Spine healthy and unhealthy series:
Part 6 –  physical stability, mobility of the spine.

Physical Stability and Well-being
In every pose, posture, and movement of the body, physical stability is fundamental. It fosters ease through our muscular architecture and keeps the spine – our central axis – physically stable, paving the way for health. The Yoga Shastra places paramount importance on physical stability, recognizing it as a pathway to achieving stillness of mind. Harmonizing the body’s physical equilibrium appears to be a cornerstone for cultivating inner balance and tranquility.

Paraspinal Muscles and Physical Well-being

We have numerous small, individual paraspinal muscles that help control movements between vertebrae. Firstly, we should prevent our muscles from becoming stiff and hard. Otherwise, distortion of our whole skeleton system is bound to happen, and our soft tissues also start to sink or shrink or harden further, potentially leading towards tumour or malignancy at an early age.

For this, we should train our Muscular architecture physically to prevent such outcomes, necessitating efforts that adhere strictly to the physical laws of nature/universe. Secondly, we have to learn to move these paraspinal muscles in a particular direction of force that is head towards tail and shoulder towards the pelvis. To keep our physical structure stable, they have to be contracted consistently, which leads them to permanently remain in contraction positions, causing them to get stiffer and stiffer.

Awareness and Muscle Dynamics
What I observe in my teaching is that people are often unaware of the stiffness of their muscles. Perhaps they misconstrue stiffness as being “toned,” or maybe the strong passive and defensive forces inherent in muscular contraction lead them to overlook this aspect, resulting in ignorance. Instead, muscular contraction ought to embody smoothness. Hence, it becomes necessary to consciously expand these muscles to foster elasticity, rather than consciously and repetitively inducing shortening, which can perpetuate rigidity. Cultivating awareness of this dynamic appears vital for nurturing suppleness and harmonious bodily function.

Coordinated Engagement of Paraspinal Muscles
In both static and dynamic poses, it appears crucial to engage the paraspinal musculature in a coordinated manner. Pulling the paraspinal muscles from the pelvis downward towards the heel, concurrently with lifting the column from front,  muscles upward towards the head from the back of the ears –

Embodied Experience “Anubhuti “of Paraspinal Movement
This isn’t merely an imaginary  movement it’s about actually feeling the movement within oneself. One must sensitively experience the dual-directional engagement of the paraspinal muscles – the pull downward from the pelvis towards the heel, and concurrently, the lift pubis symphysis upward from the back of the ears towards the head. It’s a palpable, internal sensation of muscular interplay, felt kinesthetically rather than just visualized. This felt experience appears fundamental to cultivating conscious, harmonious movement and alignment.

A conscious movement invoking muscles acting in opposite directions front upward movement and back downward movement relative to each other. This dynamic interplay evokes imagery of a cycle chain or the action of springs and pulleys harmoniously aligned in a unified direction, suggesting an intricate balance of forces fostering stability and alignment.

So , In any pose static and dynamic, we have to pull Paraspinal musculature from the pelvis downward towards the heel and from the back of the ears we have to lift the column upward towards the head with conscious movement of muscles which are in opposite directions of each other . It’s like a cycle chain or action of springs and pulleys that have to be in one direction.

Most importantly, these paraspinal muscles have tremendous stress to make us physically stable, and our motor system has to work hard to keep them contracted constantly and consistently.
This is one of the reasons muscles go into spasm and further become harden.Remember muscle contraction happens passively or reflexively. But for muscles to expand needs more strength and more active force.This exactly needs to enhance their function to evolve further.

The second reason is that repetitive movements of hands and legs make both girdles and Paraspinal musculature more stiff and hard because of their anchoring. This brings not only anatomical distortion in the musculoskeletal system but also affects all the organ systems of our body.
Therefore, in yogic movements, we have to move the musculature of the central axis from the periphery that is from hands and legs with movement of girdles, till that should become memory programming.

We must achieve the state of  ” Prayatna Shethilya” avastha/ state and that is my aim.

These Paraspinal muscles and other posterior muscles are the chief extensors of the vertebral column.But all exterior muscles are weak by nature because of the position of the fetus in the mother womb These paraspinal muscles are at a deeper level .So an additional factor is that they have tremendous stress to make us stable , have to contract strongly hence remain in contraction position for longer time and become/ hard.Therefore to make these extensors strong first we have to remove the dominance of flexor muscles and bring equilibrium in these muscle groups in our conscious physical activity. ( Here, I am not talking about the neutral state of body position in which people make mistakes, given how it looks outside. As flexible body postures always look good, which is again not ideal where health is concerned )

Therefore, from childhood, one must learn conscious movements of elongation of paraspinal muscles from the musculature of both the shoulder and pelvic girdle. So in day to day activities, the movement of our body will be from the center towards the periphery and not the filling centre from the periphery. Then only we can prevent these muscles from becoming stiff and hard, and then only we can easily avoid sports injuries, where we need higher skills for repetitive movements.

The aim of Yogasan is to make us physically stable and bring easiness i.e., sahajawstha in our body to bring equilibrium for harmony within all organ systems, which is directly related to our mental stability.

Lengthening – strengthening increasing range of moment of  our paraspinal muscles with specific directional movements can help stabilize our spine for mobility, prevent motion sickness, migraine, headache,vertigo, phobias and any pain in our musculoskeletal system (neck,back pain and other common back injuries). It will also improve our range of motion in Muscular architecture, which not only keep joint spaces intact, but all other body cavities as well to improve the physiological function of all the organ systems.
And most important is overall physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual health and further genetic changes which is further evolution of nature and which will be a healthy genetic change, cellular intelligence I e.our cell mutation has to evolve and this will lead us towards natural evolution of human spices .
Swati Joshi Yoga Therapist