I was teaching a private yoga session recently in which my student did great work to strengthen, stretch, and engage her body and mind. The work was challenging and fun. But at the end, after a few moments of relaxation in savasana, she sat straight up, dropping her head back slightly, and straining the muscles in the front of her neck to recover her balance. To me, it looked stressful.
I asked her to lie back down and took her through some steps for moving more smoothly back up to sitting:
- Roll onto your right side, with bent knees, embryo-like, using your right arm as a pillow for your head.
- Turn your chest and face toward the floor so that you can use both hands to press yourself up.
- Let your head hang while rolling up to sitting from the base of your spine, with your head coming up last.
She followed my instructions and then asked what the point was.
This gave me a golden opportunity to share what I’ve learned and what I am passionate about—everything is core.
There’s not a lot of clarity about what core actually means. Some people use it interchangeably with abs and other people include more muscles in their definition. Some use it in a more metaphorical sense, to mean the center of the body. My view is that because the whole body is so interconnected, and everything moves out from the core to the periphery and in from the periphery to the core, you can potentially think of the core as including everything in the body.
My idea that the core is big, deep, and encompassing has come through years of working with my body.
As a young dancer, I sprained my ankles a lot. It was a chronic thing. One time, this happened in a ballet class. The force of landing a jump on a twisted ankle also broke my fifth metatarsal, a bone in my foot. After healing and physical therapy, Pilates was recommended to me as a way to become stronger and more physically organized. Pilates is an intelligent system of exercise using special apparatuses, designed to improve flexibility and strength through engaging the torso-stabilizing muscles of the abdomen and lower back. Since that intensive Pilates work so many years ago, I haven’t sprained an ankle again. How is it that becoming stronger in my core also made my limbs more integrated into my whole body, helping me to resolve the chronic problem of twisting my ankles? Maybe it's because the core and the limbs are so deeply interconnected.
Later as a professional modern dancer in New York City, I learned how to initiate movement from my core in a fluid way, by understanding the core as an area I could release and flow from as well as an area to work, integrate, and activate.
Realizing that my own understanding and experience of “core movement” is not universal has inspired me to create practices for my yoga students to make them aware of how their cores can be incorporated into every pose. After that private lesson where my student sat up in a way that didn’t engage her core, I was inspired to go back and dig through the sequence of poses and exercises we had done in order to find all the opportunities we’d had in the practice to incorporate her core, so that we could focus on them more in the future and she could develop a greater awareness of power in her own body.
One by one, I unpacked the ways the core could be the focal point of each pose we had done. The idea was not to tighten the abdomen in every moment, but rather to find a range of relaxation and engagement originating in the core, as if the engine of the body resides there.
Your body parts are interwoven into one amazing, articulate whole. Your core is part of that interconnected whole, not something separate to isolate and obsess over.
There are more ways to work with your core than just tightening it. You can brace yourself in a protective mode, firming and compacting your abdominals. Some poses, like chaturanga, really do require an almost absolute and total muscular engagement of the whole body—including our core muscles. You can also relax and release your core muscles, letting your belly billow, like it’s a water balloon being filled. Do this when you want to “open” your hips—because tightening the low ab muscles, which are located very near the hips, might be counterproductive in that instance.
One of my yoga students read in a magazine that she should hold her belly in 70 percent of the time. When she told me this, I thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of time.”
Just as there’s not one “right” way to do things all the time, there’s also not one part of our body that requires constant engagement and monitoring. Everything within our body is connected to everything else. So releasing habits of holding, especially in our deep core, can affect every cell in our body and give us greater range of motion. Facilitating different movement possibilities in our body is a good thing, like the flow of life itself.
When we realize that our core is inherently connected to every part of us, we can fully experience the balance of effort and ease, both anchoring—grounding downward by letting go—and ascending—lifting upward by engaging all of the muscular strength and energy of your body—beyond our usual reaches. To me, it’s fun to explore different qualities that originate from my core—the capacity for everything from infinite relaxation to maximal activation—and every stage between.
Learn more about Jennifer Brilliant at jenniferbrilliant.com, and find register for her May 11, 2024, workshop, Radiate and Return: Relating to Your Core, here.
Originally published on YogaInternational.com. Used with permission of the author.