One way to do that is by studying the Human Body.  Regardless of your yoga style or technique, the human body remains a constant across all Asana traditions.  This class is your window into the workings of this miraculous container we travel in.

We will review and discuss:

• Anatomy and Physiology Basics–terminology, tissues, structures and functions
• Mechanics of Movement–concepts of movement and how to be more observant of these in our students
• The Nervous System–the brain, learning, reflexes and the mind
• Common Injuries–modifications, healing and what to avoid
• Posture-specific Analysis– risk and modifications

This is not a “name the muscles” class.  We dive in deep and work on concepts that will help enrich your experience of your yoga practice, bring more awareness and intelligence to your sequencing, and help make you a better observer of your students. This workshop will help build skills that make you a better yoga teacher.

The next class is scheduled as follows:

Date: January 10th & 17th (two consecutive Sundays)

Time: 1 P.M.-7 P.M each day; starting promptly at 1!

Place: New Seattle Massage Classroom–4519 1/2 University Way NE, Seattle WA 98105

Cost:  $125–includes instruction and all materials, 12 CEU’s for Yoga Alliance RYT’s

Registration forms will be sent by email.  If you want to attend, please leave your contact info in the “Comments” section below, or email functional.anatomy@unitytherapeutic.com with any questions.   (This email is monitored for this class only and will be terminated upon completion of the class.)

Richelle is a massage therapist, yoga teacher and therapist, bodywork educator, and perpetual student of life.  She has been learning and teaching about anatomy, healing, injury prevention and rehabilitation since 1994.  Richelle is eager to share her knowledge with you!

I myself learned so much from the class.  Though I have taught it many times over, this was my first adventure with current teachers.  I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your suggestions and feedback.  I hope that I am able to incorporate them as I go along, and am able to offer even better instruction with each new installment.

Keep the comments coming!  I am currently working on the next training for January 10th and 17th, 2010.  This will be roughly the same material for those who missed out on the first round.  Of course, since this information cannot be repeated too often, anyone from the first round is welcome to join us again!

I will make sure to keep this site, as well as Yogablaze, updated with the class details, so please come back often to make sure you keep your information current.

Thank you all again, Richelle

If you share that vision, please contact either Mihal Ehven or Richelle Ricard to schedule a viewing and discuss details.  We consider ourselves a family.  Your membership here includes:

• Shared treatment room–furnished cooperatively by each practitioner
• Furnished welcome/waiting area, filtered water
• Secured entry–combination lock with deadbolt
• Office space, separate from treatment room for paperwork and billing(available 24/7)
• Representation on Co-op website, with option to post articles
• Representation on all Co-op marketing materials
• Flexible Lease Terms

We charge $110/month per weekday.  i.e. All Monday in a month for $110.  Discounted rate for 4+ days/week.

Please see our Join The Team link for availability.

Do you desire a deeper understanding of human anatomy and physiology?  This class goes beyond memorization to explore the various systems that influence a yoga practice.  We will examine and discuss the physiology of:

• The Nervous System—The influence of the brain in sensory perception.
• Muscles—Including common conditions, reflexes and postural patterning.
• Fascia—What is it really and how does it work?
• Joint Structures—General anatomy along with specific mechanism of injury at the most vulnerable joints.
• The Breath—How it fits in…

Along the way, we will discuss how this deeper knowledge can advance our teaching skills through more intelligent modifications, hands-on adjustments and sequencing.

Richelle Ricard is an educator, massage therapist and yoga instructor who has been studying the human body and its miracles since 1994.  She developed a yoga-specific anatomy curriculum in 2007 for yoga teacher-trainees and is eager to offer an advanced version to veteran instructors. More about Richelle here…

• Cost:  $100 (introductory fee—one time rate!)
• Dates:  Saturday, October 31-Sunday, November 1
• Times:  10 A.M. To 4 P.M. (12 hours CEU credits for Y.A. RYT)
• Location:  New Seattle Massage, 4519 ½  University Way NE, Seattle WA 98105
• Contact:   206-931-2949 or functional.anatomy@unitytherapeutic.com (this email is monitored for this workshop only and will be removed when the workshop is completed)

My previous articles have dealt with how the brain and body work together through the nervous system.  Sensation and perception both play important rolls in how we experience both pain and relief from it.  There is one aspect that we haven’t fully considered yet though, and that is the mind.  The mind differs from the brain in that the mind can and will attach emotional weight to physical sensation, and vice-versa.  The mind, for our purposes here, is the seat of the emotional body as well as the intellectual body.  It is not separate from the physical body, it is integrated into the complete system, overlapping with the brain-body connections.  While the brain perceives and takes action, the mind attaches judgement to both the perception and the action.  Our mind is what takes us as humans beyond mere instinct into the realm of conscious thought, deliberation and emotional experience.  (That’s not to say that animals don’t feel, but that’s a whole other article).

Because the mind is not separate from the brain-body, certain associations are made emotionally when we feel something physically; the circumstances that lead us to the physical sensation have judgements linked to them.  Say that, as a child, you slip and fall in the hallway, and as kids do, all the passersby point and laugh at you.  This has now become not only painful to your backside, but painful to your pride.  Your brain sets up a pattern that when you slip and fall, you feel embarrassed.  That pattern lasts through most of your life, deep into adulthood…when you slip and fall, even when there is no one there to see you or laugh, you feel embarrassed.

This works in reverse as well.  As an example, we have all felt deep sadness in our life.  Whether we have lost a loved one, buried a beloved pet, or had a relationship fall apart, we have all felt devastating emotion.  There is a reason that the word “devastating” is used with respect to sadness; because there are physical sensations that accompany the emotional state.  Many times there is an aching pain in the chest, stomach or gut.  Our breathing changes, sometimes nausea occurs, even vomiting.  We are in turns exhausted and restless.  These are physical reactions to the emotional state of our mind.  They are very real because there is no delineation between the mind and the brain-body.  The nervous system reacts to these emotions as if they were physical stimuli by activating the stress response and all its chemical reactions.

Here’s the clincher…the brain-body’s physical responses to these emotions can be remembered too.  In fact, just as embarrassment is your reaction to the slip-and-fall, tension and adhesion and spasm and trigger points are activated in times of emotional stress. Patterns are set up by the brain to elicit the same physical responses to each emotion…some of us clench our jaw, or our glutes, or our abdomen.  Some of us have trigger points near our armpits or at the base of the skull that lead to pain and tension patterns elsewhere.  To our brain-body, these physical patterns are linked with our emotional state…they are inseparable.  This is the less tangible side of “muscle memory”.  We sometimes refer to this as “holding onto an experience”. Massage can help us let it go.

When you are receiving massage treatments, there may be times when your therapist hits upon an adhesion or trigger point that, through treatment and release, also brings up an emotional response.  That trigger point had been activated not by a physical activity, but by some emotional event, and now that the point has been “found out”, the emotions come up as well.  Sometimes we are able to identify the emotion specifically while other times it is just an intense feeling of anger, grief, sadness or anxiety.  This can happen at any point in the massage and can sneak up on you out of nowhere.  If you are new to massage and emotional release, you may be tempted to stifle the response or “run away” from it, but in the end it is best to try to ride the wave.  The beauty of emotional release is that once those emotions and tensions are gone, they are gone.  We may have been carrying around pent up emotions for years, using up precious energy keeping them hidden deep in our tissues, and now….ah!  Relief.  The pain of the tension is gone and so is the exhausting holding-on of emotion.  No psychoanalysis necessary, just a wonderful sense of levity and lightness you didn’t know you were missing out on!

I know it all sounds very woo-woo, but it is a phenomenon grounded in the science of the human system.  All of our sensations and actions are possible because of electrical and energetic impulses.  Those impulses have many signatures, expressions and effects on our brain, body and mind.  Massage can make sense of some of them and help release the ones that don’t need to make sense.  If you find yourself in the midst of an emotional release, don’t fight it.  Embrace it and even explore yourself through it. You may learn something new about the body you’ve been walking around in all these years.

Part 2:  The Nervous System

In this section we will examine the nervous system in greater detail and how massage treatment affects pain through it.  The nervous system includes the brain, spinal cord and all the peripheral nerves that go to the muscles, organs and skin.  The nervous system uses hormones and electrochemicals to turn stimulation into sensation and act through movement of muscles and other tissues.  If it happens in the human body, the nervous system is involved at some point.

When we consider the nervous system in bodywork, we recognize two things:  first, that we feel pain because a part of our brain tells us we do…through the use of hormones, it is the modulator of sensation; second, that we feel things because our nerve-endings have sent sensory information to our brain via the spinal cord, our brain makes sense of it, and instructs our muscles to react based on that information.  In certain cases however, the brain is taken out of the equation:  we call this a "reflex".  We have a few reflexes already pre-programmed into our muscles so that when certain stimuli is experienced, the signal goes to the spinal cord and speeds directly back to the muscle as action.  This is a part of the "fight or flight" mechanism; our body’s way of removing itself from a potentially painful event.   Certain parts of the brain eventually get clued into what has gone on during a reflex reaction and records it, a bit like an external hard drive for your computer.

One such reflex is the "stretch reflex".  When a muscle is stretched too far, too fast, the stretch reflex causes the muscle to contract very quickly to protect itself from tearing.   Another is called the "GTO response".   This is roughly the opposite of the stretch reflex; when a muscle bares too much tension, the GTO response causes the muscle to relax all contraction to protect itself from spasm or strain.  Over time these reflexes can make patterned imprints on the brain (that external hard drive), leading to what is typically called "muscle memory".  Some massage techniques work directly with these reflexes to help reduce painful spasms, increase the length and pliability of muscle tissue, and reset the memory of a particular muscle or group of muscles.  Ahhh, pain relief!

We should also consider "gate theory" when speaking about the nervous system and pain relief.   Gate theory states that the nerve signal for pressure sensations are faster and stronger than the nerve signals for pain sensation. That is a handy revelation when most massage treatments employ the application of pressure at some point.  If you apply pressure to tissue that is in pain, the pressure signal "beats the pain signal to the gate", and the brain only acknowledges the pressure sensation.  Ahhh, pain relief!  This may be why we instinctively press on an injury…the pain of a bump, a scrape or even a cut will benefit, at least temporarily, from immediate applied-pressure.

Because the brain uses hormonal information in feeling various sensations, we try to use that to our advantage in bodywork.  Part of what makes a massage such a relaxing experience is that our brain turns off the "fight or flight" response of the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS)–a condition where our brain and body are flooded with stress chemicals such as adrenalin and epinephrine–and turns on the "relaxation response".  This Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) is the part of the nervous system that allows the body to recover and heal after high-stress events.   When we massage the skin, muscles and organs, the PNS signals the brain to turn off adrenalin production and increase the production of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin–our on-board supply of pain killers and euphorics.  Our brain slows down our breathing, increases our healing and rebuilding processes, and gives us the sensation of rest and comfort.  Our nerves relax and slow the flow of information and the perception of pain is reduced.  Ahhh, pain relief!

Ultimately, as the communication network between our outer and inner worlds, the nervous system is the key focus in any pain relief treatment. Massage and bodywork can address it very generally in the case of parasympathetic stimulation, or directly when utilizing specific reflexes and circulatory functions.  Over time, regular massage treatment can help inprint the brain with a higher tolerance for painful stimuli and keep the Sympathetic Nervous Response to a minimum.

Check back soon for the last installment in this series: Energetic and Emotional Release.

Ah…The ultimate question.  It is a complex, or at least multi-layered question to answer.  In many ways it depends totally on the approach of the particular practitioner you are asking, therefore I will respond generally and in sections:

• Muscles and Fascia
• The Nervous System
• Emotional/Energetic Release

While all of these areas overlap at some point during your treatment, they are more easily understood separately at first.

Part 1:  Muscles and Fascia

First let’s consider the tissues we work on directly:  Skin, muscles, fascia (connective tissue) and joints.   Treatment massages often address all of these tissues because they all tend to be connected.  Most of us are familiar with all of them except fascia.  Fascia is the web in which all of our cells are suspended.  Made mostly of water and non-living collagen and elastin fibers, this web helps give muscles shape; connecting cells into bundles, bundles into muscle bellies, and extending beyond the edges of the muscle belly to make tendons which merge with our bones. These muscles get bound together into groups by another layer of fascia, and then our entire body gets a layer wrapped around it just under our skin.

These layers are designed to be slick but strong, giving each muscle the ability to slide easily along each other as we move.  Unfortunately, these layers are acutely prone to dehydration, killing the slickness and leaving a sticky, fibrous mess instead.  Once these layers get stuck to each other they are difficult to pull apart.  These sticky places are called adhesions.  I liken them to the two sides of Velcro; once the two sides come together you can no longer glide easily past one another.  Each time you move the adhesions pull and tug and create sites of micro-inflammation which get sore over time.  Some of the "knots" you feel in your shoulders and neck are actually these stuck adhesions.   One aim of massage treatment is to "break up" these adhesions and allow circulation to return to these dehydrated layers to reduce the inflammation.  Ahhhh, pain relief!  I do warn you though, it isn’t always the most fun part of your treatment…imagine how Velcro feels being pulled apart.  Yeah, it can feel kind of like that.   But since there is a layer of fascia just under the skin, even gentle Swedish massage techniques can bring a great amount of relief.

Thicker bands of fascia also connect bones to each other to make our joints. These bands are called ligaments.  Ligaments lack the elasticity of the thinner layers that surround our muscle fibers as well as the abundant blood flow.  When they get irritated or overstretched there is less opportunity for a healing response.  They shrink and tighten to reduce the irritating movement and that can cause nerve pain and inflammation in surrounding tissues.  Treatment massage can help reduce the inflammation and lengthen the ligament fibers to create more space within the joint, effectively releasing trapped nerves and increasing circulation to the joint.  Ahhhh, pain relief!

When considering muscles, you cannot separate them from either the fascia or the nervous system.  Nerves transmit information to and from the muscles, instructing them to contract or relax.  Our joints move when muscles contract only because fascia transfers that force to our bones. There are a number of neurological sensors and influences that we will discuss later, relative to the nervous system.  For now we will focus more on the muscle fibers themselves.
When muscle bellies bear more weight than they can tolerate or are stretched beyond their maximum length, they usually tear.  In bodywork we call this a strain.  These tears can be microscopic or they can be a large rupture across the entire belly or tendon.  Either way, inflammation happens and pain along with it.  Massage treatment can help keep the circulation in the area flowing to reduce painful swelling and promote healing.  Sometimes a muscle will try to protect itself from this tearing by contracting very quickly and very strongly…so strongly it can’t relax completely on its own.   This is what we call a spasm, or what you may have experienced as a charlie-horse.  Sometimes they are very painful as the entire muscle belly remains contracted, while other times only a small bundle of fibers remains tight.  These smaller contractions still hurt, but tend to be a bit more subtle at first, turning into nagging tension and soreness.  This is another expression of those "knots" we all are familiar with. Massage treatment uses pressure to spread out and lengthen muscle bundles to release the contraction and return the muscle to its resting tone.  Ahhhh, pain relief!

These adhesions, tears and spasms are not always caused by trauma or obvious injury.  At times just our everyday posture creates patterns that strain muscles beyond there tolerance and create adhesions between fascial layers.  Massage treatments over time aim to reduce not only individual injuries and adhesions, but to correct and promote the overall postures that are the underlying cause of much chronic pain.

Check back for Parts 2 & 3 later this month!