The psoas knows everything that that has ever happened in your life. The psoas major is an incredible muscle and certain things that happen in the course of your life, the psoas keeps locked inside. It is as if a muscle deep inside your body is making decisions about what your emotional brain can handle. How crazy is that?
Constructive rest position (CRP), a pose that I recommend everyone become friends with, has probably been the single most humbling “thing” I have come across in my life. In constructive rest position a person lies on the floor with the knees bent and the feet flat to the floor. That’s it. And then, depending on what your psoas has chosen to hold within its bounds, the magic happens. Or not.
The magic, for what it’s worth, takes all forms. A short list of happenings that I have witnessed in CRP include—knees falling involuntarily from side to side, feet slapping the ground, minor convulsions that look like electric shocks, major convulsions where the body rides waves of movement from within.
My simple take is that the human animal with its ability to reason has thwarted the natural mammalian process of excitation followed by relaxation, otherwise known as homeostasis. Animals that can’t think the way we do process trauma in a purely instinctual way. They experience it, and let it go, with different animals having different techniques for this type of release. Human beings are different. Some of us process instinctually and don’t hold onto the experiences we go through– imagine a soldier in combat who doesn’t get post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Watching someone go through the effects of constructive rest position can be very powerful. And to repeat myself—it is very beautifully humbling. One amazing thing that I have found is that the body doesn’t let go in constructive rest until it is ready to, crazy as that might sound.
A while back I had a client who was experiencing extreme reactions in constructive rest and was being woken up in the middle of the night by what she described as electrical charges below her sternum. The coolest thing was, though she was fairly freaked out and wanted to know what was going, she had a smile on her face.
I explained to her that I thought her body wouldn’t be taking her on this journey if she wasn’t prepared for it. For whatever reason, whatever it was that was coming out of her body had chosen to stay inside up until now. If she wasn’t ready to let it out it would continue to stay inside.
It? It? It? What the hell am I talking about “it” that is coming out. Is it trauma, memory, feeling, pain? I don’t know but the psoas knows.