THE SPINE THAT HOLDS ITSELF

A Low Back Remedy

There is a peculiar thing humans do when they are worried about their backs: they hold them. We tighten the abdomen, stiffen the lumbar, pull the shoulders back, brace the core and generally try to make ourselves into something structurally reassuring. If the back feels vulnerable, it seems perfectly reasonable to hold it more. If something hurts, hold it still. If something feels weak, make it stronger. If the spine seems unstable, stabilize it. This can work remarkably well. In fact, the human body is so good at compensation that a person can spend decades holding themselves together without realizing they are doing it. What begins as a useful response to an injury, an uncertain knee, a painful back, stress, fear, fatigue or simply the demands of life can gradually become the body’s normal way of organizing itself. The holding disappears from conscious awareness. It no longer feels like tension. It feels like me. The problem is not that holding is inherently bad. Holding is useful. If you are about to lift something heavy, catch yourself from falling or brace for impact, please hold whatever needs holding. The problem begins when a temporary strategy becomes a permanent residence. Holding is expensive. A young body can afford an astonishing amount of unnecessary effort. It can recruit extra muscles, compress joints, restrict breathing, stiffen the trunk and still run around appearing perfectly functional. But the bill eventually arrives. The strategy that successfully held a person together at thirty may become increasingly costly at fifty, sixty or eighty. Muscles tire. Joints have lived inside the same patterns for decades. Breathing becomes smaller. Sleep may not provide the restoration it once did. The nervous system continues performing its quiet background job of maintaining an organization that was never meant to require constant vigilance. This is where the usual command to relax becomes almost useless. You cannot simply take away a body’s holding strategy and expect it to thank you. That tension may be doing something. It may be providing stability that the person does not currently know how to find any other way. Yank away the scaffolding before the building has another means of support and the nervous system has every reason to put the scaffolding right back. The goal, then, is not to release all tension. The goal is to make some of that tension unnecessary. That distinction changes everything.

Before release, there must be support. Before adding strength, there must be organization. Before demanding movement, there must be articulation. And before rushing from one position to another, there is the largely ignored territory of transition. Support may begin with something almost embarrassingly simple: the ground. Lie down and notice that the floor is already doing a considerable amount of work. You do not have to hold yourself up while lying on it. Gravity has not disappeared; your relationship with gravity has changed. The question becomes whether the body can actually receive that support or whether it continues holding itself several millimeters above the proverbial mattress. This is one reason I use Constructive Rest Position so frequently in the Mystic Body Method. Lying supine with the knees bent and the feet supported does not look like much. That’s part of its usefulness. There is no performance to hide inside. Nothing impressive is being accomplished. The body is given an opportunity to encounter support and then, rather than immediately doing something to itself, to notice what it continues doing unnecessarily. Then comes breath. Not breath as another assignment. Not “take a gigantic diaphragmatic breath and do it correctly.” Breath as information. Can the diaphragm descend? Can the abdominal wall receive that movement? Can the ribs respond? Can the lumbar region participate rather than being held outside the event? Can pressure be distributed through the trunk instead of being manufactured by gripping it? This is where the idea of a “strong core” becomes much more interesting. A corset can be strong. A clenched fist can be strong. A concrete column can be strong. But the human trunk is not supposed to be a concrete column. We breathe, rotate, bend, walk, reach, absorb force and continually reorganize ourselves around changing circumstances. The deep core is valuable not because it can clamp the spine into submission, but because it can respond. That is a different kind of strength. And it brings us to articulation. We casually speak of “the low back” as though there were one low-back bone somewhere above the pants. There isn’t. There are five lumbar vertebrae, each participating in a much larger articulated spinal system. Seven cervical, twelve thoracic, five lumbar: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Add the sacrum and coccyx and the vertebral column contains 26 bones. The spine is not a stick. It is an extraordinary kinetic chain. Knowing that changes the body before you perform a single exercise. Instead of imagining one troublesome slab called MY LOW BACK, a person can begin to perceive an articulated structure capable of distributing movement. One segment need not do everything. One region need not remain frozen while another region compensates. The question changes from “How do I protect my back?” to “How does my spine move?” And then there is transition. We tend to think in destinations. I am sitting; now I need to stand. I am standing; now I need to walk. I am lying down; now I need to get up. Point A. Point B. Done. But the nervous system lives through everything between A and B. The transition is where the organization changes. Loads move. Pressure changes. Joints articulate. The center of mass travels. Support moves from one place to another. Breath either continues or disappears. Old holding strategies can suddenly reappear before we even know they have been summoned. We may arrive beautifully organized and then abandon the whole arrangement while getting out of the chair. This is why traveling well matters as much as arriving. The body is not a collection of positions. It is an ongoing transition. Which brings us, naturally, to the flounder. The flounder has recently become something of a spirit guide around here. This is partly because “floundering” has such wonderfully negative cultural connotations. To flounder is to struggle, stumble, proceed clumsily or appear not to know what one is doing. We are supposed to stop floundering, get ourselves together and move purposefully toward the objective. The Flounder Doctrine™ proposes something different. The actual flounder is a vertebrate. It has a spine. It has structure. It has tone. Yet it presents a useful image of an organism that does not appear terribly preoccupied with holding itself together. It receives support. It adapts. It conforms. It moves when movement is required and can otherwise have the decency to lie there like a flounder. This is not an argument for becoming limp, passive or weak. The opposite of holding is not collapse. That may be one of the most important distinctions in this entire conversation about the body. Many people are reluctant to release because somewhere beneath conscious thought they equate tension with structural integrity. If I stop holding, what will hold me? Good question. We should not answer it by ripping away the holding and hoping for the best. We answer it by gradually giving the nervous system another experience: support without collapse, articulation without instability, movement without unnecessary force, strength without rigidity. The new organization has to become believable. It has to be experienced repeatedly enough that the old strategy no longer seems like the only available option. The body does not need to be conquered into this. It needs to discover it. Perhaps that is what The Spine That Holds Itself ultimately means. Obviously, no spine literally holds itself. Muscles, fascia, ligaments, pressure systems, the nervous system, gravity and the ground are all involved. But a well-organized spine can begin to feel as though it requires astonishingly little conscious management. Instead of constantly holding the spine, we learn to inhabit it. And that may be the low back remedy hiding in plain sight. Not another heroic exercise. Not more bracing. Not a desperate attempt to strengthen every vulnerable structure before calamity arrives. Start by finding out what is already holding you. Find support. Allow organization. Recover articulation. Notice the transition. Let strength arise from something more intelligent than rigidity. You don’t have to be rigid to be strong. Sometimes you may simply need to flounder.