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Unit 5: The Lower Limbs

Module # Topic Timestamp Page #

5.1 Somatization: Axial / Appendicular 00:00:54 1

5.2 Evolution of the Foot 00:06:57 2

5.3 Geek Out: The Foot 00:13:19 3

5.4 Walking & Gait 00:27:44 5

5.5 Feet: What Might Your Students Say? 00:36:29 7

5.6 Geek Out: The Knee 00:43:02 10

5.7 The Lotus Dilemna 00:53:43 12

5.8 Geek Out: Pelvic Halves 01:03:43 14

5.9 Your Legs are Longer Than You Know 01:12:33 15

5.10 Lotus: Look Again 01:15:27 16

5.11 Building an Asana: BOS - COG - ROM 01:21:26 17

5.12 The Big Questions: “Do You Know What You’re Doing?”

01:27:50 18

5.13 What is Alignment? 01:49:12 24

Review Unit 5: In Review 01:58:13 26


[Timestamp 00:00:00]

Narrator: Welcome back to YogaAnatomy.net Fundamentals. This is Unit 5, The Lower Limbs. In this unit we will look at the lower limbs in detail—their structures, their functions and how they developed. We will start at the foot, look at the structure and also examine issues like gait, plantar fasciitis, bunions and how to keep the weight transfer healthy. Next we will look at the knee, how it's put together, and what we need to know to keep it safe in practice and in life. Finally, we’ll look at the pelvis and the psoas. This unit will close at a look at what we in yoga call alignment. But first we will join Amy for a somatization.

Module 5.1 Somatization: Axial / Appendicular


Amy: From a standing position, find your feet underneath you and turn your attention inwards. Bring your attention to your spine. Let all of the things that you may have learned or experienced about your spine settle into the back of your attention, into the back of your awareness, and see what it is that arises as you say hello to your spine today. Then shift your attention to all of the things that are attached to your spine. Consider, for a moment, your organs. The muscles that attach to your spine. Then bring your awareness to your limbs, to your lower limbs and your upper limbs. What comes into your awareness when you hear the word limb? Here's another word to consider. An appendage. What is an appendage? What part of your skeleton do you consider part of the upper limb? What part of your skeleton do you consider part of the lower limb? How is that different than the part of your skeleton that you might consider your axis?

So we generally classify the spine as being axial skeleton and the bones of the limbs as being appendicular. But what counts as axial and what counts as appendicular can be fluid in some of the categories of bones. Your ribs might be part of your axis. They might be part of your upper limb. So how is it now to move your arms through space, to lift them up overhead or bring them out to the side or move them however you like. And compare as you do, entertaining the idea of your ribs being part of your limb, part of your appendicular skeleton, to the experience of considering your ribs part of your axis, part of your axial skeleton. You can also, in that movement, entertain the question of what your shoulder blades and your collarbones are. As you move your arms, what do you include in those limbs, in those appendages?

Then switch your attention and the movement to your lower body, to your lower legs, and from standing, move your legs and see, where do you feel the pelvis organizing itself? Is your pelvis part of your axial skeleton? Is your pelvis part of your appendicular skeleton? If you want to, you can lift a leg up from where it is or you can leave both feet on the floor and move your legs, but see what you include in that. Then, for just a few moments, bring your attention to your spine. Now move your spine and see how that experience might be different to initiate movement from your axis as compared to your appendages. Is one of the ideas, experiences, more familiar? Is one of the ideas or experiences less familiar? Then find your way back to standing and to relative stillness on the outside. Observe again what your spine says to you in this moment. Add into it, add into the conversation now your upper and lower limbs. Thank you.

YogaAnatomy.net Fundamentals—Unit 5: The Lower Limbs Page ! of !1 26


Module 5.2 Evolution of the Foot


Amy: In this unit on the lower limbs, we are going to begin at the feet and find our way up to the pelvis. I often begin with the feet because I think that questions we have about knees and hips and back and spine and neck, head, a whole lot of those questions can be sorted out, or at least we can find a starting place in them, when we look at the feet.

Leslie: Like Amy, I often start my investigations about what's happening in our bodies with the feet. The feet, after all, are the foundation of our bodies, very much as the foundation of the house supports the rest of the structure. After all, if you were visiting a friend's house and you noticed that the roofline was crooked, I wouldn't recommend going up to the attic to find out what was wrong with the roof. I would go down to the basement and see if the foundation is sinking, and that's what's causing the apparent problem higher up in the system. Same is true of the body.

Since we are going to be starting this unit on the lower limb with the foot, I think a good definition is in order. So how would we define the foot? Well, the way I choose to define it, the story I choose to tell about the foot, is this. The foot is the part of your body, which has evolved specifically for the purpose of having a relationship with the earth. Whatever the position you're in in gravity, some part of your body is having a relationship with the earth, with a supporting surface. But the foot is your body part that has evolved specifically to do that. The way it has evolved to do that is to have a particular arrangement of its structural elements that it can most effectively communicate the downward weight-bearing forces of your body to the earth so that it can conduct the upward supporting forces from the earth back into your body. Now, I keep using the word earth in this definition and these descriptions, and therein lies the problem for most of us. When I say most of us, I mean those of us living in the industrialized, civilized parts of the world, where the earth that the foot evolved upon, like the dirt, earth-earth, the earthen earth, is not something we interact with very much with our feet. We don't stand around in bare feet on the earth as our ancestors did for millions of years when this amazing structure evolved to be, essentially, an all-terrain vehicle. The terrain that we interact with mostly looks like this.


It's flat. It's hard. It's paved. It's predictable. It's not all-terrain. It's just flat terrain. If you had an all-terrain vehicle that had a wonderful, sturdy, adaptable suspension system, but never took that vehicle off road, you wouldn't really wonder why, after years of that, the suspension might freeze up a bit.

So we yoga people do prefer a little bit more barefoot kind of living. We like to walk in the earth. We walk in the sand. We do yoga barefoot on yoga mats. So we do try to introduce a little bit more of the natural functioning of the foot into our lives through this.

So the basic architecture of the foot that allows it to be such an amazingly adaptable all-terrain vehicle is that of a triangle or a tripod. When we look at tripods like the tripod that that camera is sitting on right now, one thing about a tripod is that it will never wobble. It will never wobble. If, however, you have something like this, which is a four legged stool, if the surface it's sitting on is a little uneven, or if the length of these legs is even a slight bit off, you're going to get a wobble. Tripods will never do that. So if we wanted to draw a picture, a simplified picture of the basic architecture of the foot, we can do that by starting with three dots in this sort of arrangement. These dots represent the three places where the bones



of the foot actually come in contact with the surface that it's resting upon. If we were to connect those three dots with lines, we of course get a triangle, and these three lines actually represent arches. Three arches in the foot. Not just one. Whereas the points represent where the weight-bearing energy of our body goes downwards towards the earth, these lines, these arches, represent places where the supporting energy of the earth can come back up into our body in the opposite direction. So to get the rest of the foot, all we need to do is draw the outline here, here, here, here and like that, and that's your footprint. Your footprint actually is reflecting this architectural reality of the underlying structures. We will be going more into this in greater detail as we progress through this unit on the lower limb. So anyone can draw a foot. If I can draw it, you can draw it. Give it a try.

Module 5.3 Geek Out: The Foot


Amy: When we look at the bones of the foot in detail, we can divide the foot into two parts that are called the heel foot and the ankle foot, or the tibial foot and the fibular foot. I'm going to use heel foot and ankle foot because those are more familiar to me. On the slide here we have a picture of the bones of the foot with a view from above and with a view from below. Colored in on the slide in the pink color are the bones of the foot that are called the ankle foot. So, from above on the right foot and on the left foot, and from below, we see the heel foot in more tan and the—from below we see the heel foot in this tan color on the right foot and on the left foot, and then above it, the ankle foot, left and right. If we look at those bones in that model without the color coding, we can see that there's an organization to the heel foot from the heel bone here into this bone, called the cuboid, and the fourth and fifth toes. Now, a regular person's foot won't do this, but this model shows really nicely, if I pull it apart, how the outer two toes, the fourth and fifth toes, communicate with the cuboid and the heel, the calcaneus. The first three toes, the big toe, second toe, third toe, communicate with these three cuneiform bones with the navicular and what's called the talus.

So this organization into heel foot and ankle foot is a really useful way to start looking at how weight travels through the foot. The heel foot is the part of the foot that has the calcaneus in it. It’s why it's called the heel foot. The bone of the calcaneus has developed to receive the weight as we bring weight into our foot, as we step forward, or as we receive force from the earth. That weight then travels through the heel foot primarily, because the ankle foot is not, at its back part, in direct contact with the earth. Because the foot does not have four points of contact, as Leslie said, the three points of contact are because the bones of the foot, with their connective tissue ligaments, are organized into what's called an osteoligamentous spiral. What that means is that the back of the foot has one point of contact and is organized perpendicularly, and the front of the foot is organized parallel to the floor.

If I were to show this on the yoga mats, if we were to have four points of contact we might have something flat to the floor, like the yoga mat. Instead, the back of the foot has the talus bone right under the ankle, receiving—nope. The back of the foot has the talus underneath the tibia receiving the weight of the lower leg and transferring that weight to the calcaneus. In the front of the foot, then, the foot spreads, spirals, distributes the weight into the five toes, and then, from the push of the big toe, all of the toes, the inner part of the foot, we can send force back up into the body through the first three toes, the cuneiforms, the navicular, the talus and back up into the tibia. What this twist does is it gives us the arches of the foot.



If we take the twist out of the foot, then, we end up taking the arches out of the foot. Which is only a problem because it diminishes the resilience of the foot to have four points of contact instead of three. The height of the arch, though, is not the point. The height of the arch in the foot is not an indicator of the health of the foot. Instead, the spiraling pathway through heel foot and ankle foot is more important for the presence of the arches.

So if the foot is not very highly arched, if the foot is not very highly arched it can still have that spiral pathway. If, however, we consider the foot as having four points of contact in such a way that instead of having one point of contact in the back, we think we're supposed to get the talus or some inner corner down to the floor, we might end up flattening out that spiral. We might end up pouring the weight into both the inner and outer edge of the foot, and taking away the descending and ascending resilience that arises from having the spiral in the foot. So the bones of the foot are organized in this osteoligamentous spiral.

Supporting that, we have layers and layers of muscle, which we can see in this drawing.


We have here the deepest layer of muscles that go from the long bones here of the foot into the toes. On top of those muscles are these muscles, also intrinsic to the foot. Which means they begin and end in the foot. Intrinsic muscles begin and end in a body part. Extrinsic muscles begin in one part and end in another. So these intrinsic muscles of the foot and these intrinsic muscles of the foot, and these and these intrinsic muscles of the foot all connect, organize, support, modulate, the relationships between the bones that help that spiral adapt, but stay present through all of the movements of walking. Ah-ah-ah—because as we look at all of these layers, which, in these drawings, are organized into four layers—you may also hear the muscles of the feet organized into three layers or five layers or two layers. The way we have looked at them is in four layers. When you look at how many different muscles there are, and in light of the idea of muscles all having conversations with each other, this huge number of muscles means we have a tremendous variety of ways that all of the little bones of the foot can move in relationship to each other.

So whether our foot has all three points of contact on the floor, has the front toes on the floor, but the heel lifted up, we still have the muscular support to maintain or to continue keeping that spiral pathway through the bones even though we might not keep the exact position of the bones or the height of the arch exactly the same. Could you go to the next drawing, please? Thank you. In this drawing of the side of the foot, we can see the arch of that spiral, the heel as a point of contact. This edge out here is the outer edge of the foot. We're looking through from the medial edge to the lateral edge, or through from the inner edge to the outer edge. So this would be the heel foot edge. This would be the tip of the big toe and the inner edge of the ankle foot. So we can see that the talus bone here does not touch the floor.

In the spiral of the foot, then, looking from underneath, we can see all of the layers of the foot, all of the layers of the muscles of the foot, with the most superficial layer of tissue, which is not muscle, but is connective tissue. It's called the plantar fascia, which just means it's the fascia on the bottom of the foot. Here in the side view is the plantar fascia as well, and the layer of fat that cushions the heel and the ball of the foot and the toes. Filling in this space created by the spiraling arch of the foot and the plantar fascia, filling in that space would be all of those layers of muscle that we saw in the previous drawings.

When the bones of the foot are not organized in relationship to each other in such a way that that spiral pathway exists, and when all of the layers of muscle that fill in this space are not active in shortening, lengthening and maintaining the relationship between the bones, then it might be that the two points of



attachment for that plantar fascia get pushed away from each other. So if the foot collapses in such a way that the spiral in the foot is not present, and the muscles of the foot here are not active enough to help keep the pathway through the bones clear, then these two end points can get pulled away from each other by the weight landing in the foot. At which point there may be an excessive amount of pull on that plantar fascia, which then leads to it throwing a temper tantrum, which has a fancy name, which is plantar fasciitis. So 'itis' means an irritation, or can be translated to be irritation. So plantar fasciitis is irritation in the plantar fascia. In most of the cases where it arises, it is because we have asked the plantar fascia to support the weight of the body in some way, or to take on the role that the spiral and the bones and the muscles could have been doing. The solution to plantar fasciitis, or one of the things that is often suggested, is to stretch it out. But, in fact, the challenge of it arises because it has been asked to get longer than it can support faster than it knows how to respond to. So clarifying the pathway of weight in the bones of the foot, activating the muscles of the foot enough to support the weight in the bones, can be long term more helpful for the plantar fascia than stretching it out further.

[Timestamp 00:27:44] Amy leads a group movement experience: Figure 8

So find a standing position. Find your heels. Shift your weight back and into one heel, and see if you can find that sense of your heel and your heel foot—the pathway from your heel to your little toe. Now, if you are accustomed to feeling a lot of weight in the inner edges of your feet, you might feel like you are way, way out. If you go so far on the outside of your heel that you feel like you are stretching the outside of your ankle too much, do less. The point is to go as far out as you possibly can, but to find the place where the weight lands in that heel foot. Having done that on one side, shift your weight forward towards your little toe and then across towards your big toe without dropping to your inner heel. From your big toe, then, shift back and across to the other heel. From that other heel, find your little toe and your big toe and then back and across to your other heel, making a kind of figure eight on the floor that is tracing the pathway through your heel foot and ankle foot through the three points of contact and traveling through the arches of your feet.

Module 5.4 Walking & Gait


Leslie: Continuing with our exploration of the lower extremity, we are going to try to put together some of the information you have received and examine it in the context of, well, what we do a lot of with our lower extremities. Walking and gait.

So you will recall that we talked about the basic structure of the foot as being a tripod, a three point contact structure. The lines connecting those points are the arches. So, basically, in terms of the physics of the foot, the points, which are located here in the center of the heel, the base of the big toe, the base of the little toe, are the places where the weight of your body is channeled downward towards the earth and the lines connecting those points are the arches, which are basically engineered to create a rebound, or a place where the upward force, what we call support, can be gathered from the earth up into the body. So when we complete the outline of the foot, as we did earlier, we get something that looks like this.

What I want to point out now in terms of gait is that when you are moving across a surface with your foot, there's a sequence of events that happens that basically takes this spiraled structure of the foot, stores



energy into it and then releases it in the process of walking. So if we are walking, not going particularly fast, okay, we are going to hit somewhere here in the heel region, okay? The faster we move, the further forward we tend to hit. Now, immediately upon landing on the floor, that impact of that downward weight force needs to be absorbed in what we call the heel foot. Okay? That division of the foot and that arch,


the lateral longitudinal arch, which would be this line here, is really about absorbing and dispersing that initial downward contact. So if we follow the path of the weight in the foot as it lands, or right after it lands—this all happens rather quickly, but you'll be able to feel it. It goes to the outer edge of the foot heading right towards that point. Then there's a transition of energy from the heel foot to the ankle foot, and that comes across this arch. This transverse, or sometimes called the metatarsal arch, across the front of the foot. It heads this way. Where is it headed? Well, the final phase, and I'm simplifying this, this can be broken down into a lot more phases if you want it to be. The final phase is, as it goes into what we call the push-off, it passes through the base of the big toe and heads that way. Now, this is a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional action. But the pay-off you get for allowing that weight to travel through the foot that way is that you have basically wound up a spring if you do that. What's the unwinding? Where does the energy get released from the spring? It gets released up into the body through this medial longitudinal arch. Now, as I said, this is two-dimensional. But you have to imagine this arrow pointing not towards the heel, pointing up along the vertical axis of the body. So this arrow, really, is pointing towards you, the viewer, here. So this is a completely Newtonian picture. The clearer we can get this pathway of weight traveling this way, and remember, this is pointing down into the earth, away from the viewer. The more this pathway spirals up and travels down, the more clearly the support of the earth can come up.

So I'd like you just to, without bumping into each other too much, just move around the room and see if you can pay attention to that pathway of weight. Do this at home as well, okay? If you have room. Okay. Now, how many of you are actually looking at your feet when you're doing this? Yes. Okay. That's a perfectly normal response to being asked to pay more attention to what your foot is doing. However, there is something that we have been referring to as proprioception, which is the ability to gather that information from your body's own movements that I'm going to ask you to tune into. Okay? Resist the temptation to reinforce it visually with your eyes. Good. Now, are you noticing that maybe one of your feet is a little smarter at doing this than the other? Yeah. Well, one of your hands will be smarter at doing stuff than the other too. That's quite normal as well. All right? So just go back to where you started and let me just add to this for you a little bit, okay?

This is one part of what I like to teach as a three-part method of understanding gait. You can teach these in any order. I just decided to start with the foot. The other is, the other two, actually. I'll teach them together. As you begin moving through space, notice if you can get it to happen with your center of gravity moving first. Most people, when they go to move forward in space, will simply shift the weight off of one leg, swing it forward, let it hit and pull themselves along. If you watch some people carefully as they walk, you might notice that their foot is actually traveling backwards a bit before it actually encounters the floor. Okay? That's not the most efficient way of storing and releasing this energy. In fact, it's a little jarring for the joints when you do that. So if you bring your center up and over your foot a little bit more, let it travel forward and let the leg almost catch up with you. We call that more of a falling step. Notice how you have to actually find your center of gravity in order to do that. For many people, that is quite an accomplishment. But that might change your experience. Can you combine that with that spiral in the foot?



And the third part, where is that leg swinging from? You can experiment with that. See how it feels to swing your leg just from your hip joint. Imagine swinging it from the pelvic half, where it would be articulating at the sacroiliac joints. And my personal favorite, swing it from your psoas crotch up here. I will talk about that a little later. But imagine that your leg actually comes all the way up and your crotch is way up here.

Having choices in how we move is very, very important. I have somewhat funky knees. Occasionally they will bug me when I'm walking around. Come back to your mats. See, that was perfect. I caught you at just the right moment. Almost. Sometimes my knees are bugging me when I walk around. You know what I do? I change the timing of these three points just by a fraction of an inch. It creates a little bit more balanced joint space in that moment for those motions. So knowing all these components of gait and movement allows you to have more choices when you need to adapt, or when you need to uncover a pattern you may have that's causing you trouble. Right?

So those are the three components. The foot spiral, moving from your center and moving the center first, and then playing with where you're swinging your legs from. You can also play with the timing of how long you spend here or here or here. That can give you all sorts of different effects. So, it's something to play with once you understand the components of gait and walking. Thank you.

Module 5.5 Feet: What Might Your Students Say?


Leslie: Let’s talk about some of the things that happen in feet that people complain about.

Amy: Ah, that people complain about. Besides just generally aching dogs.

Leslie: Yeah. Well, you mentioned earlier the plantar fascia as being a kind of going into a resentful state. It's sort of like when you're at work and you end up doing other people's job for them. You get inflamed and resentful.

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: It's like when the plantar fascia starts having to do the job that the musculature should be doing, it gets resentful and inflamed. We call that plantar fasciitis. But that actually can progress to another level of problem that happens right around here. Right. That's when the tugging at this attachment becomes so intense it actually starts to pull the attachment point away from the bone, and then the body sort of back-fills it with calcium. It will actually show up on an x-ray. That, of course, is what we would call a heel spur. But it's sort of the end product of plantar fasciitis.

Amy: Right, though people can have pain from heel spurs without having had plantar fasciitis.

Leslie: It just shows up as the heel pain, yeah.

Amy: Because—we’re in that pain question, again, about what people notice and what they don't. So people might not notice the plantar fascia pulling sensation temper tantrum, but they will feel the heel spur. Yeah.



Leslie: So that’s definitely—again, the long-term solution is to get those muscles in the foot doing their job so the plantar fascia doesn't have to.

Amy: To get the muscles in the foot to do their job and to get the bones knowing what their relationship is to each other, and I think also knowing the spiral through the bones, that the bones can bring their own consciousness to it as well.

Leslie: That goes back to the definition of what the muscles’ job is in relation to the bones. It's to put the bones in the position so they can do their job of channeling the weight-bearing forces in a healthy way.

Amy: Yes.

Leslie: Speaking of bones and weight bearing forces, tell us about—'cause your feet are kind of interesting.

Amy: Thank you, Leslie. That was very diplomatic. One of the things that we also like to talk about looking at foot issues, and my foot is able to demonstrate, is what happens in a bunion, which goes back to—rather than being a plantar fascia issue, though it may also go along with that. One way to explain what happens in it is the lack of clarity in the pathway of weight. So if I bring my foot to the floor and instead of finding my heel foot, I pour the weight into the inner part of my foot, can you see how the weight pours into this joint right here? I did this for many, many years. My mother did it too and my sister does it. I don't think my dad did it. But high heels exacerbate it, and for me, training as a dancer exacerbated it in looking for turnout. So a bunion is an expression of too much weight combined with a predisposition towards it. But too much weight pouring into that ankle foot. What's interesting about, I think, that kind of expression of what happens in the foot is to go back to that idea that it doesn't necessarily have to do with the height of the arch because I can lift my arch up here, but keep that bunion pattern. So because of whatever muscle, flexibility, blah, blah question I have in my foot, the arch can lift up,


but the pathway of weight can still be unclear. The toes, in fact, get even more distorted. So the height of the arch will not necessarily clarify the pathway of weight in the foot. But the pathway of the weight in the foot can help sort out some of these issues that arise.

Leslie: Now, is this the same thing as what usually ends up getting described as excessive pronation?

Amy: I don't know what they mean by excessive pronation.

Leslie: You hear that a lot, though.

Amy: Yeah. I know. But a lot of what I hear is people coming in to me saying, "I have been told I do this.” I'm, like, “Yeah." Supination and pronation, they are actions in the foot that happen as part of walking. They are part of our natural gait. So excessive pronation might be that being stuck in it and not having available the supination aspect of it.

Leslie: So excessive pronation could actually be deficient supination?

Amy: Yeah. Well, I think it's one of those things that’s about stuff being in balance.



Leslie: Yeah.

Amy: So we need supination in our foot. We need pronation in our foot. We need a clear pathway of weight. Having all supination and no pronation is no good. Having all pronation and no supination is no good. We need to be able to do the action when we need it, not do it when we don't need it, so that we can be responsive to whatever the terrain is offering.

Leslie: Yeah. it's sort of like inhaling and exhaling. It's not like one is good and the other is bad.

Amy: Right. Exactly.

Leslie: You kind of want to have the ability to do both freely when it's appropriate and whatever pattern is supporting what you're doing.

Amy: Exactly. It's all about being able to respond and to change to whatever comes up, right?

Leslie: So, for example, unlike you, who went directly from the heel to the big toe and had to work to bring this pathway in, some people might have the opposite problem where they go from the heel to here and they are leaving out their big toe.

Amy: Some people might have the opposite problem, yeah. I see that less often, except for as an overcompensation to having been told, "Lift your arch," that we get stuck in this pattern.

Leslie: Right.

Amy: But, yes, that can also happen.

Leslie: One last little thing. Some people have been taught that, to lift their little toes up like this when they are practicing is a good way to ground the foot and create the support through the arch. As a strategy, it seems to make a certain amount of sense. When you create this lifting energy on the top of their foot you are driving energy down into the bottom of the foot. So as a way of finding it, maybe.

Amy: Maybe. And when you lift the toes, you also end up—when you lift the toes, you end up pulling this taut. You pull it forward a little bit. So it might help lift the arch up. But lifting the toes comes from the muscles on the top of the foot. And it doesn't cultivate an understanding of what's going on on the bottom of the foot in a way that, when I let go of my toes, I will still be able to do the action.

Leslie: Right.

Amy: So.

Leslie: So there.

Amy: Yeah. Spiral your feet.

Leslie: Okay.

Module 5.6 Geek Out: The Knee




Amy: We're going to look next at the knee joint and some of the major structures in it. The knee joint is made up of three bones. The top of the tibia, the bottom of the femur and a third bone, the patella, which is embedded in the connective tissue at the front of the joint. So the patella is embedded in to the joint capsule and the connective tissue that connects the quadriceps to the tibia. When we look at the top of the tibia, it's a relatively flat surface. The depth of the socket doesn't match up very much with the roundness of the condyles at the end of the femur. So if you look at the bottom of the femur from the side, we can see that the condyles are very rounded. They don't actually match very closely to the top of the tibia. So we have an additional soft tissue structure that is attached to the top of the tibia that creates more of a socket for the condyles of the femur. This is called the meniscus. We can see part of the meniscus here, this wedge-shaped structure. We can also see part of it here. What the drawing doesn't quite show is the continuity of it as a ring all the way around. So if we look at the top of this model, you can see the lateral meniscus here and the medial meniscus here. So the lateral meniscus would be on this side of the tibia and the medial meniscus would be on this side of the tibia. The menisci together are attached to the top of the tibia. Unlike in the model, where it's a really separate piece of plastic that has been attached to the top of the bone, the meniscus arise from the same tissue that the tibia does. So they are not a separate thing that has been imported in, but they are an outgrowth, or a part of the top of the tibia, that is developed into these specialized structures.

When we look at the movement of the femur on the top of the tibia, then, we see that it is a combination of rolling and gliding. So if we only rolled the femur and did not glide, the femur would end up falling off the back of the top of the tibia. Or, if the knee were in flexion already and we were to roll but not glide, we would end up with this kind of organization between the bones. So instead we need to do, we do do, luckily, a combination of rolling and gliding for the condyles of the femur to roll and glide on top of the tibia. Or, if we were to do it the other direction, for the tibia to move around the femur. That rolling and gliding action is facilitated by the meniscus. So the meniscus, in their attachments, have very strong attachments close to the center of the top of the tibia, and the outer part of the meniscus is much more loosely attached so that, as the femur moves, the meniscus can shift forward and back in relationship to the movement of the femur. Either in flexion and extension, or in the rotation of the tibia underneath the femur. So those movements are flexion and extension. Or, if we do that movement moving the tibia, it would be flexion and extension. The rotation of the knee is then that the tibia and the femur can rotate separately from each other.

An important point to make here is that, if we are talking about rotating the knee but the two bones move the same direction, then that's not an articulation within the joint, but is a movement of the joint through space. If the knee moves in such a way that both bones do the same thing, that it's moving through space, then chances are good that the movement is happening, actually, in an articulation of the hip joint. Or, if not there, somewhere else higher up. But if we are looking at the movement at the knee that is possible, we have flexion, extension. We have medial rotation, describing the movement of the tibia, and lateral rotation and very, very little movement side to side. Inside of the knee joint, then, along with the meniscus, we have two ligaments between the meniscus and between the condyles of the femur that are called the cruciate ligaments. If we were to look at the knee joint from the side, one of them runs on an angle this way and one of them runs on an angle this way. They cross each other, which is why they are called cruciate ligaments. One of the jobs of the cruciate ligaments is to keep the femur and the tibia in relationship to each other so that as we roll and slide that ligament that might be connecting from the front of the tibia back to the femur keeps it from sliding back. The posterior cruciate ligament that connects



from the back of the tibia forward to the femur helps to keep the femur from sliding off the top of the tibial plateau.


So the cruciate ligaments support the knee joint in the side to side relationship with each other that goes forward and back, anterior to posterior or posterior to anterior. The meniscus support the knee joint in this horizontal plane on the top of the tibia, and we have two more ligaments that support the knee joint, then, on either side. These are called the collateral ligaments. They help resist too much movement in this plane of motion. So the movements that the knee can functionally do and needs to be able to do are flexion and extension, medial and lateral rotation, but only a little bit of this medial and lateral kind of deviation.

We often hear that rotation in the knee is a bad thing and is not supposed to happen. But, in fact, there's a little piece of rotation that's necessary to have in the knee. It's called a physiological lock. When we look at the condyles on the base of the femur, the medial condyle is angled out to the side and is a little bit longer than the lateral condyle. What that means, then, is that when the femur is rolling on top of the tibia, or when the tibia is excursioning on the femur, more movement needs to happen on the medial edge than on the lateral edge to keep a clear pathway of weight from femur to tibia and to keep the center of each condyle oriented over the top of the tibia. What that means, then, in terms of movement, is that when the knee extends, if I'm very precise about centering the condyles of the femur over the top of the tibia, at the end of extending the femur, a little extra rotation needs to happen through the media condyle of the femur. That extra rotation of the medial condyle of the femur to center both condyles of the femur over the top of the tibia is called the physiological lock. It's often described as being a lateral rotation of the knee, which would mean that the tibia rotates laterally. But it might show up as a rotation of the femur medially. Whether it's the femur moving or the tibia moving, that little bit of rotation, which is not huge, but is doable and necessary in the knee. It might be just this much rotation of the tibia under the femur, is part of a healthy rotation, a healthy spiral through the tissues of the knee that helps keep the femur in relationship to the tibia when the knee is extended, and then, to varying degrees, participates in the femur staying in relationship to the knee, whatever other position the knee is in.

Module 5.7 The Lotus Dilemma


Leslie: So having covered the structure of the knee and its movements and the idea that we have these labrum structures in the knee called the meniscus, I want to go into a little more detail on the movements of the meniscus and, in particular, this problem that I have come to call the Lotus Dilemma that afflicts certain people in our yoga teaching and practicing community. So, first of all, the movements of the meniscus. This is a graphic that we have created. Just to orient you, the top of the graphic represents the anterior front part of the knee. So if you were looking at this particular knee from this same angle, you would be looking into it this way, with the top being anterior, the back being posterior. This would be the lateral side and this would be the medial side. In general, just so you know, in most illustrations that show anatomy, if it's not specified otherwise, the body part you're looking at is going to be a right side body part. There's a strong preference for right sided things in anatomy books. As it happens, there's also a strong preference for right sided things in yoga practice, but we will get to that.



So just to orient you, again, this is the three-dimensional version of what we're seeing in two dimensions. This shaded area, which is below, three-dimensionally, in all of the drawings, is the tibial plateau. That's the top of the tibia, which is slightly dish shaped. But it's deepened into more of a socket by these structures here, the meniscus. So medial meniscus would be on the left side. The lateral meniscus would be on the right side. As Amy mentioned earlier, they are anchored very firmly in the center of the tibial plateau. We have actually represented that with little circles here just to drive that home. It's as if they were tacked down on pivoting attachments, okay. So these attachments don't go anywhere. But the cartilage can wander around and change its shape from that firm attachment point at the center of the knee, depending on what the femoral condyles are doing. So the job of the meniscus, really, is to follow the movements of the femoral condyles on the tibial plateau. So what does that mean in terms of the basic movements of the knee? We're gonna look at extension, we're gonna look at flexion and we're gonna look at both medial and lateral rotation.

So up here in the upper left we see where the cartilage goes, the meniscus goes, during extension. That's compared to a neutral position, which is here in the center, where it's neither being pushed forward, nor pulled back on the tibial plateau. So extension of the knee, straightening of the knee, moves the cartilage, the meniscus, towards the front of the knee. Both sides towards the front of the knee. Flexion does the opposite. It draws the meniscus towards the back of the knee. Now, as you might imagine, rotation is going to do one on one side and one on the other. So medial rotation describes the way that the tibia is going. If there were a foot at the end of this, the toe would be also moving medially toward the midline of the body, right? So medial rotation, which is being pictured here, and you can see three dimensionally—what does that do? It moves the medial condyle anteriorly and the lateral condyle posteriorly, and that, of course, is going to be reflected in the movements of the corresponding meniscus. Does that make sense so far? Well, then lateral rotation is going to be the opposite. Okay? It's going to be this. The medial meniscus moves to the back. The lateral meniscus moves to the front of the joint. So, to review, extension moves the cartilage to the front of the knee. Flexion moves it to the back of the knee. Medial rotation moves the medial meniscus forward, lateral meniscus backward. The opposite happens for lateral rotation.

This is where the Lotus Dilemma comes in. In my practice of therapeutic yoga education over many years of doing that, I began to see an interesting pattern emerge in people who showed up with knee injuries, injuries to the meniscus. There was a rash of them for awhile. It was mostly in the left knee. I was wondering, "What is it about the left knee in yoga practice that could be making so many of these cartilage injuries?” By the way, it was medial meniscus.

It was not the lateral one. It was the medial meniscus that was getting torn in people doing yoga, and most of the ones I saw were in the left knee. So, again, looking into what people are practicing and how they were practicing it. I think we've all heard this at one point or another about folding the legs into lotus or half lotus or whatever. It's much safer to bring your knee into full flexion first before you begin doing any kind of rotational movement.


The idea, of course, is to have that rotational movement coming from your hip joint, not from the knee. Because rotation of the knee is deemed dangerous. Well, in reality, the knee is able to rotate much more freely when it's in this half bent, half straight position. When it's fully straight it's got less rotational movement available to it, and when it's fully bent it has less rotational movement available. But when it's in between it's got a lot of rotational movement available to it. So the thing that we're told to avoid to make this safe is this, grabbing the foot and cranking like that. Why is that unsafe? Well, it's right there in



front of us, okay? It's right there in front of us. Flexion, the bending of the knee, is trying to pull the medial meniscus backwards. But the medial rotation is trying to pull the medial meniscus forwards. It places a contradictory mechanical strain on the medial meniscus to combine, simultaneously, flexion and medial rotation. So all you need to do to avoid it, really, is make sure the knee is fully flexed, it means the cartilage has been drawn to the back of the knee and there it will stay, where rotational force are minimized and you're trying to get this to come from here, not from here. Well, that's all well and good when you put your right leg into lotus. Remember when I said there's a strong preference for right handed things in yoga? Well, usually lotus is taught, do the right leg first. Then, how do you protect the left knee in the same way you protected the right knee? Okay? I've got it fully flexed here and it's up in position. Now, how do I—I’m kind of stiff. Maybe a more flexible person could do it. Actually, it doesn't matter how flexible you are. At a certain point this leg is going to have to come out of its full flexion just enough to clear this shin to bring it over here. It's at that moment, that moment, when it's not fully flexed, and you are pulling it in that you run the risk of tearing that medial meniscus. Now, you may be able to do this your entire life and never have a problem. In fact, most people do. Some people are flexible enough to do it without their hands. They just flop their legs into lotus. It's never even an issue that they would consider. But, for certain people at certain times, all it takes is just that one moment where the cartilage just doesn't want to respond to that contradictory demand by stretching in both directions at once, and it will tear by being stretched in both directions at once. So that, in short, is the Lotus Dilemma. How do we solve it? Well, I've solved it. Pretty easy solution. I don't do it and I really don't teach it. In my book, if you're flexible enough to do it easily then you probably don't really need to be doing it. It might be fun, but if you are too tight and you struggle with it, it's probably not worth the risk. I know Amy has her own take on this as well that she's going to share with you very shortly. So that's the Lotus Dilemma.

Module 5.8 Geek Out: Pelvic Halves


Amy: When we go to the next joint up from the knee joint, we come to the hip joint. The hip joint is where the femur articulates with the pelvic half. The pelvic half is one of the bones that makes up the pelvic basin, or the pelvic bowl. The pelvic bowl, or the pelvis in general, is made up of the two pelvic halves, which are also called innominate bones, and the sacrum. The pelvic halves articulate with each other through a disc at the front called the pubic disc or the pubic symphysis. They articulate in the back with the sacrum on either side. Each pelvic half has a socket in it, or a hollow, called the acetabulum. The acetabulum and the head of the femur articulate with each other to create the iliofemoral joint, or the hip joint. Like in the knee, we have an additional soft tissue structure to help the head of the femur stay in relationship with the acetabulum, which is called the labrum. Labrum means lip, and it is additional connective tissue that develops around the edge of the acetabulum to help cover and articulate with the head of the femur. Because the head of the femur is so rounded and the acetabulum, relatively speaking, is so deep, and with the addition of the labrum, is deeper, when the head of the femur and the acetabulum are in relationship to each other, we have a lot of choices about joint movement. Those joint movements are described as being in the sagittal plane or in the vertical plane or in the horizontal plane, but we really have an infinite number of combinations of those movements to do in the hip joint.

The hip joint is often described as being the very top of the leg, but in fact the top joint of the leg is where the pelvic halves meet the sacrum. The sacroiliac joints. When we look at the sacrum and the pelvis in



relationship to each other, when we open up that sacroiliac joint and separate the bones from each other, we can see, colored in on the sacrum here, is the articular surface where the sacrum and the pelvic half move in relationship to each other. On the pelvic half, we can see colored in here, where the sacrum articulates with the pelvic half. What I think is interesting about this, or one of the many things I think is interesting about this, is how far forward this articular surface is. If we look at it in the full model, that this is where that articular surface is, not in the back here. So many of us describe our sensation back here as being sensation in the SI joint where we might actually have a lot of sensation here. But where the joint is, is not here, but more accurately in the front.

So the pelvic half, which is made of three bones that fuse together, they come from the same tissue that the leg develops from. The sacrum comes from the tissue that becomes the spine. So when we look embryologically at where the leg develops and where the spine develops and where those two meet, the SI joint, the sacroiliac joint, is actually the top of the leg. The movements that we can do at this SI joint are called nutation and counter-nutation. It used to be said, I hear less and less, but I still hear sometimes that we are not supposed to move at our SI joints. That movement at the SI joints is bad or pathological, or should only happen in certain situations. In fact, the movement at the SI joint is also part of this need, part of the whole body relationship of having a little bit of movement at a lot of places. A little bit of movement at the SI joint on either side is part of how we don't ask too much of our spine and we don't ask too much of our hip joints. So when we look at what that movement of nutation is, the movement of nutation in the SI joint, which is the place where it happens, is the nodding of the sacrum forward. So when the top of the sacrum tips forward, like it's nodding, that's called nutation. If the top of the sacrum comes forward and the whole pelvis goes with it, that's not articulation at the SI joint. That would be a pelvic tilt, perhaps, and it might move the sacrum. But it is not articulating in the SI joint. So the movement of nutation is the top of the sacrum tipping forward


and the movement of counter-nutation is the top of the sacrum tipping back in relationship to the pelvic halves. Now, that doesn't have to happen because the sacrum moves. It might also be that we nutate and the pelvic halves change their position in relationship to the sacrum, or counter-nutate and the pelvic halves change their relationship to the sacrum. Either way, nutation and counter-nutation are movements at the SI joint and are expressing or participating in the conversation between movements at the hip joints and movements in the spine.

When we walk, then, if each pelvic half is considered part of the leg instead of part of the pelvis, then the movement of the pelvic halves around the sacrum will be one of one joint counter-nutating while the other joint nutates. For example, when I do that. Then, as soon as the other leg swings forward, we have nutated and counter-nutated in the opposite joints. So if I switch to the big skeleton here, which doesn't have quite as much movement in the SI joints, but has a little bit. When the right leg swings forward to walk, rather than it being that it's all movement at the hip joint, if we let the pelvic half be part of the leg, then less will be asked of our lumbosacral joints and lumbar joints, and we might ask less of our hip joints as well.

A little bit of movement in each SI joint won't necessarily be very apparent at the top, but the repercussions of it are significant in how the leg travels through space and bears weight, and in how the weight, and in how the force of the stride travels into the spine. So the top of the leg on a skeletal level, instead of being the hip joints, could be brought all the way up to where the lower limb meets the axis by coming all the way up to the sacroiliac joints.



Module 5.9 Your Legs are Longer Than You Know


Leslie: So in our ongoing inquiry as to where the top of the leg actually is, Amy chimed in with a wonderful embryological perspective. We both agree that the leg does not begin at the hip socket. From the embryological perspective, in terms of how these tissues evolve, you have to include the pelvic half with the leg. That would make the beginning of the leg up at the sacroiliac joint. I actually absolutely agree with that. And, in addition, I found it useful to keep going and to think, even higher up in the system if we trace the myofascial kinesthetic sensory motor experience we can all have when we're practicing. This actually coincides with some stories, some models, that have been told traditionally about the anatomy.

You may recall having seen this slide earlier in my basic introduction about anatomy as a story. It's from Albinus. What he calls the Fourth Order of Muscles. It's this pathway of deepest musculature that actually starts with some of the extrinsic muscles of the foot that support the arch. It comes up the back of the shin, the inner thigh muscles, and then joins with the psoas muscles, which actually find their apex right up here at the top of the lumbar spine at L1.

This dissection was done in the lab by Tom Myers, and this is an endosection. That's actually a still from a video he made of it, but here's a more artistic rendering of it that we have come up with. So what if we thought of the leg as starting—and including the psoas and starting where the psoas starts, right at the top of the lumbar spine? That would mean that your crotch is actually up here, deep inside, at the front surface of your spine. What would it feel like to stand and move and swing your leg from that psoas crotch? It's something to thing of when you're practicing, and in particular, when you're practicing with your breath. That's exactly the same place where your diaphragm arises from the front of your spine. In fact, there's an area of crossover between where the legs of the diaphragm come down and the top of your legs come up. It's interesting that that spinal part of the diaphragm is also called legs, the crura. Something to think about when you're breathing and moving.

Module 5.10 Lotus: Look Again


Amy: Okay. We're going to come back to the lotus question and add another take in. As Leslie said, I have another kind of question I engage with around it. While it's true that, when we come into lotus, a lot of stress can be put on the knees and we can avoid lotus altogether because of that stress. Perfectly great reason to avoid doing it. I also thing it's an interesting question to look at what we think the pose is about, and this is a question that ends up coming up over and over. But particularly in the poses where people injure themselves, we sometimes start to avoid the pose because we think the pose is bad. We need to look at what it is we bring to it and what we're assuming about that pose that might lead us to hurt ourselves.

In lotus, I think one of the things that can happen is, if we focus altogether on the action of lotus happening at the hip joint and at the knee joint, and if we don't want to hurt the knee, then, like Leslie



said, we have to mobilize our hips, but that we actually have to go even further and have a conversation in it between our feet, our knees, our hips, our SI joints and our spine, and know that all of those are talking to each other. So that not everybody will be able to do a huge amount of movement in their hip joint. But if they can't do it in their hip joint, they may be able to find it in their SI joint or they may be able to not put pressure in their knee because the movement can travel through the bones of the foreleg to the ankle in some way. So to assume that any asana is impossible because one joint is limited really implies that we're assuming that an asana is about just one joint.

Now, it doesn't mean that everybody will automatically be able to do lotus. I do think that any pose we want to set out to do we can find a way into, though it might mean more of an inquiry about the spirit of the pose than the fullest expression, or it looking picture perfect. But I also think that, if we are interested in doing lotus and we approach it as a whole body experience and question our assumptions about what it's about, more things become possible. In questioning those assumptions, there's also some paradoxical things that sometimes happen in our joints where we might think that we need to rotate, like, the foreleg this way. When I pull on my foot, it certainly does medial rotation in the foreleg. But what if I came into it and did lateral rotation of the foreleg and tried a whole different idea, or tried a whole different inquiry in the hip joint? Because when we start to define the movements in the joint—not when we start to define them. When we start to move as if our choices are only what we have named in a joint, then we are limiting our choices a little too much. Like in the hip joint, I was saying it's a very rounded ball. It's a very rounded socket. We describe the movements of the hip joint as flexion, extension, abduction, adduction and rotation. But we don't have a word for a little bit of flexion and rotation and abduction and then scooping it this way. So we have all these choices available. So there are ways in to experiences that might be outside of how we name things.

If we use the name as a starting point for the question, rather than an ending as an answer, we might find more choices about how to get into things. Then, if we also allow for, or entertain the idea that, movement happens not only in our joints, but in the spaces between our joints. That our bones have a fluid aspect to them. That more than our joints are available to this movement question. Even though it seems like, when I do this movement, where else could I move?


How could my femur possibly change its shape in the two minutes of asking a question about doing this? It is amazing to see how often, if I think that my femur itself could adapt to some kind of spiral pattern, that all of my other kind of holding patterns in the tissue might change. So what we learn about being possible in anatomy is useful in the sense that it gives us ways to measure things, and it's certainly useful to keep us in a conversation about what feels safe and available. I am not suggesting we should just push through what doesn't feel comfortable. But to stop because one joint can't do a movement takes away from the wholeness of what an asana could be about. I think that lotus is a really interesting place to look at that. Because it gets characterized often as a hip or knee kind of thing when it actually involves the whole body. If I change what I do in my head, it will have an effect on how my knees feel or my hips feel or my little toe feels. So there are more and more questions about every asana when we let more things be possible.

Module 5.11 Building an Asana: BOS - COG - ROM




Leslie: Now, in spite of appearances, this lesson, which I call BOS-COG-ROM, is not another Sanskrit terminology lesson, even though it sounds like some sort of powerful mantra. In fact, it could be a mantra if I remember what it means. But BOS-COG-ROM actually stands for, let me just write it out, okay? It's abbreviations. Base of support, center of gravity, range of motion. Now, these are important when considering how we create a foundation for our practice, how we relate ourselves to that foundation and how we move from that relationship between our base of support and our center of gravity into a range of motion. The order is kind of important too. Because if we start going for too much range of motion before we even know where our center is or how that center may be relating to our base of support, we could be moving in a somewhat ungrounded way into ranges of motion that we can't actually support adequately.

So base of support and center of gravity have to do with how we create stability. I brought a few examples here just to illustrate this. I have a collection of glassware that I like to pull out to illustrate this principle. So the size of a base of support of something, to some extent, determines it stability. Usually we think the bigger the base of support the more stable the object is. In standing, the base of support of the body, of course, would be the feet. We know that with the feet close together, smaller base of support, feels a little less stable than with the feet further apart. Right? But there's a point of diminishing returns. If that's more stable, is this more stable? Is this more stable? Is this more stable? So it's not always the bigger the base of support the more stable you are, and different people will experience their stability in different ways depending on other factors. What are the other factors? Well, how about center of gravity relating to the base of support? See, here we have two glasses that have pretty much the same sized base of support. In fact, this one, the stemware is a little bigger. Yet, which one is more stable? See, if I push really hard on that I can't get it to not go over. If I just touch this a little bit, whoops. There it goes. If you have ever dined out with children you know if you ask for water for the child, which one do you want the water in? Right? So the relationship of the center of gravity of the object to its base of support has a lot to do with the stability. Now here we have a smaller base of support than this. Okay? You might think that this is more stable, but, again, it's not. This has a lot of weight concentrated very close to the base of support. Right? The most stable things are things like this toy here I have created. Here the center of gravity is below the base of support. Well, you can tip over Astro Boy. Okay. He's doing an inversion. That's fine. But you know these kinds of toys. They are very stable. You can't knock them over, right?

So why don't we just stand up, just for a minute, and move back to your mats. We're just going to explore this idea in a very, very simple way. Okay? So the range of motion we're going to explore is this simple movement of lifting and lowering with the arms and the spine and the breath, right? I would like you to try it with a couple of different base of supports. Feet close together and touching, okay? (inhales) All right? (exhales) Good. Now open your feet to about pelvis width apart and try it again. (inhales) Good.(exhales) Does anyone feel more stable here or less stable? Maybe a little more? Did anyone feel more stable here? Here you can actually press your legs and your feet together? No? Okay. How about here? Now notice here, not only is your base of support bigger, but your center of gravity is getting lower. Right? But at what point do you actually widen so much that you have lost your stability again? Right? These are just interesting things to think about. Does anyone want to try this? Go ahead. Oh, some of you are good. Oh yeah? Okay. Now do it with your eyes closed. Just something to think about and play with. We will be coming back to this quite a bit when we start exploring asana and adapting asana based on these principles. This is just an introduction to the ideas. Okay.



Module 5.12 The Big Questions: “Do You Know What You’re Doing?”


Leslie: Okay. So we’ve been talking a lot about the pelvis and its articulations and its possibilities, and joints and all of that. So it occurs to me that we should probably talk a little bit about some of the language that we hear a lot of in asana instruction that centers around what the pelvis is doing. So let's start with one of my favorites. Can you show me what hip opening is?

Amy: Yeah. No, I can't. Put it away.

Leslie: Really?

Amy: No, but I can talk about it.

Leslie: Oh. Okay.

Amy: I'm going to hold on to this pelvis because it's more manageable. Hip opening is one of those terms that, anatomically, doesn't mean very much, or means so many things that it's kind of meaningless out of context. So it's kind of a teaching point, too, that some of these things we say that we assume we all understand the same thing about them, but we might not. Certainly, there's no anatomical meaning to the phrase, hip opening. There are a couple of things it might mean. This is one of those things I heard and went, "Well, what does this mean? I'm going to go be an anatomical geek and figure it out.” I thought, "Well, does it mean opening like this?” Do I want to pull the femur out of the socket? Well, we talked about making more space in a joint by moving the bones apart from each other doesn't make for more range of motion, and particularly in the hip joint, moving the head of the femur out of the socket makes it actually less able to move easily and with balanced joint space than having it seated in the socket. So I don't think that's what we mean by hip opening. A lot of people call hip openers things that do this kind of movement in the legs.


What's interesting about that, then, is that we're paying more attention to one aspect of the movement than to another. Because if we look at this, the knee end of the femur is certainly going out. There's certainly some kind of opening in the front. But unless I have pulled my leg out of the socket, when I take the knees apart, something is coming together in the back of the socket. So hip opening, unless we're like a book, which we're not, because we're not two-dimensional, we're not hinges, because we're three-dimensional, when, from the other side, if we look at the back of the hip joint, when I take that knee out to the side the back of the hip joint actually closes right in there.

Leslie: These are getting together.

Amy: Those are getting closer together. So, hip opening. What does that mean? Because any movement, so the end of that—the end of my little piece,

Leslie: I think it's a description of a sensation, mostly.

Amy: I think it's a description of a sensation.

Leslie: Not a joint action.



Amy: And we know we don't all have the same sensations in any place. Because—and this is the last thing I want to say about hip opening—any joint when I move it, because we are three-dimensional, whether it's a joint in an organ or in a bone, when one part opens the other part closes. Something is closing when something is opening, unless we are completely dislocating the joint. Then it's a question of where we want to put our attention. It's the question in hip opening. Do I want to put my attention on the sense of opening in the front? Because I have some emotional or psychological or social association with being open, that's a different question. It's not an anatomical question. Then that's some intention about what the shape of the pose might feel like or convey, and the idea of being open and available, or having an open heart or having an open mind, those are all not anatomical events. Whether particular position translates into that psycho emotional social interactional experience depends on a person's context, dada, dada, dada, dada.

Leslie: I think also opening in that context, in that spirit, may just mean freeing.

Amy: Yes.

Leslie: Which is a very different way to say it, I think. I would prefer that language if that's what we really mean. We're going to do some hip freeing practice now.

Amy: Then, in that case, wouldn't we want to free it in this range and in this range and in this range?

Leslie: Yeah. Free is a three-dimensional freedom. Yes.

Amy: Like we want to free it in any—yeah. Multi...

Leslie: Multi-dimensional freedom. We are in favor of that.

Amy: We are.

Leslie: Okay.

Amy: So how about this one, Leslie? Would you like to say anything about the instruction to point both of your hip bones forward like headlights?

Leslie: That gets said?

Amy: Yes.

Leslie: I know it gets said. I'm just being a jerk. Okay.

Amy: Leslie, would you like to say anything?

Leslie: Can I handle your pelvis, please? Thank you.

Amy: Please.

Leslie: All right. So the idea is, I think, that—let’s say you're stepping into warrior stance, right?

Amy: Any asymmetrical stance.

Leslie: Any asymmetrical stance. But, for the sake of argument, we'll do warrior. As soon as you offset your feet—see, it's not an issue when you're here, right? Necessarily. You don't get a correction to point



your headlights down the road when you're here because your feet are pretty much in the same plane, more or less. I mean, everyone’s a little asymmetrical. But, for the sake of argument, let's say it's not really a correction you get when you're here. But as soon as you step here, all of a sudden your pelvis is, well, it's maybe not fully in warrior one. It's certainly not in warrior two. Let's just say it's just in warrior 1.5 or something, right? So the idea is, if you imagine these beams of light shining straight out of your ASIS bones, your anterior, superior iliac spine, the idea, let’s just say my thumbs represent those beams, is to turn so that those beams are pointing straight down the road like the headlamps of a car. Well, if you hang out around Amy long enough you’re going to hear that your pelvis is not just one thing. It's comprised of all of these joints and possible movements between the iliac bones and the sacrum. You've even got a another bone down here that's a whole other deal. But when you take that step, you are stepping not just from the hip joint. You are stepping with the whole leg, which includes the pelvic half, which includes the iliac bone. So you've got this ASIS actually, okay, what’s it doing? Well, as you step forward, doesn't that come this way? When this back leg goes back, doesn't its pelvic half follow it as well? So this pelvic half has actually done this movement, which we call nutation of the right sacroiliac joint. The back leg has done what we call counter nutation of the left sacroiliac joint, if your right leg is forward. Basically, if my thumb stayed there and actually followed what the pelvic halves were doing, I've got a high beam and a low beam. So the idea of them being parallel to each other and pointing parallel down the road—well, let's just say the idea of them being parallel to each other disappears when you take into account that your pelvic halves are moving with your legs. What I'm going to ask you to talk about next is the corollary to that, which is squaring your hips to the front. Because the headlights instruction is part of the bigger conversation about squaring your hips. Take it away, Amy.

Amy: So one of the things that I think is challenging about the instruction to square the hips or to shine the headlights forward, which you so nicely demonstrate—love the thumbs—is that that idea seems to consider that the whole pelvis is one unit. It takes out of play these two joints, the two SI joints, and then the related movement that happens at the pubic joints. And in the paradigm, in the picture we have been painting of the body working most efficiently and easily and with the most kind of grace when there's a little bit of movement in a lot of places. What happens when we stop a place from moving is that the movement that would have happened there goes somewhere else. The thing that happens then in the pelvis, if we treat the pelvis as a unit and we don't allow these SI joints to move, is that we ask more of what's on either side of those SI joints. Next, in towards the midline from the SI joints is the joint between the fifth lumbar vertebra and the sacrum, which is certainly an area where people have lots of issues. Next, out from the SI joint, is the hip joints. Then the next thing down from the hip joints? Knees. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, right? So when we take the pelvis as a unit, we don't allow for movement in the SI joints, which directs more movement into other places, which might or might not be useful. It's also true that when I look at bodies in this way, once I look at this and started looking at the complex of this relationship of hip joint, SI joints and lumbosacral juncture, those three joints in relationship to each other, instead of focusing on just one joint, then I saw that some people I see have lots of movement in their SI joints and not so much movement in their hip joints and a medium amount of movement in the lumbosacral juncture. Some people have lots of movement in the lumbosacral juncture and a medium amount in the SI joints and the least movement in the hip joints. However, that it keeps balancing out. It's possible to, in a completely functional way, have, say,

100% of movement distributed differently between these three. What's important is not the measurable amount of movement, but that the movements are all in relationship to each other. So what I see happen a lot is that when this isn't allowed to move in that squaring the pelvis paradigm, we can ask too much of the hip joints or I see and hear and feel it happen in the knee joints. That the knees are asked too much.



That we put more twist in the knees and that things get loaded up in a way that we, particularly in the warrior one that you were doing in the back knee, that there's this huge amount of twist through the back knee to get the back edge of the foot down, but to get the hip bone facing forward.


Leslie: And a lot of the accompanying alignment corrections are countermeasures to that.

Amy: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. When we get caught in looking at doing separate instructions without feeling the underlying relationship between them, we can run into not acknowledging the different proportions of movement that people have in their bodies. We go looking for it all in one joint, which we talked about before, then we are really set up for some people being really good at something and other people being not good at something. When instead, I think the question is, how can each person find their way into it? These hip questions, SI questions, knee questions, I think they all feed into that. The other place that ends up showing up is asking too much of the hip joints and the whole tail, sit bone back kind of thing. Do you want to say anything about that? Hamstring attachment question?

Leslie: Sure. Just to go back just for a 'sec to the language of square...

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: ...You may or may not ever be able to tune in exactly to precisely what your SI joints are doing or not doing. I don't think that's the issue. But sometimes it's just a matter of using language and imagery in such a way that your body's natural, inherent desire to distribute movement in a healthy way can kick in. But if you use language that goes very much against the way your body is put together, if you start imagining movement happening in straight lines, parallel lines, square shapes, it is exacerbated by the fact that we practice on rectangles in squarish rooms, right? There are no straight lines in the body. There are no right angles in the body. There are no edges in the body. It's all spirals.

Amy: We aren't machines.

Leslie: We aren't machines and gears and pulleys.

Amy: We don't hinge. We weren't engineered. Yeah, exactly.

Leslie: Yeah. I think it's just also a language thing, if nothing else.

Amy: Definitely.

Leslie: That can take us further away from the organic reality of what's really going on. I have seen some of the consequences of this in people's bodies. I do some injury type work. You talked a little bit about standing, but let's talk about what happens when you're sitting on the floor for long periods of time and using not your feet and all the bones between your foot and your spine to create a pathway of support, but sitting right on these guys here, the sitting bones. Right? And maybe your tailbone, right? It has to do with how the next joint up from the weight-bearing surface is going to be asked to take a lot of that weight. I have seen people actually destabilize their SI joints a bit with too much sitting and floor oriented practice and not enough standing. Not so much now, but years ago, when that was the predominant way of practicing. Not so many standing postures. This showed up as people showing up with pain down the back of their leg. They said, "I have sciatica.” When we looked into it a little more deeply, it turned out not to be sciatica. It wasn't the sciatic nerve, even though the pain went down the back of the leg. It was



yoga butt. I think I was the first one to start using that to describe something other than tight pants that made your butt look good.

Amy: I think you did yoga butt before yoga butt pants came out.

Leslie: Long before.

Amy: Long before.

Leslie: Everyone wore pants like this. There were no mats. There were rugs and towels. That was what you practiced on. But, it actually, it was a pathway of inflammation that came from this thick connective tissue that holds this joint together, which got inflamed across the sacrotuberous ligament down into the hamstrings. So it was a soft tissue pathway of inflammation that was mimicking nerve pain, and that was the original diagnosis of yoga butt. Yeah. Do we have time for just one last question that I would like to ask you?

Amy: Okay.

Leslie: A lot of people get the impression that when you are practicing, in order not to put strain into your lower back, you should be tucking your tail.

Amy: You should be tucking your tail? Hmm. Hmm.

Leslie: Now, from the standpoint of what we are learning about the pelvis and all of these possible movements of the pelvis in space and of the spaces within the pelvis, what does tucking your tail actually mean?

Amy: I don't know. We start with hip openers and finish with tucking the tail. I have no idea what tucking the tail means because it's not an anatomical term. It shows up as being a couple of different things. The tail is actually able to articulate separately from the sacrum. So tucking the tail might mean doing this.

Leslie: And there are muscles that do that.

Amy: And there are muscles that do that.

Leslie: Try it right there, right where you're sitting.

Amy: Tucking the tail might mean doing this. I think that what a lot of people are looking for is tucking the tail to do this, to take some kind of hyperextension out. So the instruction to tuck the tail might be to actually undo an over-articulation of the lumbar spine or to tilt the pelvis back, in which case it might be more effective to say, "Tilt the pelvis back."

Leslie: Or flatten your lumbar curve.

Amy: Or undo what you're doing in your lumbar curve. So tucking your tail can mean, well, it can mean whatever it means, because it doesn't have an anatomical definition. But it can be mean articulating at the sacrococcygeal joint, wiggling the tail here. It could mean moving the tail, which then would move the sacrum and create this movement of nutation and counter-nutation.

Leslie: So the tucking action would actually be counter-nutation.



Amy: Would actually be counter nutation.

Leslie: Yeah.

Amy: It could actually translate all the way through into the SI joints and through those, and tucking the tail might pull the sit bones along for a ride, which, from the side, would then create this movement. Or tucking the tail could travel up the spine and change the curves of the spine in some way. But it's not actually very specific. For as specific as the tail is, tucking the tail is not actually a very specific term. We run into in that, also, I think, an assumption or a lack of discrimination between what the tail bone is and what the sit bones are. The tail bone is the lowest part of the spine of our axial structure, where the sit bones are part of the pelvic half, which are the top of the leg. So if we ask a question about the role of the tail or the part of the skeleton that the tail participates in, we could look at the tail bone, the coccyx, as an axial structure, and we could look at the sit bones as part of our appendicular structure, our lower legs. That might change our experience. But the whole question, what does tucking the tail mean? What does opening the hips mean? Why do we square our hips? Why did that even come up I think has to do with another question about what are we expecting to get out of our asana practice? Which you addressed before. Why are we doing yoga? But I think also the assumption that we all have common language or that we all know what something means, like hip opener or tail tucking, or that we’ll all have the same experience. I think if we really examine those assumptions, it's worth it to say, "Do I know what I'm doing? Do I know why I'm doing it? Do I know what I want to be doing?” Then, once I know what I'm doing, once I know what I want to be doing, can I change it? Can I make a different choice? That first question, do I know what I'm doing, that can be the hardest question. Which we already talked about, right, with proprioception. We might not have any idea what I'm doing. So, do I know what I'm doing? Am I doing what I want to be doing? If I don't want to be doing what I'm doing, why am I still doing it? Then, can I make a different choice? Is a great way to approach asana and these things we get told.

Leslie: And we will be seeing this play out in a practical sense as we apply it to the asana in the later portions of the course.

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: Fun! Thanks.

Amy: Thanks.

Module 5.13 What is Alignment?


Amy: So there are lots of different instructions in the world out there in yoga classes about how to be aligned, or what to do to find alignment. One of the things that I really like about the idea of the pathway of weight is that it lets us focus more on relationship than on the absolute position of things so that, within whatever instruction we're getting, that we might look at from the outside or we might look at in terms of spatial positions of things, we can also look for this internal experience of the relationship between the bones and the ligaments and the joints in our body. So what I mean by pathway of weight is something that happens in the skeletal system where, because of how the synovial joints work and because of how the bones work, and the role that the bones play in our body of transmitting weight and transmitting force,



and because of all the choices we have about finding balanced joint space, we’re able to have the bones in a variety of positions in relationship to each other and still have a clear transfer of weight or force traveling through the skeletal system. So the pathway of weight is a series of relationships, not a position, which then would mean in a lot of different positions we could still find that pathway of weight.

So in the spine we talked a little bit about, at various moments, both Leslie and I, the weight traveling through the bodies of the vertebra. In the lower limbs the pathway of weight gets more complex. If we come from the sacrum, which receives the weight of the spine, the weight then transfers out into the pelvic halves as the top of the leg in the skeletal system, if not in the muscular system. So at the SI joint, at the sacroiliac joint, we have this transfer of weight from the sacrum into each pelvic half. Through the pelvic halves, the weight travels either, if we are sitting, to the sit bones, or, if we are standing, through the acetabulum to the head of the femur. One of the things—it’s a little hard sometimes to see in a hanging skeleton, but in the femur we do see the angle of the heads of the femur actually pointing in towards the sacrum. So there's a way that, when we look at this, we can see this expression of how the weight would come into the bones. So we go sacrum through the pelvic half to the acetabulum and the femur, and then through the femur, through the knee joint, the weight then transfers into the tibia. From the tibia, the weight travels to the talus, and then from the talus into the calcaneus and the heel foot and across to the ankle foot. If we look at the pathway of force coming back up through the bones, we push off from the ankle foot and come up from the talus into the tibia, into the femur, into the pelvic half and up into the spine.

It's a fairly simple list of bones. But the inquiry becomes, when we are looking at that, the inquiry becomes about how we sense the relationships between the bones rather than how much muscle activity we feel in any single spot or in any particular area we might call a muscle. Because not everybody will have the same sensation in their muscles when the bones are clearly transferring weight. Some people might feel the sensation of effort. Some people might feel the sensation of stretch. Muscle sensation varies hugely from person to person. So using the sensation of muscle to tell us if we are aligned can be deceptive. Because not only does muscle sensation vary person to person, but it varies in the same person moment to moment. It's not only—and—it’s not only sensation that varies, but actually what muscles we use. So when they do tests on people and they have them lift their arm 10 times to see what muscles in their shoulders and ribs and neck and arms they are using, 10 different people will use 10 different assortments of muscle. But the same person over those 10 times will use different combinations of their own muscles. So we don't always use the same muscles. We don't always feel the same muscles. We won't always have the same sensation in our muscles.

But we can ask another question along with the question about what do we sense in our muscles. We can ask a question about how we feel the weight traveling. The other piece of looking, or another piece of looking, for a clear pathway of weight is that if the bones change their relationship to each other, because of all the capabilities for balanced joint space in a variety of positions that we have, we can still look for a clear pathway of weight through something that isn't quote unquote “straight," because none of our bones are actually straight. So the spatial relationship of the bones may or may not correlate to there being a clear pathway of weight. Certainly an instruction like having your knee over your ankle gives you something to look for from the outside as a guideline. But it is not necessarily true in every situation that if your knee is not over your ankle, there is not a clear pathway of weight. I'm going to say that again because it was a lot of nots. It is not necessarily true that if your knee is not over your ankle, that there is not a clear pathway of weight. To say the positive side of that, your knee can be outside of your ankle or inside of your ankle and you can still have a clear pathway of weight.



If it helps, or if it is appropriate in the style of yoga or the approach to yoga that you are learning, if it's part of the shape of the asana to have your knee over your ankle, that's great. There's nothing wrong with doing that. But we have more choices available in terms of what's safe or potentially appropriate than just the few positions that we sometimes hear. What we decide to cultivate as a question is an entirely different thing than what might be right or correct within a style. So we have this choice, then, to get inside of a style and do what they name as the principles or the points or the correct way to do the poses. But we can also, and in any class I go to, I go take lots of different classes. I’ll go one day to Bikram and I'll go another day to an Iyengar class. They teach the same pose wildly different ways, and then within they ask me to do, I ask this question, “Can I feel how my weight is traveling through my bones and my joints?” In the lower limbs, it is a question of, can I feel how the weight of my spine comes into my sacrum, into my pelvic halves and gets down to my heel foot and the rebound from the earth then comes back up into my spine. If I can feel that pathway, I have some information about what my own experience is aside from what I might hear from my muscles.

Unit 5 In Review


Amy: We began this unit with a movement exploration about the difference between axial and appendicular, and beginning to bring our attention into the lower legs. Then I spoke a little bit about why we start at the feet.

Leslie: I then introduced a definition of the feet as the body part that has evolved to have a relationship with the earth, and I spoke a little bit about how the earth has changed so much for us as humans over the years that we all need to get a little more off road action in our feet. I also introduced the basic architecture of the foot as being a tripod.

Amy: I then talked about the heel foot and the ankle foot as a way to organize our understanding of the bones of the foot. The osteoligamentus spiral of the foot that facilitates the pathway of weight down into the floor and the rebound from the earth, and the layers of the muscles of the foot in the plantar fascia at the very bottom of the foot, and spoke a little bit about plantar fasciitis and how that arises.

Leslie: We then took all this information into an exploration about how the foot moves across the surface in walking. A little bit of gait analysis and how to really feel that spiraling action of the foot as we carry it across the floor in walking.

Amy: Then we talked about issues that arise in the feet, like problems in the arches, heel spurs, bunions and ways to deal with instructions that we hear about what to do with the toes and the feet. We took a look at the structures of the knee, both the bones and the soft tissue support, and the movements that are available to the knee, including the psychological lock rotation.


Leslie: I then took that into a yogic specific discussion about particular movements that occur in the cartilage structures of the knee that may be problematic, and I call that the Lotus Dilemma.



Amy: I spoke about lotus as a full body question, rather than focusing on the knee. Then we talked about the hip joint, the pelvic halves and the sacroiliac joint, and what happens at the very top of the leg and where the top of the leg is.

Leslie: I gave an alternate view, then, of where the top of the leg is from a more soft tissue, connective tissue, psoas perspective. I took that right into a discussion about base of support, range of motion and how to develop a center of gravity in relation to those in asana instruction. I then developed an alternative view of where the top of the leg might actually be from a myofascial perspective that involves the psoas and its relationship to the diaphragm and that deep core musculature. We took that into a discussion of how to develop this model of base of support, center of gravity and range of motion when constructing asana or asana sequencing.

Amy: We talked about questions in the pelvis around how to treat the pelvis, either as a block or letting it articulate, which turned into questions, also, about what is it that we're trying to do when we're doing asana? In the question of looking at what are we doing in asana, we also come up with a question of, what is alignment? And introduce the idea of pathways of weight as a way to organize rather than a single alignment cues.


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