through its hidden channels in the body.  In my aquatic practice, I aim to support a person so as to allow any waves that arise to reach the periphery  (hands, head and feet) if possible.   If not, noticing where the wave 'dies' along the spine, I'll work to loosen these vertebrae, opening the blocks so that the energy can pass freely.  Constraint around the 12th thoracic vertebra might well implicate psoas involvement.

For more abrupt waves, I may put the person into tight flexion, allowing the impulse to build until it releases like a compressed spring.  The initiating pulse for the bodywave often seems to be in the solar plexus, which  is also the region where the upper part of the psoas muscle is attached.  In my experience, the form the wave takes varies: an English woman who had studied with a South American female shaman exhibited almost continuous waves that concentrated over her abdomen; another oriental woman had violent, contractile waves from the moment she was raised into the float position.

In my own case, bodywaves occur invariably in water (which is where I first experienced them). They now also arise on land when I am resting, meditating, receiving bodywork of any kind, or doing yoga.  My bodywaves always originate in the solar plexus, near the upper psoas attachment to the spine. With support and encouragement from an aquatic bodyworker, water allows the waves to move through my body and dissipate (at least for a while).  The experience is often accompanied by sounds, facial expressions and other body movements that suggest mild or extreme discomfort.  As on land, I readily become a witness. 

Here are some pertinent extracts from Liz Koch's book Core Awareness:  Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance (p. 35-6):

Self-will, self-actualization, and wilfulness are emotions all associated in Chinese Five Element Theory with the element of water.  Water element is revealed in the body as kidney energy.  In the Chakra Energy System these human attributes are expressed within the solar plexus (located at the 12th thoracic vertebra where the psoas originates and where the kidney organs make their home).  The element of water is thought to govern the bones and blood made within the bone marrow and associated with the color blue/black, all primordial life and other most powerful desires to self-actualize here on earth.

From this perspective, it is understandable how the misuse of the upper psoas can happen when a person wants something very much.....Getting a grip on one's feelings involves tensing abdominal and upper psoas muscles.  Muscular tension holds feelings in check by blocking the diaphragm's range of motion.  But tension ultimately fragments the iliopsoas muscle's fluid wholeness.... Because of its relationship to the flee or fight response, lack of health in the iliopsoas is associated with adrenal depletion, exhaustion and lowered immune response.

....

The Chinese Five Element System associates these instinctual reflexes with the deepest energetic level that is the element water.  Both fear and the personal will are housed in the water element associated with Kidney energy.  As the iliopsoas is part of the fear reflex, it too is associated with Kidney energy.  The ear, shaped like an inverted embryo (and the kidney organ) is associated as the sense organ.  The proprioceptive system, which fires the falling reflex, is located within the ear.  Kidney energy is said to lubricate and nourish the adrenals and the immune system.  The kidney and adrenal organs, which rest directly on the psoas muscle, are massaged by the psoas when it's free to move as a supple muscle.

and again (p. 73):

Water is the earth's element associated with balancing fire.  As an element water includes all bodily fluids: blood, tears, sweat, urine, mucus, and embryonic and synovial fluids.  Expressed through the pathway of the Kidney meridian the water element is also associated with the following aspects: the immune system, the adrenal glands, bone, ears, lower back, courage, will and fear.  When the water (kidney) energy is strong, it feeds the element of wood (liver) that fuels the fire (heart) of life.  It is then water, by keeping fire in balance that has the ability to calm the heart and nourish the spirit.

I can relate to the above with respect to most of my own life traumas,  and to my recently escalating psoas issues - the scary falls after straining my body lifting heavy logs being only the latest in a series of less dramatic incidents - as I continue to grapple with the consequences of a divorce.  Earlier this year, I visited Harbin (see A Return to the Water) for the next phase of this healing using aquatic bodywork.  Now, I am drawing together all these threads to create a personal healing protocol (see Part 3) that others might also find valuable.  It is an ongoing exploration that I intend to report back on.

Two accounts of working with my own trauma in the water

To illustrate the potential of aquatic bodywork in revealing and resolving trauma - here specifically illustrating psoas/ solar plexus/ belly button involvement - I will share two personal examples from the period 1999-2000.  In both cases, the physical manifestations of this hidden trauma seemed successfully worked through.  However, this does not necessarily mean that all parts of the trauma were dealt with or that further traumas did not remain in my body memory for future triggering (as seems to have happened in the incident described in Part 1).

A near-birth/ near-death experience

The most profound personal experience of trauma work I have had occurred while I was taking part in a training course for aquatic bodywork practitioners led by David Sawyer (Prenatal Journey). Over the course of two weeks I was able to pace the process associated with my traumatic forceps delivery (40 years previously) and to integrate it.  This was aided by the safe space created, the preparatory land sessions, and certain triggering body positions (drawn from prenatal psychotherapy) incorporated into the aquatic sessions.  

Below are some extracts from my personal record of that experience:

The session began, as often, with a series of bodywaves during which I focused on smoothing out the waves that shook my body.  When I was lifted into an upright seated position, all the strength seemed to leave my body though the jerks in my solar plexus continued.  All of a sudden, I went into shock - a place of mortal fear.  I felt that my abdomen was being ripped open and that I would bleed to death if the practitioner did not hold me together.  A part of me was sure I would spill my guts and bleed to death; another part rationalized that I must have healed otherwise I would not be here now.  I remained held around my middle in seated stillness for almost 30 minutes, not disassociating but concentrating on a deep inner healing.  At the end, there was a wonderful feeling of wholeness, as if I were inside an intact sphere with a strong cell wall that had a high, sweet vibration I could clearly hear.  This blood-red, gory experience left me with the realization that I had been afraid of surgery all my life because I thought I could not heal; that I had been afraid of hurt for a very long time.

In the final session, for almost an hour, I was held in craniosacral stillness until I had gone fully and deeply into that birth-shock state.  Then followed another hour of sheer mystical artistry.  First my body went into the extensions of 'divine longing'.  I screamed silent, primal screams that seemed to call in my guardian angels one by one.  I knew, then, in my soul-spirit that I was somehow precious and important to that 'other' world.  They [the angels] were preparing me to face my rebirth.  Now I felt my body twisting and turning its way, as if skillfully manipulated by forceps.  Then, I was free and instead of the terrible stillness of shock, my body went into a long, long phase of reorganization.  I watched in awe as it began to move through an intricately, self-orchestrated sequence of movements.  The tender patience and infinite space I was given this time seemed incredible to me.  Kisses rained down on all the wounds to my head.  I felt I was being honored and welcomed in some ancient, sacred ritual of birth.

Before this experience, for as long as I can recall, I had been unable to touch my own belly button directly (and certainly would not have allowed anyone else to do so) without feeling extreme nausea that caused me to avoid such an event or move violently away from it, if it occurred.  The lower belly areas over my psoas (left and right) were also extremely jumpy, even to my own touch.  Since the above workshop, this sensitivity has been greatly reduced though there are times when skin touch anywhere on my anterior torso is mildly unpleasant to me.

David Sawyer finds that in water, more primitive brain functions begin to surface - archetypes, feelings, sensate awareness, somatic memories.  Prenatal movement patterns identified in the water by Sawyer include:  flexion indicating umbilical armory (sometimes part of the bodywave); extension suggesting 'divine homesickness' or the startle reflex;  and limb-shaking recalling sperm energy according to his perspective.  He also teaches the use of prenatal triggers - such as pushing someone's feet against the poolside to simulate the birth process  - which are powerful and should not be tried without some training. 

This next account, written immediately after another aquatic bodywork session (not part of the prenatal workshop), records a process that repeated itself through many subsequent sessions with several different practitioners.  The release of my left arm and accompanying pain in the left breast/ heart area seemed to be urgently demanded.  Pain in this area of my chest became increasingly familiar around that time of my life, relating to the emotional volatility of my then-partner.

The quiet terror of watching as my right arm began to unravel itself.  Sinews, like the strands of a strong rope, twisting and untwisting themselves.  Snake in its death throes.  Earlier in the day I had danced, shaking my arms free.  How beautiful my own hands had seemed then, not holding on to form, not grasping at anything.  Flowing like water; empty-handed like a mountain pool that cannot restrain that liquid energy.  But I had also noticed how my shoulders were unbalanced, taking their responsibilities unevenly.  The left arm, denied its power, had broken itself at the elbow  (aged eight or so)....  X let it unravel itself until the nausea in that shoulder joint was almost more than I could stand.  Sickness rising where it always does, in my solar plexus. 

And suddenly X folds me up there, cramps the pain in until it just has to explode out.  Stretched open on the surface of water, no need to wonder any more about the courage it takes to leap.  Leap into water.  Jumping over the edge into the rush of a steep fall of water.  How many times did we repeat that unleashing?  The relieving moments when he let me spin into the delicious curves and swirls.  Realizing that this is not, for me, a return to the watery confines of the womb but rather to long before then - an aquatic inheritance that is pure unadulterated joy.  So there is no adulteration when at last all I want is to press my chest against his and hope that he can receive the almost painful rush of light through my heart.

Disclaimer: The ideas I am sharing here, including those gleaned from the work of others, are being presented in a context of inquiry based on my personal experience as someone troubled by psoas issues and likely underlying trauma, and also my professional observations as a massage and movement therapist with a special interest in aquatic bodywork.  They are  intended to stimulate exchange rather than to suggest definitive methods for working with someone who has psoas-related trauma.  Please be very careful with such work.

Link to Part 3: Some ways of working with the psoas on land and in water

Back to Part 1: Personal experience of psoas trauma

See also Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing