Hip stretches

I've really got into doing hip stretches in the last few weeks.

Trolling the Runner's World website, I came across a couple of wonderful videos with professional athletes, smiling and calmly brushing away a stray lock from an immaculate hairdo, while demonstrating a series of eye-popping stretches for the hips, core and abdominal muscles.

Most of these exercises are done on all fours - well, actually, less than all fours since they involve extending an arm and its opposite leg, or raising a leg parallel to the floor with knee bent at a forty five degree angle, or doing 'donkey kicks' backwards as far as possible, or extending and rotating the leg forward and outward, then reversing, and other amazing movements that leave me gasping, dripping, and exhilarated.

I've been doing rather gentler hip rotations for some years now, lying on my back to engage the abs, and also during the closing portion of my morning stretch routine, standing on one leg and rotating the hip in both directions nine times, then switching legs.

Then I follow my marvellous chi kung teacher Minke's instructions to rotate at the waist in each direction 'as if writing on the ceiling with a pencil sticking out from the top of your head'. This is relatively easy; yet when my hands drop down on either side from the waist to the hip, and I begin to rotate the pelvis and hips, my breath catches. Shame and self-consciousness inflame my face and I bring my unsteady attention back to the pelvis, dropping down into the core anxiety, the clenched root of neurosis.

I am outraged and embarrassed each time I manage to say this out loud. (Will they call me mad like Wilhelm Reich?) Toilet training is the primal lock on the ecstatic energy that streams through the infant's body. Before we know better, we are taught to clamp down on that undifferentiated libidinal flow. We learn too early to tighten our sphincters, often beyond our conscious control. We are conditioned (by banal triggers, the dull semiotics of pornography - inflated breasts or pectoral muscles, the numbing boredom of repetitive genital banging) to associate release with both pleasure and shame; the orgasm we get to experience is more guilty spasm than abandoned flow.

So when I do hip stretches, and manage to breathe into the anxiety, I am liberating not just the muscles of my hip and knee and calf and ankle that I use for running; I am unfastening the shackles of a rusty body/mind armour I want badly to let go. Who would have thought loosening your hips would help you lose your mind?!