Lecture 4: Spiraling Unmeśas

The full body spring: our spiral line

It is no coincidence that a spring is itself the form of a spiral. Spirals are capable of loading and unloading energy with incredible efficiency.

Our body is actually loaded head to toe with a spring like spiral line that wraps around our entire surface area.

As a fascial line it is the great mediator and balancer of force throughout your body, wrapping you in a double helix of support form back of head to bottom of foot, crossing the front, back and sides of the body.

88% of the spiral line itself is composed of muscles from the other primary fascial lines-- hence it's ability to coordinate movements across all planes of motion.

The Path of the SPiral Line

Trace the path.

back of shoulder

opposite ribs

same side hip

cross front of leg

under foot

up outside of leg

up back of thigh

crosses sacrum

up the back to skull

For the most part this line is coordinating motion from the other lines, acting as a stabilizer. As you start to generate force in this line, through walking, or throwing, you start interacting with other functional lines that align with this same path.

The functional line pictured here utilizes bigger musculature like the lats and glute max to accomplish a twisting or spiraling action with more force

It's no surprise that a muscular chain that offers full body support and enables multi-planar movement is itself quite complex in structure. Lucky for us, though, we can interact with this muscular chain in a very simple way in our daily life and in our yoga practice.

Key Take Away: Visualize the functional work of spiraling as a big "X" across the front and back of the body. This "X" helps us distill down all the complexities of spiraling into an easy to use and digest persepctive which is:

Spiraling occurs simply by crossing your midline, specifically by bringing shoulder/elbow to the opposite hip/knee.

Spiraling is simply how we move

When you look at nature, you find spirals everywhere, it’s the natural pattern of growth. In our own body’s too, spirals are how we move best.

The traditional Planes of movement help us visualize and practice moving forward, back and laterally, as do most of our yoga postures. These movements are essential for certain types of specialized training methods or rehabilitation, but our daily movements never actaully move through these strict pathways— in fact, almost every movement we perform utilizes all of them simultaneously. You can't even take a step forward without breaking these boxes, much less reach into your back seat to find your water bottle, or throw a frisbee to a friend.

To support daily multi planar movement, you've got to train your spiral line. Otherwise, when you reach for it, the connections aren’t there. And what’s more, because spiraling is so natural, you’ll find that it opens up new realms of spontaneous and intuitive movement in your practice.

Let's explore a few simple transitions that we do everyday and notice how critical the spiral line is for support.

Something as simple as standing up from your chair is extremely challenging when you try to stay in the sagittal plane-- go ahead, it's like rising up from your deepest Utkatasana without any support. But the moment you stagger your feet, and allow yourself to rise up to the left or right, the motion more resembles Patanjali's creed of "Effortless effort".

(Feel free to use your chair as support for the next example) Similarly, if you were going to lower yourself down to the floor, it would be very challenging to do so if you try to keep the body rigidly within the same plane, but as soon as you allow yourself to turn inwards towards the front leg you find tremendous stability and support. You can feel this immediately in the crouch, you don't have to go all the way down to the floor.

And finally, another fun example with your chair, is that if you have to step up onto a surface, let's say stepping up and over a log in the woods, you would be much better served to allow yourself to turn inwards towards the leg as you stepped.

Let's also play a little with walking

if possible, try to allow yourself room to walk for 15 feet or so forward when you try this experiment.

first let's walk without spirals

bend forward a little bit to disconnect the X, and then walk around the room by just moving your legs forward. Feel the jolt you get in your joints and the overall lack of grace. Also notice the work it takes, how small your steps are and how little participation there is in the rest of your body.

Now let's find our spiral

Stand in a vira 1 stance with the right foot forward. Raise the right arm up and feel the stretch of the diagonal line that runs from your left knee, across the hip and torso to your right shoulder. Play in those 15 degrees of stretch and recoil, feel the elasticity. Now let yourself recoil into a step forward with your left foot. Do this a couple of times, and feel the elastic quality of the movement, the effortless effort as Patanjali said. Notice how far your foot is flung forward, and the ease with which it moves there.

Try to take that same step forward without the X and recoil and you'll find your step is shorter and it requires balance.

Now let's walk with spirals

Now come onto the other leg in Vira 1 stance and play with that recoil a couple of times, stepping forward and then back.

The next time you recoil forward take that momentum into a walk for at least 5 or 6 steps and feel the difference between it and your intial walk. Notice the lightness of your step, the distance of your gait, the natural swinging of your arms and whole body rotations.

Transitional Spirals are intuitive

As we’ve said, spirals are not only essential for healthy movement, they’re also intuitive. spirals are like a light switch that you didn’t know you could turn on, and when you do, they happen automatically.

The simplest way to explore spirals in your movement is just by crossing the midline with one of your limbs. That’s it— as you do this the spiral begins to take shape.

cross mid line examples

free form exploration

spiraling your transitions

instead of always facing one edge of the mat, start opening to the idea of changing directions during a transitional moment

standard example: from belly push back to kneeling and step one leg out for parighasana

spiral example: plank, draw knee to nose, drop knee and pivot to the side

standard example: roll from back to seated

spiral example: roll from back to PJS

(from class) standard: stand up from lunge

spiral: twist and untwist from lunge to standing