Free your hips

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A foundational lesson for all lessons, this acquaints you with the way the hip socket moves in your own self—not the intellectual understanding, but the sensory feedback from your own experience.

I feel lighter and taller after this lesson. My legs feel like they’ve just been oiled in the joints. Plus, as the joints wear with time according to how we use them, this will save your hips and low back for years to come.

Circling the pelvis around the hip socket helps smooth out the rough edges of your walking. It also highlights where you might be holding in the ribs, jaw, belly, and neck.

This lesson invites a smooth connection from the pelvis through the ribs to the head, which makes walking so much easier with a nice swing in the ribs and hips.

This lesson is also wonderful for low back pain.

Tip: Think of allowing the ribs to be influenced by the pelvis. The more supple you can be, the less muscular resistance you will have to fight against in even the smallest of movements.

For another rocking lesson to free the low back, see 459 Easy rocking to soften your spine, jaw, and breath.

(Mia Segal/Gaby Yaron, 1977-78, #8)

This lesson is in sitting with the legs long. You reach forward and across yourself and feel how the knees, spine, chest, and pelvis do—or do not—respond. Just observe what you do at the beginning, then see how it changes by the end.

Much of our ability to swivel the pelvis comes from the ability to swivel the spine and ribs. You’ll feel this as you go through the movements. Feel how the whole self participates until the spine is more and more twisty. This lesson grows into a bigger movement, give it time to blossom!

As a complement to this lesson, see:

41 Twirling legs and folding spine, 36 min
287 Folding forward, lower leg to chest (excellent for right hip!), 36 min
Hurdle (scissor) lessons
Splits - 4 (AY211, AY212) (you don’t really do the splits, just practice moving the hips!)

(AY358)

Sense how the spine moves to support the legs moving through space. A lovely connect-me-up lesson through the ribs, spine, pelvis, hips, and legs. You will clarify the shift in the bones of the leg all the way to the head! I love this lesson, and it is one I often give to my students to practice.

Part 2 continues with bigger movements of the legs. Feeling the emerging pattern of the legs in the back offers a real insight into human movement.

I love this lesson for walking and cycling! Free hips and low back are smooth and oiled. This lesson has some stronger constraints, meaning it’s more of a puzzle at first, then voila the puzzle is solved! It’s super fun to teach this as the end movement brings everything together with flexible hips and spine.

(AY302)

Anyone who knows me knows that I say “THIS lesson is my favorite.” Really, this lesson is one I go to again and again for softening the back and feeling the connection of the leg into the back effortlessly, without doing anything.

(Esalen workshop)

This lesson is unusual. It seeks to uncouple our habit around the hip flexors and the extensors of the back. It can have a profound effect on upright sitting as we slot the pelvis onto the hips. This is one I couldn’t wrap my head around at first. In my training I even sat up in the middle of the lesson in front of forty people and proclaimed it couldn’t be done! But that was over twenty years ago. Luckily I’ve learned something about my hips in the meantime.

For more lessons on articulating the hips, see Amazingly free hips.

(AY241)