Psoas Muscle, iStock Getty Images
When I first learned about the psoas muscle, I was in the early years of my yoga practice and trying to gain a basic understanding of anatomy. At the time, the only muscles I knew by name and action were my quads, hamstrings, and biceps. When a yoga teacher mentioned the psoas and indicated that it was a deep muscle that connected the upper and lower body, my eyes widened.
I had just purchased a book on anatomy and readily found a picture and description of the psoas. I read that the psoas was a hip flexor and operated like a pulley, drawing the thigh upward toward the chest.
But then I pretty much forgot about the psoas. Perhaps this is because the muscle sits behind the organs and can’t be felt directly, the way the quads and hamstrings, for example, can be. And my yoga teachers rarely gave instructions that named the psoas explicitly, even if we were relying on it to do various poses.
But I recently had the good fortune to take a five-class program on the psoas and piriformis muscles as part of an ongoing yoga program I participate in (https://www.yogaheartsong.com/the-sanctuary).
The Salmon Psoas
A basic “psoas release” exercise we did in class was to stand with one leg on a block while swinging the other leg forward and back (with the hand on the swinging-leg side lightly touching a wall for support).
When I let myself feel the smooth glide of my swinging leg and visualized my psoas helping to animate this action, what struck me was that the image of the psoas as a pulley, the image that I had found in a book, seemed off, not well matched with my experience. Nor did I feel in any direct way that the main contribution of my psoas in the swinging motion was to flex my hip, as my anatomy book suggested was a primary function of the muscle.
Instead, the image that came to me was that of a wild salmon swimming from its inner home in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest, where I live, out into the Pacific and then naturally reversing course to travel seamlessly back to its birthplace. The water element of the sacral chakra seemed to flow alongside my psoas as the muscle lengthened with the arc of the swing. What propelled my leg forward, for example, appeared less like a mechanical, pulley-like contraction and more like the salmon's organic swimming as it let the current take it out to the sea.
Full-body Walking
The next morning, I decided to try out what I had experienced in my yoga class as I went on my regular walk in my neighborhood. The first thing I noticed was that the forward and backward swing of my legs seemed to flow from where the psoas originated in my spine, the point where my mid (thoracic) spine joined my lower (lumbar) spine (the thoracolumbar junction). It was as if my legs began there rather than merely from where my thigh bone connected to my pelvis.
This was a new sensation for me; I had always experienced my walking legs as receiving their guidance from the hip joint. While certainly my hip joints were a key part of the mosaic of bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments involved in walking, when I imagined the long and wide band of tissue of the psoas muscle as a lively salmon beginning its journey from deep in my core, it felt like I was moving from the central nexus of my body. Walking was no longer merely about limbs swinging like a pendulum from my hips and more about a supple syncing of the upper and lower bodies. It struck me that this was full-body walking.
Fluid Walking
In addition to sensing a greater integration of my upper and lower body, I felt more fluidity in the rotation and counter-rotation of my pelvis and ribcage than I generally felt. When my right leg, for example, swung forward, my pelvis rotated a bit to the left. When my left arm swung ahead, my right ribcage and shoulder rotated to the right. This was the normal pathway for walking, but when I became more attuned to my psoas and followed its actions with my imagination, the rotations and counter-rotations became more lively and more smoothly rhythmical. It also seemed to me that my shoulders and arms started their energetic actions from that juncture of the mid-spine and lower spine where the psoas began. This reinforced my sense that the psoas was helping connect the upper and lower bodies when walking.
Leading the Way?
I often find in yoga that the experience of my body becomes a model for my experience of life. I'm wondering whether my sense of greater fullness and fluidity in walking, with a more playful and metaphoric embrace of my psoas muscle, will help me open to possibilities for more fullness and flow in my life as a whole. It's too early to tell whether this will be the case. But what I can do now is set my intention to bring curiosity and a spirit of exploration to this question and pay attention to whatever discoveries may lie ahead.
I love this imagery Glen. I've never really thought my about my psoas, even in yoga teach training. But I'll definitely be paying more attention to it now, even if just when walking. Thank you for informative and visual post.