Abstract The psoas muscle topic highlights important differences between structural integration (SI) practice and allopathic approaches to musculoskeletal symptoms and dysfunction. Rolf ’s SI approach restores system coordination integrity rather than claiming to cure disease or organ, nerve, or muscle pathology. Out-of-balance psoas function is part of a motor control pattern. Psoas issues are part of confused patterns of stabilization: The psoas is frequently recruited as primary or secondary rather than tertiary stabilizer. SI is about restoring primary (normal) stability tendencies so that muscles such as the psoas are available for appropriate function. Rolf made fascial touch with the psoas part of SI protocol and it is integral to the restoration of normal stability and coordination in the SI series. How SI work benefits from this protocol is described as part of a package of coordinative system interventions for primary stability and security. SI work is enhanced by a comprehensive approach to stability that includes perceptive-based self-care programs that mirror the work of the series. This article, minus the introductory paragraph, originally appeared in the December 2010 issue of Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute®. This article is another in a series of articles that examine underlying premises of structural integration (SI). Contemporary science suggests that SI shifts motor patterns (of which posture is an example) and is not likely to be a direct adjustment to supportive membranes and cables (Frank, 2008). To help us think about structure as coordination rather than a stack of parts, the term movement brain was introduced in a previous article entitled “Body as a Movement System, A Premise for Structural Integration” (Frank, 2008). It’s an invented term that points to the elusive and mysterious nature of motor control. We cannot dissect coordination. We do not teach people how to move. Structural integration integrates cortical and sub-cortical processes so normal coordination is restored. Our tools—things like fascial mobilization and perceptual guidance—happen to speak to the system event we call posture and movement. Success is measured in happy accidents of postural and motor improvement, but the controller of these accidents is a complex system of anatomical and neurological events that we are only beginning to understand. Movement brain is a term that respects how much we don’t know and but offers a user-friendly name, a reference to the body movement intelligence we are working with. The psoas topic provides an illustration of how new premises apply to how we see and do our work.
by