My Pilates teacher, Mabel, is one of those people who is a lifetime learner, and she is always taking new courses to further her knowledge of bodywork, and thus through our sessions I learn a lot from her about some of the latest trends. In fact she was just in Amsterdam in the past week on another workshop. Even though my back is almost well, I have opted to continue with the private pilates classes because they help me on several levels: - A form of gentle stretching for my joints to maintain their full range of motion;
- A means to build sensitivity to what is happening inside my body (what are my organs feeling, am I using certain muscle groups to compensate);
- A conscious way to encourage relaxation when I am moving (a lot of internal martial arts teachers urge us to remove excess tension from our muscles but don't really teach us how to do it);
- A way to rebalance the muscles in my body from bad habits and injury (my left psoas is stronger than my right psoas, and this leads to the glutes and adductors overcompensating, for example)
- A way to improve my fine motor skills and control even while doing larger movements;
- Exercises to remain mindful through the full range of motion of a given movement.
The metaphor of a car for the body is often used to describe the body (especially in relation to how it wears out) and where martial arts is how I build power, explore complex movement and test the limits of what I can do with my body, pilates has been more about the fine tuning of the engine to make sure that the car is running efficiently that I can avoid injuries in the future. This is not to say that there aren't sometimes surprising areas of overlap and the theory of the Three Cores and Domes of Uplift is one of them. This is a theory developed by Wendy LeBlanc Arbuckle (the full name of her theory is called 3 Core Bodymapping) and I found some of the principles to be very helpful.
When coming from the 3-Core Body Mapping Perspective, we learn from the body’s own natural intelligence by learning to sense the physical and energetic directions of movement in the body: ”Up the Front”, “Down the Back”, and the spirals that occur throughout the entire body. The relationships to the microscopic orbit and spiraling in internal martial arts is an interesting area to be explored.
“Lower Core” is the foot to the pelvis, “Central Core” is from the pelvic diaphragm to the respiratory diaphragm, “Upper Core” is from the respiratory diaphragm to the cranial base, or the palate. The 3 Cores correspond to our primary domes: arches of the feet, pelvic floor, diaphragm, and palate. “The study of the three cores offers a fluid, developmental body map for connecting, grounding and centering the body in any position by accessing the body’s wisdom, not by muscular effort. It is a powerful Living anatomy that babies and animals know instinctively.” We look at how the whole body breathes, and the deep relationships between the front, sides, and back of the body. There is material here which makes one think of the upper, middle and lower dantian of Taoist theory and the domes also correspond to some of the key accupuncture points that we deal with in Qigong.
Gravity is key. “How do we relax and yield into gravity to feel our natural “dome of uplift?” (Wendy LeBlanc Arbuckle) Our vestibular system, the body’s unique balancing mechanism, is how the body orients to gravity. This brings us into our core alignment where innate coordination kicks in, coordination being the difference between an internal organization that happens naturally as opposed to micromanaging the body as parts and forcing change. This is some of the work that I am doing now in zhan zhuang, how sink and settle the body and not fight but work with gravity, and when one does that the Qi seems to flow so much better.
There is too much to post in one go and I am only coming to grips with this theory in a very preliminary way and I will continue to post on how it informs my martial arts and general practice in the future.
The Pilates Center of Austin
When coming from the 3-Core Body Mapping Perspective, we learn from the body’s own natural intelligence by learning to sense the physical and energetic directions of movement in the body: ”Up the Front”, “Down the Back”, and the spirals that occur throughout the entire body. The relationships to the microscopic orbit and spiraling in internal martial arts is an interesting area to be explored.
“Lower Core” is the foot to the pelvis, “Central Core” is from the pelvic diaphragm to the respiratory diaphragm, “Upper Core” is from the respiratory diaphragm to the cranial base, or the palate. The 3 Cores correspond to our primary domes: arches of the feet, pelvic floor, diaphragm, and palate. “The study of the three cores offers a fluid, developmental body map for connecting, grounding and centering the body in any position by accessing the body’s wisdom, not by muscular effort. It is a powerful Living anatomy that babies and animals know instinctively.” We look at how the whole body breathes, and the deep relationships between the front, sides, and back of the body. There is material here which makes one think of the upper, middle and lower dantian of Taoist theory and the domes also correspond to some of the key accupuncture points that we deal with in Qigong. Gravity is key. “How do we relax and yield into gravity to feel our natural “dome of uplift?” (Wendy LeBlanc Arbuckle) Our vestibular system, the body’s unique balancing mechanism, is how the body orients to gravity. This brings us into our core alignment where innate coordination kicks in, coordination being the difference between an internal organization that happens naturally as opposed to micromanaging the body as parts and forcing change. This is some of the work that I am doing now in zhan zhuang, how sink and settle the body and not fight but work with gravity, and when one does that the Qi seems to flow so much better.
There is too much to post in one go and I am only coming to grips with this theory in a very preliminary way and I will continue to post on how it informs my martial arts and general practice in the future.
The Pilates Center of Austin
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