The Psoas: Our feel-good muscle

As you know, I am interested in the mind-body connection and healing side of exercise and food, not about weight loss.

The psoas is important for our posture as it connects the torso and the leg, and it stabilizes our spine and helps with our balance. Therefore, it makes absolute sense that being tight there causes us to feel anxious, stressed, and perhaps even panicky. And yet again, the mind-body connection at its best!

I found an interesting and great read by BodyDivineYoga on the importance and influence of the psoas muscle on our physical and mental well-being:

[..] “.. our fast paced modern lifestyle (which runs on the adrenaline of our sympathetic nervous system) chronically triggers and tightens the psoas – making it literally ready to run or fight. The psoas helps you to spring into action – or curl you up into a protective ball.” [..]

 

[..] “The psoas is so intimately involved in such basic physical and emotional reactions, that a chronically tightened psoas continually signals your body that you’re in danger, eventually exhausting the adrenal glands and depleting the immune system.”

[picture by BodydivineYoga]

I have pelvic obliquity, so it’s no wonder that my psoas muscle is very tight. During my cool-down phase after my one hour yoga practice today, I felt my psoas even more probably mostly due to my increased sitting time from the airplane travel last week. Releasing this muscle is tough for me even when I am deeply and slowly breathing. What about you? Have you had any experience with this?

Here is a great article that shows how to stretch the psoas muscle >>> and gives you a little more information too. Here are more stretches/poses for the psoas: YogaStretches & YogaInternational.

Stay yogilated and be good to yourself and your body! 🙂

Namaste’,

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