I have been playing with a made-up-by-me but plausible relationship between the tongue and the psoas muscle. I am open to being corrected or further informed: for all I know, there is some physiotherapist or speech pathologist or yogi in a cave somewhere who can speak to this more clearly than I can. Hit me up if you know him.
I have been obsessing about the tongue because of my mantra practice. There are apocryphal and esoteric stories about the universe being made of sound. Sanskrit is said to be a crafted language in which different shapes and frequencies are organized in your own mouth, purportedly touching different chords in you so you ring at a higher vibration. We, mere mortals, elicit the forces of nature by humming, trilling, cawing. It is unclear - as in it depends both on who is teaching this stuff and their motives and it depends on who is listening and their projections - whether we are to take this as poetry or prescription.
I generally take it as an open question.
I’ve seen enough to believe that the human instrument is capable of amazing things. I have enough experience with Vedic chant to know that it stabilizes, fuels, and propels me while at the same time keeping me in a happy balance of humble and committed. But I am wary of folks who promise energetic or subtle body miracles. He who repeats this song 10,000 time cures cancer kinda thing.
Some sounds are harder to make than others. It’s āsana in your mouth. There is a particular swallowing motion you make with some sounds, and subtle differences between a dental or a palatal consonant. There are velar sounds (I think of vellum, as in paper and the skitch of ink but it doesn’t mean that: it means pointing the tongue toward the skull through the roof of your mouth). Part of my clumsiness is being a native English speaker with a midwestern accent, but parts of it are something else, something more human and less semantic. As I play with Sanskrit sounds I’m challenging my nervous system, my breathing, the muscles and set of my jaw.
Did you know, in speaking English, we don’t actually open our mouth very much? But we also don’t really use our tongue. Instead we move the whole jaw, which is a pretty heavy weight to vocalize with, proportionally speaking.
This mouth question has become more pronounced as my teacher has now asked me to teach others. Some folks trip, constantly, over the same sound. Sometimes the difficulty is putting different sounds together. We say conjugation. In Sanskrit it is a sandhi, a “euphonic combination”. Sandhi also means the coming together or juncture between seasons and a political alliance. In Ayurveda - the naturopathy of Vedic thought - a sandhi refers the physical joints of the body. Some conjugations are almost impossible for a person to articulate in a way that has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the person. I mean impossible. It is impossible for them (now) even though they can easily make every one of the sounds individually. Their mouth tangles. The brain snags. The throat catches. They look at me desperately. Some go faster in frustration. Others are mincingly apologetic. Sometimes, but not definitively, this is a ghosty insight into individual psychology, as the word meaning in Sanskrit - which they often don’t even know - is a thing they personally struggle with in every day life. Ferocious strength, for example. Soft deep was one of my own stumbling blocks. It’s as if we can know, intellectually, but when it comes to saying certain things out loud, the mouth itself refuses. Intellectual understanding is not the same thing as physical capacity. Many, many of us choke on the names of God.
I find it strange how ten or twenty minutes of paying attention to shapes in our mouths has a ripple effect across the body and day. Days I sing feel like I am well hydrated, well exercised, appropriately caffienated and adequately slept. I do not mean anything about water, exercise, intoxicants or rest. I mean there is something as effective as chemicals involved. I don’t know what it is. But I can feel it like I can feel a sugar high. Often, singing days are ever so much more than “I feel pretty good today”: singing days are days I step into a secret forest before anyone else is awake and bring back dew drops on my eyelashes. It feels like I’ve hit a portal in my brain through which cadence and comfort and confidence and calm - mostly calm- erupt like endless steam from the core of the planet up my body exude from my pores. I feel myself, quietly steaming. Nobody notices. I realize how unlike calm ordinary consciousness is. I therefore understand a heck of a lot about the world and myself in it.
All that is interesting, sure, but it’s only really obvious when compared to the days I don’t chant. Some elecrolyte is off. Some fuse is dark.
But this half throttle is so normal and familiar to us we tend not to see it. We tend not to realize there is another way of being and we wander off, distracted and alone.
Lore
“Cat’s got your tongue” is rumored to be Abyssinian. Caught thieves had their tongues publicly cut out and fed to feral cats.
In other, later cat incarnations, cats are revered and wander Islamic cities because a cat once sat on the Prophet’s robe as he prayed. Rather than disturb the cat when his prayers were done, he cut his robe and walked away with his legs bared.
European women accused of being witches were punished or controlled by having their tongues removed. Ostensibly, this prevented them from speaking curses.
Often, the accusation of witchcraft was just patriarchal hysteria. Women gossiping at the well was considered a threat. In feminist perspective, whisper networks are often what keep us alive and get us safe.
The word, gossip, derives from something like ‘close to’ or ‘sister of’ god.
The “Scold’s Bridal” or “Branks” seems to have it’s origins in Scotland, circa 1557. It’s a contraption to keep women quiet. It was a metal cage that could be placed around the woman’s head. It was used on “shrews” and “hags”, common scolds, female prisoners, and intoxicated women. The cage had an inward facing gag. The gag had a bit, an inward protruding “curb plate” that was slid into the mouth. This gag often had a spike on it. It wholly prevented speech, caused excessive salvation, and made food impossible. Swallowing was a torture, a lacerating of the tongue, but what with that thing in your mouth you salivated so much the need to swallow was intensified. It was an orthodontic torture. A penetration. The device sometimes had a bell on it, to draw further attention. It also had a leash. Women were led through town or tied in the square as an example onto others.
Though Scottish in origin, the device was also used in the British colonies. In Colonial America it was used mostly by non-Quaker authorities on Quaker women who spoke of their religion in public. It was also used on Black slave women throughout the Americas and Caribbean.
Escrava Anastacia is a Brazilian folk saint said to have died from wearing a punitive iron muzzle.
There is a delicacy, a thing that happens in my lips, around Vedic chant. I am very well aware that my teacher has received death threats for her work; some say none but Brahmin males can chant. I am also aware that Sanskrit and Vedic teaching have been weaponized as a tool of casteism. On top of that, you have the wholy appropriated version of Bhakti most commonly found in the West, in which the edges of have been lost. The lyrics are now cast as love notes you’d send to a boyfriend or soft porn you can keep on the nightstand. They were intended as conversations with God.
This can become a baby and bathwater conversation. Some say we should abadon Sanskrit and dismiss the chants as oppressors tools. Others say the oppressed have a right to the knowledge systems used against them. Women Bhakti poets defiantly sang and walked through the market naked. “I am a slut for god,” hissed Mirabai. Meaning: she knew god more intimately than the pundits in their temples behind their theatre of pomp.
psst. I have a sharp thing in my mouth.
Popular Mechanics
The psoas muscle is eternally popular amongst movement geeks. I joke that illio-psoas is a key yoga vocabulary word: no ordinary person knows what it is, but after a year of yoga you get the impression it’s the most important thing in the world. Muscle of the soul! you hear. The most emotional muscle, they whisper. Trauma and release are inevitably mentioned.
The psoas is the only muscle in the body that connects the leg to the spine, and is probably one of the biggest - both in terms of size and as concerns function and frequency - movers of the body. It lifts the leg toward the trunk - ie walking and mobility as mere concepts of possibility - and it flexes the lower spine. Much of the hagiography of the psoas concerns developmental patterns of movement and the instinctive reflexes of curling up into a ball to protect your privates and belly. The psoas is reified to the loined embodiment of fight or flight.
You hear my sarcasm. While I am just as fascinated as the next guy by the miracle of the body, I think the term ‘emotional muscle’ begs questions. How is a muscle emotional, exactly? The phrasing obfuscates more than it helps. The issues in your tissues conversation veers toward materialistic determinism, as if we are mere puppets and free will isn’t. It also falls in the direction of passive victimhood and conveniently, when you’re not looking, becomes ablism. Ablism given traction rolls all the way home to eugenics. The trauma held in the body conversation distorts our understanding away from things like relationship, society, and responsibility to a self-referential obsession. For all the purported self-help, it is self loathing and the ways in which we are failing that are taken as starting point. This kind of talk pathologizes something that may not in fact be - may not have ever been - a problem.
It causes us to look in the wrong direction.
Of course, the poetry of the body is alluring. Empowering, even. To that end, I bless it.
But there is always a question as concerns power, isn’t there?
It’s terribly important to ask what one’s doing with it.
Capacity to do the splits is a psoas question. It’s often taught with the story of Hanuman (the pose is named Hanumanāsana). Hanuman, the Vedic monkey god, is a metaphor for loyalty and devotion.
Pardon me, but I don’t confuse someone’s devotion with their physical ability to pull themselves apart. One day in an aṣtanga class the teacher put his mouth by my ear - hot, humid, sweaty and naked - and said that anger lives in the hamstrings. He straightened up and walked to the front of the room with his hands behind his back like he was on a Sunday stroll. He sauntered. He blinked slowly, like a saint. I quivered, barely holding it together, thigh muscle twitching.
I was reading about mouths. I had anatomy books spread all over the house. I leaned over one while eating a peach and the juice dripped onto the page. I wiped it off with the edge of my hand. But all these things about the psoas kept popping into mind.
There are similarities. In fact, I think the two muscles at opposing ends of the trunk are probably connected.
The body is riddled with pairs and mirrors of itself. The curve of the neck is related to the curve of the low back. The skull remembers the sacrum: the two embryologically developed together and the triangular occipital bone is an inverted image of the triangular sacrum, like time slowed down to bone. They are both sometimes refereed to as ‘keystones’ as regards movement and posture, and the movement of both involves some twisting and tilting, but an awful lot of nodding. The pelvic floor both functions and is structured remarkably like the vocal cords, or vice versa. The scapula dish is a mini illicus, the upper to cup the arm bone, the lower to receive the femur. Then there are the feet and the hands; the pubic rami nodding at the clavicles, each dotted at the center with a cartilaginous disc, the public ‘bone’ and the menubrium like a dice at the top of the breastbone, respectively. These things all talk to each other, such that a kink or a tilt or a snag in one tends to elicit a counter click, a thrust, a hangover over on the other end.
Alternately, saying the same thing in a different way; there is a rhythm or a song or a conversation - a relationship - between these things. The quality of that relationship can affect all sorts of things you wouldn’t suspect.
Whether you’re breathing with your mouth or your nose, for example, and the way you hold your head. How you hold your head has everything to do with how you stand, walk, and see. Breathing through the nose is correlative to sleep disorders, attention and mood stuff, lowered immunity, compromised heart, muscle, lung and other athletic stuff. Both head position and how we breath paint perception, and perception determines whether you feel life is a burden or something you’re being swept up in, miraculously, almost as if you were flying and there were no effort at all at all. Strain or ease; mildness or scraping; soft blinks or lava like tension moiling somewhere deep inside the eye. Middle aged women squeeze their legs when they sneeze.
They also hold something in their throat.
Center
Speaking of lines, I was primed for this tongue/psoas idea because I know they are both links in a fascial line that runs from your toes through your hips to your diaphragm and up to the tongue. The deep core or deep front line is a link of contiguous and synchronizing structures running like a train track up the body. Your tongue is connected to your toes.
In other words, your tongue is a core muscle.
If the tongue is habitually pressing down or ramming into your teeth (pretty often, in the faces I’ve seen), it will pull the head forward of plum resulting in possible neck strain, jaw clenching, teeth grinding. Which might show up as back pain or breath gone off line. Which might be part of why we feel weak, or can’t balance, or are chronically sore somewhere. Effort and strain, oh my.
Posturally speaking, this deep front or core line lifts the arch of the foot, stabilizes the pelvis in relation to the legs and the low back in relation to the pelvis. It provides structure for the abdominal balloony cavity to balloon and the coursing wave of the diaphragm to diaphanate. It spaceifys the heart and lungs. It supports the delicate neck and the heavy head. The tongue is a rudder to the whole kinetic chain.
And then it gets biblical: James 3.1-12
1 Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.
2 We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.
3 When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal.
4 Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.
5 Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.
6 The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.
7 All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind,
8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness.
10 Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.
11 Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring?
12 My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.
I’ll leave you to ponder the mysteries. Except to point out that Vedic teachers say much the same thing: You rascal, says the śastra; first of all control your tongue. Then you can understand what is God.
In movement, this deep continuous and interdigitating line ‘does’ nothing independently (aside from flexion of the hip and wave of the diaphragm. And, I guess, tongue things like speech and food moving). But there is NO bodily movement that is outside of the core line’s influence. The line is surrounded, encased, knitted into other myofascia, all of which duplicate and synergize the roles played by the muscles of this deep inner line. It’s a cat’s cradle, a machine like sum-more-than-parts in which effort and strain are distributed and power amplified. The myofascia of the line itself is infused with dense fascia and more slow-twitch, endurance muscle fibers, reflecting the role the line plays in stability and subtle positional changes to the core structure. Tilt your head; your chest and belly and back muscles change. This allows the more superficial structures and lines to move the skeleton with more ease and efficiency.
Disconnect, compensation, injury or habit can interrupt this continuity. “Failure”, though I’d like a different word, along this line does not necessarily mean an immediate or obvious loss of function. We still walk. We seem to be fully mobile. Everything more or less works. There is not necessarily a sense of ‘pain’. We don’t even tend to know that there are pieces of us we don’t know. The body is remarkably resilient, and tends to be just fine. If something disconnects in this core line, its functions are easily and unconsciously transferred to outer lines and more superficial muscles. But the more superficial muscles do strain and fatigue, they knot and bulge. There may be slightly less elegance and grace, and more wear to joints and articulation.
The point here is not that there is something wrong with you. The point is that it is possible to experience things like ease, support, and integrity as a part of who you have always been. As part of your innate design. As a given.
When I purposively let my head shift ahead of my spine, or hang my tongue down in the bottom of my mouth, I can feel my psoas contract. Now it’s probably true that I have spent so many years feeling for these kinds of subtleties that it’s easy for me. And it’s also true that because I expect it to be there it is there. But I can feel the grip where my knees would be drawn into my chest in a fetal position, a tension without perceivable outcome and how exhausting that is. A futility. I can feel the whole shell of me coil around the face, the heart, the guts. All the actions of an armadillo. All the motions of a curl or a preparation to run, run away, run.
But then you wonder: chicken? egg? is my posture determining my thoughts, or are my thoughts forming my body and experience in this life? forget eggs and chickens: Big Bang? God?
One morning I found myself going through rather ridiculous looking tongue tension exercises, intended for singers, that I found on YouTube. A mirror is involved. I stick out my tongue and notice if it trembles. Does it puckers? Does it narrow? I grabbed my tongue between my thumb and forefinger. The YouTube coach suggested a tissue. I grabbed toilet paper. This pretty much dissolved and was useless. Spit all over my hands, I wiped them on my jeans and began again.
I had memories of studying Ayurveda in New Mexico. The tongue is said to be a window into what is happening on deeper layers of the body. Twitchy tongue: too much nerves and aggravated anxiety things. Too much mucus: lay off the cloying sweet things in life. Cracks and teeth indentations: somewhere, the person is not able to absorb what they take in. The line down the center of the tongue, I was taught, is a mirror of the spine.
But right now I was singing.
I lay my tongue, flat and broad, on my lower lip. The instructor, a flamboyant goateed man in a polo shirt, said “as if the lip is a fat, plush pillow for your broad, soft tongue.” I stick out my tongue (“don’t narrow it!” says my virtual coach) and start making a siren sound: beginning in the low range of my pitch, slowly raising my voice as high as it can go, then lowering it again. All while watching my tongue’s movement. “Does the tongue narrow?! Does it tremble? If so, you’ve got tongue tension, my friend!” says the theatrical man on YouTube. He then guides me through ten minutes of saying ‘glug glug glug glug’ and ‘hang hang hang hang’ and then ‘glug hang glug hang glug hang’.
My tongue, I was intrigued to note, did not present significant signs of tension.
After ten minutes of this, I chanted. Maybe expectation determined outcome, again, or simply the resonance of bathroom tiles, but it seemed I’d busted out some cherubim.
Anyone who has peered into anatomy knows: it’s a vortex. You go looking for a diagram or a definition and before you know what’s happening you’re considering jaws and vagus nerves and throats and swallowing and tastes and reflexes. You have to consider evolution. Then there are questions of human development to consider, infantitude, nature and nature: to what extent DOES ontogeny (embyrological to stages of development, slither to crawl to teeter to walk) recapitulate phylogeny (evolution of species)?
You touch on various branches of physics. Newtonian of course, but also fluid mechanics, how electricity sparks and travels in pulses. You start to consider temperature, suction, pressure, vacuums. Sucks and blows. And then there is chemistry with its salts and irons. Epigentics coiled and floating.
Its like star gazing: there is a pull, a velocity, a draw. Each thing you notice only reveals an adjacent cluster. You squint. You lean back. Micro. Macro. There are no definite or simple answers here. You stun quickly. Branches of science and their specialized jargon tease you: you know they mean something, but it is beyond or outside of what you know. You can - you do -regard it deeply, but regard is not necessarily comprehension.
Except for the fact that none of this is beyond or outside of you at all: it is quite literally inside of you. It is your own self. To this self gazing, some innate part of you responds. You don’t have a word or inkling for that response, either.
I once heard a woman speak of leaving her body. It was only a flicker, a teeny not even moment. There was her car spinning, and a nanosecond in which she lifted and said I’m not ready. She says she felt the thing that listens. But only for a moment. Then, car still spinning, she came back.
I remember wanting to die, aiming at it, and some bully thing raging up like a fist of wind to slap me back. No. It said. Not yet.
But I’m talking about this last week. Sitting in the back yard with bare feet and a hummingbird, chewing a piece of toast and reading about tongues. Reading about the tongue but brattily thinking about the psoas.
Both are deep, deep to the body; close, close to the fight flight and rest digest functions of the nervous system; both are super strong, but prone to all sorts of unrecognized because so normalized tensions; they tend to be emotionally tangled; they are a signal flare between postural things and psychological things; flippy.
But what is a tongue for? I wondered suddenly, over and again, each time as if it was a new question. I hit that point considering physiology, and then again from the perspective of biomechanics, and then again considering things like speech and the humanities, cultural and ethnographic peculiarities. In Tibet you stick out your tongue as a sign of affection. I thought of South and East African clicking languages. Wikipedia says “Anatomically, clicks are obstruents articulated with two closures (points of contact) in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by a sucking action of the tongue. In technical terms, clicks have a lingual ingressive airstream mechanism. The forward closure is then released, producing what may be the loudest consonants in the language, although in some languages…clicks can be more subtle and may even be mistaken for ejectives.” I thought of Maori ceremony. I thought of chef David Chang and his legendary palate. I thought of my grandfather, who sat each of his 21 grandchildren on his lap and put a dab of butter on their lower lip. I do and do not remember this happening.
This can become hopeless right quick, and like you just unlocked heaven’s gate in the next moment: what is the science of people?
Are people people because they science? Is science an expression of being human? But when we say “the science of people”, do we mean an objective or a subjective thing?
Aren’t, isn’t that, maybe the human question? To have both objective and subjective capacities? Which is to say, to be self-aware? To look at the world and oneself and think? To feel? To experience and then to wonder, fear, want? To have, ahem, a free will?
Free-ish will: stable but flexible, changeable within limits, beyond which splat.
Song muscle
We can say some general functional things about muscles, and the tongue is a muscle, so you’d assume: muscles move bones. Bones are the scaffold, the architecture, the quiet effortless support that can transfer strain without compressing. Muscles move that structure around in such a way that we hold ourselves together. Connective tissue weaves and stitches, melts and reforms, creating a strange thing that constantly changes shape but does not, unless forces are too great, become a blob or a splat. The baseball does not smash our hand bones because the hand magically and instantaneously becomes hard enough to resist the impact. Our muscles don’t pool at our ankles like a pair of trousers. Our heart doesn’t crush our lungs. We are a tensegrity: a vital expression of moving, melding net that has qualities of both responding to tensional forces and maintaining integrity.
We are capable of movement - within some parameters. And yet we are stable - to a certain extent.
This is what it means to be alive.
But already the tongue is different: the tongue, unique in the body of muscles, does not develop around a supporting bone. Well, not in the way muscles generally do. It is anchored to the hyoid. But the hyoid is unique amongst bones in being floating, not skeletal in a sense, not structure as we typically understand structure: it simply is not jointed to other bones. The hyoid bone is a non-articulating body. “Articulating”, when we are talking about bones, means joint movements. It means joined + movement. Articulations refer to both what is in relationship to what else and how those things move in relationship to one another. In the sense of normal speak, “articulating” means speaking. And perhaps this is what I’m getting at. The language of muscles and bones is movement.
But the tongue?
I suggest the native movement of the tongue is song. Speech. Language. Breath given meaning. The various movements of interaction and communion.
The soft flap of flesh we call ‘tongue’ is not one muscle, but a conglomerate of eight muscles. Four anchor to structures in the head and neck. One holds to the base of the skull, another to aforefloated hyoid. There is a muscle that grabs the lower jaw and another that sucks to the palate. These together propel the tongue from side to side, front to back, up and down.
The other four muscles make up the tongue’s body. These are what we tend to mean when we say ‘tongue’. They do not anchor. They simply relate to themselves. Rather than moving bone, these muscles intertwine and create a flexible matrix.
Because they are all muscle, no bone, the structure is supple and gymnastic. It has an enormous range of motion, but never loses its volume. It’s like a water balloon; if you poke it in one place, it’ll bulge somewhere else. Science calls this a muscular hydrostat. A muscular hydrostat performs hydraulic movement. In plain speak, the movement relies on the fact that water is effectively incompressible. Rather than compressing, it will slick and slide and shape shift. Elephant trunks are hydrostats, as are octopus tentacles and a mollusk’s foot.
Unattached and unaffiliated at the distal end, the tongue wags. The little slug. It more than wags. The tongue roils, coils, rolls, cusps, cups, wiggles, contorts, flaps, fattens, twists, galliwags, presses, pushes, palpates, pistons, salivates, hunkers, hews, suckles, glugs, savors, whips, slathers, points, narrows, licks, flattens, swings, spirals, sucks, pushes, pistons, toothpicks, presses, whips, slathers, teases, and it flips. Contortionist extraordinaire, the tongue is wild and willful. Maybe it’s a tension line unhooked; unhinged, whipping dangerously. My sharp tongue has certainly. I mean I know my tongue can be dangerous.
What for, therefore? What on earth and in creatology IS this thing?
If not, like ordinary muscle, to create movement, then what?
The tongue does create a movement, I suppose. Just a different kind of movement. This tongue rattles and flails in open air. The other end of this brawny little slipper isn’t mere self-reference, but interaction with the world. This flap-ability provides the shapes that create speaking, eating, and swallowing.
Chewing, suckling, singing.
Speech.
Sound.
Sentences!
The tongue’s articulation is song. And cursing.
Muscle Memory
The concept of ‘muscle’ can be misleading, as a muscle is made up of connective tissue, threaded with nerve fibers, a weave of strands that bundle up together. If you unweave all this connective tissue, “muscle” is nothing but a bit of juice. A splat without structure. Like the ‘orange’ part of an orange, separate the pith and you’ve nothing but a messy spurt. And although we have named and separated muscles in anatomy studies, though we mimic them with puppet strings and wire pulleys, the fact is we do not have hundreds of separate muscles: we have one muscle organized into six hundred or so different little sacks.
There is only one body wide function of the mind that whispers: muscle. One common to the whole body electocontractile fluid, carried and contained in some six hundred different fibrous cottony thready sacks. This oneness is organized in lines and weaves and layers like a tapestry. Beads of liquid, separated into distinct beads, that all probably remember being one body. This is so true that if, say, we can’t move one way, we tend to work around it without having to be conscious of the work around. This is so true that it’s false and rather silly to separate movement into ‘biceps’ or ‘hamstrings’ or ‘quads’, as if they could be isolated. My friend Jules Mitchell points this out. We are often taught that if the biceps contract, the triceps will ‘release’. But muscle movement isn’t that simple. We don’t work that mechanically. Go ahead: bend your elbow and touch your bicep with the opposite hand so you can feel it engage when you strike a Rosie the Riveter stance. Then, put your feeling hand on the back of the arm by the triceps. Theoretically, according to old science, this should go lax as you flex your bicep. But be Rosie and do a biceps curl again, this time feeling what happens in the tricep.
It fires too.
And how do these mucle things move? Well. Some of them are autonomic, like our heart and our digestion. And good thing, too. We’re not smart enough to handle the heart on our own. If we had to consciously choose to contract the heart, we’d of been dead very very long ago. We never would have made it out of the womb.
But we also have voluntary or somatic muscles. The ones we can flex. But even that functioning is much more subtle and symphonic and genius than we are: sure, we can ‘flex’ a muscle, but generally speaking we don’t have to, and we don’t. We just think ah! There’s a bee in my face! and swat it away. Or we want to grab something off a shelf: you don’t micromanage your way to do it, asking the whole kinetic chain to fire now this now that. No: your brain body just does it for you. You can think of doing Rosie biceps curls, but what your body actually does is a lot more like a symphony than a lever.
So, okay. Muscles move bones. But the tongue, now: it isn’t bone bearing, or bone locked, or bone anchored. No! So what is it doing? And can it be, perhaps, that a little tension or an old grind lives there? And what does that mean, bio psycho socially?
I figure the tongue plays a major role in infantile, instinctive, suck on a nipple actions. A learning to swallow. An infant’s tongue creates a piston: when the tongue maneuvers backward in the mouth, low pressure is generated that helps suck in a fluid when drinking.
I know: the things we’ve experienced in life hang out with us in muscle memory for a long time, subliminal and ever. Influential as hell. Sub, if I dare say so, lingual.
I bet the tongue - whatever it’s personally doing there in your mouth right at this moment- has been navigating your sense of comfort or fear, am I safe or should I howl, all this time. The whole of your merry or terry fied life.
I mean, once you were born, you had to figure out how to create that sucking pressure. But it’s never just about the one direction: we also had to figure out how to release that pressure at some point and go the other way. Otherwise our guzzling would drown us.
Here’s a thing: put the tip of your tongue on the upper pallet of your mouth, just behind the front top teeth. There are teeth, then a little bitty smooth elevated part, and then a hard protrusion. After that bony stalactite, you hit the ridges of the hard palate and then the soft again lift of the soft palate. I’m just interested in that boney stop just behind the front teeth. It’s called the alveolar process. Fancy fact: that protrusion is rich with receptors of the vagus nerve, the main line of am I in fight flight fawn or freeze? The tongue, when relaxed, actually puts a wee bit of pressure on this spot. When relaxed, the tongue is broad and high, touching the whole roof of the mouth, from root of tongue on the back of the mouth to tip resting right on that ridgey thing. Resting right there.
And you know what a kiddo is touching when they suck their thumb? That knob behind your front teeth.
That signal to the whole subconscious: safe, soothed, comforted.
Look at the feet, look at the face
I figured this bit out in novice teaching. I was specifically taught - as many of us are - to give cues from the ground up, establish foundations, root to rise…however it is you learned it. And this works: If I look at a person ‘doing’ a pose (or even, at this point, standing and walking), I can tell if they are stable, connected, and fluid by what’s happening in their feet. I will see little flickers in the ankles, color changes as the blood flows and muscles engage, micro adjustments. Alternately, if a person isn’t terribly in their body or is focused on an external idea of a shape, their feet are pretty dead. (Caveat: I think some of us worked so hard on ‘engaging’ our feet that that has become an overused pattern too. I know a lot of yogis who can’t let go of active toes. I tell em and they relax. But two seconds later I have to say it again.)
But somewhere along the line, I realized faces were important signals for me, too. Indicators of what is happening internally. Sure, a person might be ‘doing’ the pose beautifully, super concentrated, highly skilled. But when you look at their facial expression, you see hard hot eyes, gritted teeth, and veins popping out all over the place. Again, I think many of us know this and have practiced with it before: how often have you been doing a practice and then remembered or been cued to soften your gaze or relax your jaw? I’m just trying to make it explicit.
And again, I believe there is a continuity, a contiguity, from feet to face, anus to mouth. That is, it’s one thing to feel your feet and the sensations of ground, support, uplift, ground reaction force, mobility, capacity. It’s another, completely different thing to feel the face soften. Something altogether more subtle happens when I can do both, feel both, at the same time. Specifically, I have access to all sorts of bits and connections between the one and the other. I feel the whole. Suṣumna - the subtle body’s main drag, the plum line, the center of the center - is an experience rather than an idea. I giggle now when I’m doing something subtle with the pelvic floor and notice my lips starting to pucker.
I giggle, too, as I fumble with the Vedic chants in my mouth. My guts are dancing along.
Philomela’s Tongue Says
Melissa Studdard
you could mistake grief for a diamond
the way it shines when cut into, like fish
eyes in a boat’s drain. The eyes fly
into death seeing everything: the cloud
of alcohol in Sagittarius B2, the ten
billion-trillion-trillion carat diamond
in Centaurus, the soul swimming through
air with its tie hanging silver beneath it
like a kite string. But Philomela’s tongue
does not die. Shards of memory fall through
her, finding muscle at the shore where blood
meets vein, cutting the string that’s kept
her sanity tied to the root. In its place,
mute swans lie dormant beneath frozen
lakes of scar. Tereus says she cannot say
what happened. She says silence writhes
inside the walls of truth, like a fox thrashing
hot in a hound’s jaws, or a riled fly, frantic
to escape the hand that carries it to safety.