What is The Movement System

If you’ve ever had a therapeutic treatment that focuses on the meridians, whether acupuncture meridians, or myofascial meridians, you have probably experienced relief of a problem through work done to a seemingly unrelated part of the body. Perhaps you resolved a shoulder pain by going to an acupuncturist and feeling release of the tension after having needles placed in the legs, for example. How is it that treatment of a part of the body so distal to the area of complaint can elicit such a potent response, yet trying to stretch into the pain and focus all your self-care on the affected joint seems to do very little?

Your body is a unit. Nothing operates independently. The more you try to segment the body into parts, the further away you get from the reality that the whole body is involved in everything we do. Everything you do is involved in your state of health. Not just what you do, but how you’re doing it. Unnatural habitual patterns lead to patterns of distortion. These patterns come from unnatural activities, and guess what, if you live in society, you can’t avoid unnatural activities. Learning what Sotai has to teach you can help identify and transform those habitual patterns, while giving you the tools to counterbalance unavoidable unnatural stressors of modern life.

Sotai is ultimately about developing the body awareness to modify your movement habits in a way that helps you facilitate your body’s own natural healing process. Essentially this is training your habits to get out of your own way and let your body maximize its self-regulatory potential.

There are two muscular systems in the body; smooth muscle, the tissue that makes up most of our internal organs and other structures that are under the involuntary control of our autonomic nervous system; and striated muscle which makes up our voluntary skeletal muscle. Striated muscles are used to actively move our bodies and are an integral part of our movement system. When we talk about the movement system, this includes, bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments, striated voluntary muscle, fascia, and skin. The nervous system is also associated with the movement system. The movement system includes everything that works directly for the purpose of displacing our bodies, changing physical position, and breathing. Restoring and maintaining balance in this system is the main scope of Sotai healing exercise.

It pains me to use this cliche, but everything is connected. When one part of the body moves, it creates a chain reaction that reverberates through the entire body. In a sense, when one part of the body moves, it creates a chain reaction. If movement can undulate through the body without impediment the body is healthy, but if there is distortion anywhere in the body, compensations will be made that overtime will create more stress in the body if not addressed. The realization that the body moves as a whole and that disease is often the result of unnatural movements and the resulting accumulation of deformation is central to the Sotai viewpoint.