How well do you know your pelvis?
How we use our pelvis affects the alignment of our back, head and limbs. Have you mastered moving yours?
If we are to move efficiently - distributing work throughout our self to accomplish an action with minimum effort – we need our pelvis to contribute to almost any movement. Our pelvis is literally our centre. Geometrically it is the location of our centre of gravity, and, in most movements, of our centre of rotational inertia. In oriental disciplines, the lower centre (lower dantian in Chinese) is located in the middle of the pelvis. It is held to be the place where vitality originates.
Keeping the pelvis free to move is a key aspect of balance, movement, and presence. Yet many of us are unaware of parasitic tensions that impede freedom. Such tensions can have many origins. Perhaps they became habits in childhood and remained with us. Or they might be compensating for pain in our back, shoulders, or neck. Or they might be a consequence of a wish to project a certain image, or of sucking our belly in so we can look thin.
Habits of movement in how we hold our pelvis go deep. From my own experience, moving past those habits to find freedom is a matter of small gradual steps over months or years. If this sounds daunting, it isn't: each small improvement feels like a victory in itself. Who wouldn't want to experience the feeling of gaining more clarity, comfort, and control, again and again?
I found it helpful to create a clear mental image. Get to know your pelvis - its size, shape, and position with respect to the other parts of you. For example, sit on your hands so you can feel your sitting bones, notice their size and shape and whether you prefer sitting more on one side than the other.
You can imagine the pelvis as a single unit, able to rotate around three axes, giving it complete freedom of orientation:
an axis which goes through you from side to side - rotation about this axis causes the pelvis to tilt forward and back so your tailbone either comes between your legs or tries to stretch behind you
an axis which goes through you from front to back - rotation around this axis causes your pelvis to tilt so one side gets further from the ground and the other closer
an axis which goes through you from top to bottom - rotation around this axis causes the pelvis to turn so one side moves forward and the other back
Once you've mastered this simplified image of the pelvis, you can build a more complete mental picture: in reality, the pelvis is not one bone but two, with flexible tissue connecting them. The two sides of the pelvis, while generally moving together, also move with respect to one another. With practice you will begin to notice how this contributes to walking or running.
How does your pelvis figure in your mental picture of yourself? Please leave a comment.