The Leg Bone's Connected to...

Everything in our bodies is intimately connected to everything else. This might not be a revelation but it is a theme that comes up almost daily in my anatomy and asana classes. Each joint is controlled by the actions of multiple muscles, some of which span across two or more distinct joints in the body. A muscle that moves the knee might also help to move the hip, for example. This means that movement in our body is rarely limited to the joint we are focused on.

I have recently noticed how this affects me in uttanasana (standing forward fold). It seems like a fairly straight-forward pose. Stand with your feet hip-distance apart and fold over from the waist to touch your hands to the ground. I have always been flexible, so touching my hands to the mat has never been challenging for me. However, now that I'm learning the detailed mechanics of the pose I have discovered that I've been doing more harm than good with this posture. Like most people who sit at a desk all day long, I have tight hamstrings. In order to come into uttanasana, something along the back of my body needs to lengthen so I can fold forward to touch my mat, and it should be my hamstrings. However, since my hamstrings are too tight to give me the length I need–but I force my hands to the ground anyway in my quest of the perfect shape–the movement spreads to a different part of my body. A pose that should provide a beneficial stretch to my hamstrings becomes one that puts a lot of strain on my lower back. With regular practice, this repetitive action can cause injury. 

As I was thinking about how actions in our bodies are not isolated but interrelated, I started to see how this is true off of the mat, too. Often we think that we can act a certain way in a situation and it won't have any impact on the rest of our daily life. In that moment we have a choice to take a right action or not, and for whatever reason we decide not to. Maybe I get cranky with the customer service agent when I call to find out why my cable bill doubled. Maybe you shout something nasty to a driver who cuts you off. Or these could be bigger actions, like taking the hotel towels home (because no one will ever miss them, right?) or flirting with a coworker even though you are married. These seem like discrete and inconsequential actions, ones that probably won't have any effect on the parts of our life that we care about. 

The trouble with these 'wrong' actions is that they don't just stay relegated to the immaterial parts of our life. If I angrily confront a server for messing up my order, that interaction impacts me beyond the walls of the restaurant even if I never give it a moment's thought after I walk out the door. The truth is that all of our actions count, even the little ones. Every time we avoid right action we make it a little easier to ignore right action the next time, and our wrong actions slowly become patterns and behaviors that seep into all parts of our life. 

When we continue to choose wrong actions, they eventually seem not so wrong anymore. If we continue to yell at other drivers when we get angry, it becomes easier to lash out at the people we care about. If we don't give our full attention to the cashier who is asking about our day, it reinforces that we don't need to be present when talking with family or friends. If you keep choosing to flirt with your coworker, your commitment to your partner and your marriage disintegrates.

The small actions that we think happen in isolated parts of our life can become habits that affect the whole. With regular practice, this repetitive action can cause injury.