Muscle Education-- Tensor Fasciae Latae Muscle

The Tensor Fasciae Latae (TFL) muscle is a bilateral hip stabilizer, which also assists in hip abduction (moving the leg away from the midpoint). A strained or stagnant TFL can cause trigger point pain and sometimes, since not all the fibers may be firing adequately, can give you the feeling that your hip “gives out”. A skilled myofascial therapist can help you identify the muscle and together you can discover if the culprit (or one of the culprits) of you hip discomfort is indeed the TFL. You can self-access it with a foam roller if you are an adventurous explorer and can shape your body into the proper positions to adequately get enough body weight pressure onto this hip stabilizer. A Muscle Stick can also work wonders.
Questions? Feel free to email me from this site or at tricia@triciaschwaba.com and we can together shed more light on this key muscle in hip health.
Remember— muscles like oxygen and hydration and to be passively massaged/compressed to keep full pranic and blood flow. You have the power to keep your muscles healthy and happy— but first you must get to know and love them!
Sending love & healing your way.

Tricia :)

Ram Dass on Trees

Photo Source: Monopole

“Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

Dark Night of the Soul

“There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light.”

Maria Popova, from The Marginalian

John Steinbeck on Humans

“We have looked into the tide pools and seen the little animals feeding and reproducing and killing for food. We name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits so that we say, “This species typically does thus and so,” but we do not objectively observe our own species as a species, although we know the individuals fairly well. When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species. If we used the same smug observation on ourselves that we do on hermit crabs we would be forced to say, with the information at hand, “It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind. It is not known whether this be caused by a virus, some airborne spore, or whether it be a species reaction to some meteorological stimulus as yet undetermined.” Hope, which is another species diagnostic trait — the hope that this may not always be — does not in the least change the observable past and present. When two crayfish meet, they usually fight. One would say that perhaps they might not at a future time, but without some mutation it is not likely that they will lose this trait. And perhaps our species is not likely to forgo war without some psychic mutation which at present, at least, does not seem imminent. And if one place the blame for killing and destroying on economic insecurity, on inequality, on injustice, he is simply stating the proposition in another way. We have what we are. Perhaps the crayfish feels the itch of jealousy, or perhaps he is sexually insecure. The effect is that he fights. When in the world there shall come twenty, thirty, fifty years without evidence of our murder trait, under whatever system of justice or economic security, then we may have a contrasting habit pattern to examine. So far there is no such situation. So far the murder trait of our species is as regular and observable as our various sexual habits.”

from The Marginalian