When it comes to sensing distinctions within our own movement, I believe natural human longing for safety coupled with our perfectionistic culture breeds a special self-conscious movement impatience. We’re compelled to know, to rush, to categorize, to perform—whether for others or ourselves—and all of this obstructs bodily presence and the self-awareness that comes with it.
Even the simple intention to shift into a calmer, slower gear—the state needed to take the time to truly feel movement can seem ambiguous or uncomfortably unfamiliar. Initially, just setting that intention may bring anxiety. This isn’t resistance to truth, a character flaw, or the absence of some innate ability that only some people have. Yet it appears and feels subtly defensive.
In over fifty years of observing, discussing, and guiding people toward greater movement sensitivity, I’ve come to believe that simple underexposure is the main barrier. Whether chemist or athlete, most people have had little experience with this kind of inner attention—and so we can grow shy, even to our own witness, much less someone else’s.
Please sit upright in a chair as you read this next part. For today, I’m choosing a less common area as more familiar tensions often fade into background noise making them harder to discern—so we aim for a place new enough to grab your attention. The exploration begins with the more recognizable layer (physical) and moves to deeper layers (mental, emotional, spiritual) as we stay with the process.
Please begin leaning a bit forward in your chair and lifting a heel so that you’re leaning on the toes and ball of that foot; toes pressing into the ground and heel lifted. ‘Listen’ to your toes, as they press into the ground. Then:
Pause and scan your body for tension.
Now, trace what else is involved in this sensation.
Is there tension in an adjacent joint or muscle?
Does an entire leg or even the entire body weigh in to this sensation?
Might this reflect a movement habit like commonly lifting a heel when sitting, that repeats regularly.
Try describing every nuance you notice:
“When my heel rises, I press my first three toes into the floor along their medial sides. My knee rolls inward slightly, my same side hip gets tired, and my medial calf stays subtly tense.”
Now, widen your scan:
Is there unrelated tension in your jaw, neck, or chest that tends to accompany this pattern?
What about your breath? Don’t change it—just observe its rhythm and depth.
If you notice shallow breathing or a rhythm shift, pay close attention—Is it familiar? Does this breath rhythm feel relaxed or somewhat tense? Now, down-shift even a small amount to level the rhythm a bit. Then ask:
Did that shift also influence the tension in my toes? Anyplace else?
As you notice and name sensations, the language you choose becomes a bridge: between subtle awareness, physical action, and your relationship with other bodily systems. This kind of linking is at the heart of bodily awareness.
And then perhaps—if you stay with it—you might sense even finer threads:
Does this tension carry an emotion?
Is it old?
Does it muddy or clarify your current thoughts or intentions?
This sample can be tricky since just reading and sensing in this position can be cumbersome and render it seemingly useless. Do this process- take your time with a different posture/tension and then talk someone through as their guide. With a little more sampling, you’ll be able to use it comfortably and get a good sense of how reading inwardly, articulating for yourself, brings bodily awareness and improves your ability to articulate with others.
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From Bodily Knowledge to Intuitive Movement prepares physical therapists, yoga therapists and all movement practitioners to recognize various components of discomfort including the bio, psycho, social and spiritual contributions to posture, movement patterns, and to their pain. This book offers practical advice, real-life examples and case studies as well as deep insight into how individual bodies can move and heal within each body’s ‘normal.’ Sherry Brourman masterfully coalesces physical therapy, yoga therapy and pain science to create this valuable resource that ultimately utilizes intuitive movement for better health.
Oppression, cruelty, and danger are surprisingly matters that anyone can ignore and be unaware of if they are not directly impacted. And even when it is on our doorstep, we can choose to be ignorant about such matters by creating ad hoc explanations that do not situate tragedy within larger historical trends.
Many of us for years have been concerned about the deterioration of the health of the environment and the remarkable systemic cruelty inflicted on nonhuman animals in ecosystems and factory farms, and we watched all of this in horror as most humans normalize this. This slow destruction of everything not human sets the backdrop for numerous painfully slow genocides and wars that have been occurring in spaces suffering from the legacy of colonization.
As a South Asianist, I was aware of the war against Tamil people in Sri Lanka, and the genocide of Rohingya people at the hands of the Myanmar state, both surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) supported by local Buddhists! As I complete my second book on colonization, I’ve come to appreciate how normalized genocide has been in various theaters for centuries, including and especially North America.
According to scholarly reckoning, prior to European settlement in the Americas, Indigenous people on Turtle Island number in the 100 millions. Within three generations of European arrival, that population was down to 5% of its original number.
Many people in the Westernized world had become accustomed to a creation of Europe in the Middle East—Israel. October 7, 2023 changed that normalization with what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have concluded is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians—a claim that the International Court of Justice determined in 2024, is plausible.
There is a word for what we are going through: a polycrisis. Accordingly, there isn’t just one problem afoot. There are innumerable all at once, but they are not disconnected.
Selective Outrage
What I observed with every new sense of outrage over awareness of some injustice is how people would often react as though it was (a) a new thing, and (b) the only thing wrong. A remarkable single-issue mentality dominates the way people often react to problems, and what this ignores is the root cause of the various challenges. One result of this selective outrage is that energy is directed to very narrow causes while allowing all the other problems of the world to unfold unabated.
Root Cause: Egotism
Understanding what the root cause of the problems we face is not easy. In contexts of oppression, we are encouraged to buy our experiences as part of our self-understanding. In Yoga this is called egotism — asmitā in Sanskrit. Egotism is a conflation of my identity with how I experience the world. And if I experience the world by way of a certain racial, sex, gender, orientation, or political perspective, this becomes part of my sense of who I am. And when I try to protect my self-interests, I protect this very narrow identity.
The result is that I end up caring about what seems relevant to this narrow identity based on various extremely contingent experiences. This would explain how people tend to be selective in their outrage and largely unconcerned with various problems. If I identify with being human, then I stop caring so much about the suffering of nonhumans or the Earth, for I’ve conflated the interests I have with this narrow human identity.
If I conflate my sense of who I am with a narrow sex or ethnic identity, say being male or white, I then only put effort into caring for issues that impact this identity. In this ordinary way of existing, we are devoted to our outlook and experiences. If I understand myself in terms of a specific cultural identity, the genocide and erasure of other groups will seem tolerable if it doesn’t impact me. And I may even feel it is necessary if that other group challenges the privilege I grant my cultural identity.
Our polycrisis goes unabated thus because we focus only on narrow ideas of who we are instead of common interests which would lead us to undermine connected crises that effect all of us.
In contrast, Yoga, the original philosophy, recommends that we should be devoted to Īśvara, Sovereignty, which is defined by the essential traits of being unconservative (not stuck in its past) and self-governing (free to move forward). This is a basic interest that all people share, regardless of species, sex, gender, ethnicity, or orientation. On this account, the Earth and nonhuman animals are persons (puruṣa-s) too as they share this basic interest. Thus to be devoted to Īśvara is to be devoted to a shared interest.
When I put my energy into being devoted to Īśvara, I no longer am defining myself in terms of a narrow set of interests based on contingent experiences. My energy is devoted to what would be safe and healthy for all persons, for I understand that this is in my interest. If people lived life this way, they would put care and attention into making our world safe for all people. They would stop ignoring problems, and also stop being single-issue agents, obsessed with this or that problem, but not with oppression as such.
What Yoga teaches us is that there is no way to be devoted to Sovereignty but also one’s narrow sense of self based on one’s contingent experiences. If I were to be concerned with my sovereignty defined purely in terms of my ethnic, sex, or experiential markers, then I am not actually devoted to Sovereignty but to my experiences and narrow way of engaging the world.
My actual autonomy (kaivalya), Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sūtra, teaches us, is made possible by an ethical transformation of abandoning the selfishness of egotism in all contexts (YS IV 29). So I must choose what I am devoted to: Sovereignty or the contingencies of my experience. I cannot do both.
If I focus on my narrow ego-based identity, I foster polycrisis by pretending that my interests are narrow and unaffected by distant problems. If I am devoted to Sovereignty, I cannot allow a polycrisis to unfold as that would be incompatible with my autonomy, which is an interest in acting freely in a free world.
Yoga: Anticolonial Philosophy
Why is this insight into the ethical project of Yoga not the starting point of Yoga education? I have found in my research that the very same forces of colonization that we live through structure ordinary discourse around yoga. So instead of going back and learning the original philosophy of yoga, we are encouraged to identify yoga with how we came to the practices of yoga, and in terms of the teachers we identify with.
Academics unconcerned with philosophy but who nevertheless call themselves scholars of Yoga treat these various social identities built around different teachers and lineages as the topic of the study of Yoga. Instead of studying the original philosophy, Yoga, they study various groups and opinions about the use of the word “yoga.”
Yet, if we are careful about research so that we do not try to impose our beliefs on what we are studying (interpretation) but engage in logic-based philosophical learning. We can uncover that Yoga is a timeless resource we can call upon to deal with the challenge of being a quirky individual in a beautiful world of quirky individuals.
All I did, which was quite unique, was to apply the very introductory logic skills I teach my introduction to philosophy students to the study of Indian Philosophy. This allowed me to discern that Yoga is a unique ethical practice centered around devotion to what persons have in common—an interest in Īśvara, or Sovereignty—that involves taking on the responsibility to explore being sovereign by practicing unconservatism and self-governance.
What this taught me is that oppression isn’t interested in individuals. In its most extreme form, it wants us all to be the same, and anything out of the ordinary has to be exterminated or bullied out of existence.
In contrast, Yoga, the original ethical practice, is deeply concerned with individuals in their idiosyncratic glory. It shows us that what we have in common is our individuality, which is something to be valued. But that individuality is not the same as the contingent experiences we have. It has to do with our ethical interest in being unconservative and self-governing. Whenever any of us put energy into working on these essential traits of Sovereignty, we no longer participate as agents of the oppression we experience.
A basic Yoga practice in and of itself disrupts oppression. But it is also the most essential and required form of self-care. This self-care is not selfish as it is not defined in terms of a self constrained by the narrow experiences of race, species, sex, or biology. It is a self that shares the same interest as all selves that we care for as practitioners of Yoga.
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To learn how self-care and anti-oppressive activism amount to the same thing, and to learn about the original philosophy of Yoga, and critically distinguish it from what colonization and oppression has redefined as “yoga,” check out Dr. Shyam Ranganathan’s book, Yoga — Anticolonial Philosophy: An Action Focused Guide to Practice (Singing Dragon 2024).
Also, follow Dr. Shyam Ranganathan on Instagram @yogaphilosophy_com, and Substack @drshyamr
How important is your sense of smell to you? As an aromatherapist, I really value my nose and the complex relationship between my sense of smell and brain. I understand that my olfactory bulb is closely linked to the parts of the brain that process emotions, memories and fears. In the millisecond we smell something we can have a negative or positive response. Inhaling the scent of a rose, takes me back to happy, sunny summer days as a child, playing in my garden with my sibling making rose perfume.
The seasonal cycle of respiratory viral diseases has been recognized for thousands of years, as annual epidemics of the common cold and influenza disease hit the human population like clockwork in the winter season. Studies have long shown the effect of temperature and humidity on viruses’ survival and transmission to others.”-Immunologist J. Moriyama
“When someone with COVID-19 coughs inside a room with dry air, virus particles stay in the air and remain on surfaces longer, and go deeper into the body, which increases the risk of contracting a virus and the severity of the infection.” –Engineer David Baird
The viruses that cause colds, flu and COVID-19 will thrive this winter partly because cooler temperatures cause us to be indoors more. As we crank up the heat to warm our offices and homes, the indoor air dries out, affecting your entire respiratory system. The upper part of your respiratory system, including your throat and nose, is lined with moist membranes that capture dirt, dust, viruses and bacteria before they reach your lungs. Proper humidity levels help these membranes do their job. But if your home or office air is very dry, moisture is drawn from these membranes as well as many other parts of the body, and even the fluid that hydrates your bronchial tubes can quickly evaporate, making it easier for harmful particles to get into the sensitive areas of your lungs. Cilia do not work as well in dry conditions either, making it more difficult for them to pass virus and debris out of the lungs.
Signs you are breathing too much dry air include a scratchy sore throat that lasts for days, cracked lips, fingertips or heels, bloody noses, itching or flaking skin, chapped lips, even a feeling of tightness around joints. If you or one of your clients is contagious with a flu, cold, or COVID, even before that person even knows they are sick, dry air may help transmit it to the other person.
How to keep the room air at a healthy humidity.
Since too-dry air encourages infection and further illness and slows patient recovery, humidity is carefully controlled in hospitals. Humidity is typically monitored in schools as well, since too-dry air has long been identified as one of the leading causes of student and teacher illnesses. Many hospitals and schools use steam-based systems with central boilers that can boil water like using a giant tea kettle and circulate this water into ventilation systems. Akiko Iwaski, PHD, an immunobiologist who researches how humidity is related to the spread of infections, recommends inhaling very moist air in the winter, using long hot showers or baths, steam baths or local steam inhalations. (Iwasaki, 2019). Tell your clients about the benefits of healthy levels of humidity as well.
Here are some simple strategies when you are in in your therapy room or office this winter:
STEP ONE:
Keep track of the moisture in the air with an inexpensive device called a hygrometer. You can buy one at your local hardware store or online. Keep it in your treatment room where you can see it easily. The air in your therapy office, as well as in your home, should sit somewhere between 40 and 50 % humidity. If it’s measuring below 30 percent, you may need to invest in a humidifier. (100% relative humidity means that the air is totally saturated with water vapor, not a good state of affairs)
STEP TWO:
Introduce moisture if the air is too dry.
1. Use hydrotherapy treatments in your sessions. Clients love them, especially when it is cold outside! A hot moist pack over a tight lower back to ease tight muscles, warm footbaths to warm the client’s entire body on a cold day, warm towels draped over an aching body part, a body scrub with warm water and an exfoliant, all moisten the air and treat your clients. If you are lucky enough to have hot tubs, warm baths or hot showers, so much the better.
2. Keep houseplants in your waiting room or office and spray them with water from a fine-mist spray bottle. They will like it and release water into the air.
3. Buy a small fountain for your waiting room or treatment room. Many clients find the sound of running water soothing.
4. Buy and use a humidifier. Some buildings have whole-house humidifiers that are mounted on furnaces, while portable ones with water tanks come in various sizes.
5. Tell your clients about the benefits of healthy levels of humidity.
Ahead of the publication of her newest book, Sabine Schmitz, talks about why she wrote the newest book and what you the role of Chinese herbal medicine in dermatology.
What inspired you to write a book about treating eczema and neurodermatitis with Chinese herbal medicine?
That’s an easy one to answer: During my TCM studies in China, I had quite a hard time finding English literature on Chinese dermatology that covered the various specialized topics. This was especially challenging since I needed to write my Master’s thesis on psoriasis. As a Westerner, I spent hours, even days, searching for books and reading literature that often wasn’t specific enough and repetitive. That’s how the idea to write a handbook series on TCM dermatology came about, to fill this gap in the literature. And let’s be honest, a medical tradition with over 2,500 years of experience should have appropriate publications on these topics. In Western medicine, there are numerous specialized books for each medical field—a tradition I wished for in TCM as well. This is crucial to making knowledge accessible to many therapists and laying the foundation for specialization.
In this blog post, Sabine delves into the topic of Nutritional Therapy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), highlighting its significant role as a fundamental component within every TCM treatment.
Nutritional Therapy in Traditional Chinese Medicine
There are many things to love about China, and one of them is undoubtedly its wonderful cuisine. As delicious and diverse as Chinese food may be, did you know that the Chinese also use food as a means to regulate and restore balance to the body? This form of nutrition is known as Chinese nutritional therapy, and that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about today.
In combination with skilled touch, water treatments are perhaps the very oldest and most revered of all healing modalities. Pain from injuries, issues from damaged muscles and joints, circulation problems, chronic tension, chronic pain and emotional stress have long inspired healers to relieve suffering this way.
From ancient Rome’s great baths to Russian saunas, Indian Ayurvedic steams, Native American sweat lodges, Turkish baths and Japanese hot springs, peoples the world over use and love hydrotherapy and massage together. In Germany, the warm waters of Baden-Baden have been used for over eight thousand years, and in Bath, England, for ten thousand. 2800 years ago, Irish sweat houses made of sod and stone were used for rheumatism.
As a bodywork student or practitioner, you may be wondering what is the advantage of adding water treatments to your skill set. Here’s how it can improve your effectiveness:
*** Like massage, hydrotherapy can relieve discomfort and pain, stimulate the flow of blood and lymph, and make connective tissues more pliable and comfortable to the touch.
***Hydrotherapy is soothing and stress-reducing. The ancients realized the effect depression and stress can have upon a person, and over centuries, chronic depression was called everything from gloom or melancholia to neurasthenia or dysthymia. In ancient Greece, while warriors bathed to reduce fatigue and promote wound healing, warm baths were also ordered to relieve “dejection and low spirits.” The founder of modern psychiatry, Philippe Pinel, (1745-1826) recommended warm baths to calm “overwrought nerves.”
In the 1800’s, many fashionably wealthy Victorians who suffered from depression spent their lives travelling to spas in hope of a cure, especially those diagnosed with mania, hysteria and other “nervous disorders”. For the first half of the twentieth century, hydrotherapy was a mainstream treatment for mental institutions, complete with bathtubs, steam baths and fomentation stations. Treatments were intended to make mentally ill patients more comfortable and compliant, and thus less likely to be violent. Fomentations were soothing, while hours-long baths calmed restless or agitated patients. But in the late 1940’s, even though the American Medical Association still affirmed the value of spa therapy for “nervous conditions,” the introduction of psychotropic medications put an end to the use of hydrotherapy and massage for sufferers.
So what is it about hydrotherapy that helps release stress and tension?
According to cognitive psychologist John Bargh, physical feelings of warmth are linked early in life to feelings of safety, and we subconsciously associate physical warmth with emotional warmth. “Especially with animals that breastfeed their infants, the experience of being fed and held and protected goes hand in glove with feelings of warmth and closeness…the positive response to heat is hardwired into our brains.” This helps to explain the deep enjoyment and relaxation our clients experience when we use any warm treatment before or during a session.
Whole-body heating has antidepressant effects because it activates specific brain areas that are important for the regulation of mood and body temperature and so a steam bath, sauna, or even a warm shower before a session will help the client calm and settle before the bodywork begins. A simple warming body wrap can be made with blankets and the client’s head, neck and feet massaged while the wrap is in place. Partial-body treatments have that soothing effect as well. For example, a warm moist pack over the spine, a paraffin dip for arthritic hands, warm compresses over the face for TMD, a heat lamp or heating pad over a painful knee, and many other local heat treatments can help clients feel safe and relaxed and get the most out of their sessions. When clients arrive for sessions chilled, tense or uptight, a warm treatment is a great help and also a treat for them.
Because hydrotherapy is so beloved, new treatments are being invented all the time, such as flotation therapy for chronic pain, Watsu for relaxation, water exercise baths for tiny hospitalized premies, and special hyperthermia treatments for depression. With such a popular modality, likely more new water treatments will be brought forward as time goes on.
In my Chinese Medicine Dermatology book series Treating Psoriasis with Chinese Herbal Medicine and Treating Acne and Rosacea with Chinese Herbal Medicine, I extensively discuss the topics of nutrition and lifestyle habits. Today, let’s shift our focus to another pivotal factor influencing skin health: smoking (nicotine).
We all know that smoking is detrimental to our overall health. The adverse effects of tobacco consumption extend to nearly every organ in the body, with the skin being no exception. In this article, we will unveil the specific reasons behind this and explore the intricate impact that smoking has on our skin.
During the last 40+ years of my career, I have always wondered: What is the scope of osteopathy?
Whilst a student at The British School of Osteopathy in the 1970’s I was taught much about the musculoskeletal system and its physiology. This was furthered by supervised clinic tuition. Then I was sent out into practice life to explore these skills with patients.
However, I always had this strong feeling that something was missing, that osteopathy had much more to offer than was being clinically practiced by most osteopaths at that time. I then went on my first cranial osteopathic course, directed by the late Colin Dove. This and subsequent courses that I attended were significantly eye opening, expanding my vision of the true clinical potential of osteopathy. Then, as frequently happens, the more you know and understand, so the trickier the clinical condition your patients present with. Hence practitioner frustration for more knowledge and skill continues!
Cultivating deeper attention and mind-body connectivity can be the key to unlocking held trauma and patterns of holding. We explore how to embody awareness through mindful attention and the breath.
What sets the physical aspects of yoga aside from mere exercise is the quality of attention that we bring to focus. A mindful attitude brings us towards embodiment – inviting our mind to where our body resides in the present moment – and allows us to fully tune in and gauge appropriate response. This ‘listening and responding’ is the basis of a meditative practice, and the route to registering safety through our whole system as the nervous system can settle. As in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1:2;
“…stilling the fluctuations of the mind”.
The importance of the pause
Within practice, we can slow down to truly feel the experience – yoga as ‘moving meditation’ – and also punctuate movement with places of pause, where we allow processing through tissues and integration of experience. Within the heightened input of information from the ‘doing’ of movement, points of stillness offer a chance to drop beneath the mind imposing its will or story upon our practice.
“The ultimate purpose of inquiry is that it allows us to pause. In the space of a pause, truth can shine through.”
Tara Brach
Whether this is in response to what has been (eg judgment, comparison or analysis) or what is to come eg (ambition, anticipation or expectation); a pause is a place for presence. Brought into the body and physical experience, this might show as noticing we’ve ‘checked out’, are changing planes (such as moving from low to high) or observational enquiry between sides one and two of an asymmetrical position.
When a physical yoga practice simply keeps moving, we lose the opportunity to catch up with breath, to let the ripples of the motions settle and to integrate their effect. Slowing down to ‘simply be’, we can explore the mindful quality of the experience rather than simply where to move a foot or limb.
