Composing Experience

The experience of being grounded comes from having a clear proprioceptive sense of the path of support from the ground beneath you through your feet. When your body weight is carried by a balanced, relaxed skeleton the supportive forces pass cleanly from one bone to next along the path, making that path of support relatively easy to sense. Tensions along that path, on the other hand, disrupt and “muddy” the transmission of force from one bone to the next, obscuring the path and making it more difficult to feel. 

Press against wall

To get a sense of this, try the following exploration. Stand where you can just rest your closed fist against a wall with your arm extended. With your arm and shoulder relaxed, lean slightly forward, gradually transferring some of your weight into the wall. If you do this gently, you should be able to feel the skeletal path along which the force travels though your hand and arm back into your shoulder and ribcage. Then come back to standing and stiffen your arm and shoulder, and lean into the wall again with a stiff arm. This time the path through your skeleton will be less evident, obscured by the tensions in the arm and shoulder muscles. 

Support path

When you are standing or walking, support from the ground  passes up into your foot, through your ankle into your lower leg, though your knee into your thigh, though your hip joint into your pelvis, through your sacroiliac joint into your spine, and up your spine to your head. Ideally, the supportive force should be transferred cleanly from each bone in the chain to the next through the joint that connects them.

For this to happen, your nervous system must sense the gravitational forces impinging on your system and organize your musculature to align your skeleton to respond to those forces with a minimum of effort. Dysfunctional habitual tension can interfere with both the neurological sensitivity (awareness) needed to control the appropriate skeletal alignment and with the muscular organization needed to achieve it. This results in a diminished sense of support from the ground and contributes to the widespread sense of insecurity and low level anxiety so common today.

Your pelvis is clearly a central element in the skeleton that supports you. Situated in the center of your body, it is where support from the ground coming up through your leg meets the weight of your torso coming down through your spine. As you walk, the base of that support shifts with each step from one hip joint to the other, a distance of approximately six inches. Remaining balanced over that shifting base requires that your pelvis and torso change their shapes with each step, as well.

Pelvis

Your pelvis consists of three distinct bones — your sacrum and two hip bones, or ilia (singular ilium). Your sacrum is a flat and roughly triangular bone and lies at the base of your spine. The two hip bones lie against the sacrum on either side, meeting in front at the pubic symphysis. Each ilium is connected to its corresponding leg through the acetabulum (hip joint socket) and to the sacrum though the sacroiliac joint. 

The joints within the pelvis — the sacroiliac joints and the pubic symphysis — don’t move very much, but the movement they offer is important for grounding and fluid mobility. Unfortunately, many people have much less than pelvic movement than they should. They treat their pelvis not as a flexible system of mobile interconnected pieces but as a single solid mass, and when they do so it becomes one. The self-reinforcing combination of lack of awareness and chronic tension work together to eliminate the naturally available potential for for pelvic flexibility. These factors are further reinforced by sexual inhibition and other forms of social conditioning against pelvic mobility. People walk around all day with a stiff immovable pelvis and suffer the resultant consequences, including the chronic back problems that plague contemporary society as well as the lack of grounding that comes from the skeletal inflexibility.

Early in my Feldenkrais practice I went through a period where I was seeing several clients with low back problems that had been attributed to one of their legs being shorter than the other. They had each had lifts prescribed to wear in the shoe corresponding to the short leg, but the lifts had not solved the problem. I never measured their legs, so I don’t know whether one was actually anatomically shorter or their diagnoses resulted from chronic imbalances in the way they held their pelvises,. From my point of view, it didn’t really matter. The underlying problem, as I saw it, was pelvic rigidity, and the help I could offer was in regaining the natural flexibility they had somehow given up.

We evolved as a species to move easily over all types of natural terrain — smooth and rough, level and slanted, spongy and hard. Our physical structure, then, is capable of handling terrain variation easily and naturally. In particular, step-to-step height variations of an inch or more are not unusual, and so should not be a problem for a naturally functioning human being. This should be true even if the variation is one we happen to carry around with us — as my clients were doing — rather than a terrain feature. Their problem, in other words, wasn’t so much having a short leg, if they did, as having lost the natural pelvic flexibility necessary to fluid comfortable movement and a good connection with the ground.

This experience deepened my interest in what it means to be grounded and to experience that connection and the ease and fluidity that accompany it. It led to the development of a workshop called “Reconnecting with the Earth”, exploring movement over natural terrain, and later to my article on Connecting with the Earth, articulating some of the ideas behind it.

Pelvic flexibility can be regained, even when it’s been lost for years. Movement practices such as Feldenkrais, T’ai Chi, and yoga can help you rediscover it. But the key to making it part of your ongoing life is awareness — slowing down a bit and feeling how you move as you walk, allowing your weight to shift naturally from one foot to the other, and allowing your pelvis to follow that shift as it happens. It isn’t something you have to work at so much as something you have to allow. If you do, it will happen on its own.