The Deep Core Belongs To You

It was Thomas Myers that taught me about the deep core through his book, Anatomy Trains. I have been studying it for many years intensively. To me the deep core seems like such a basic and intuitive idea that it is hard for me to imagine that Myers actually discovered it.

It would be like discovering that you live in a small valley by a nice river. You have always lived there so what does it mean when you “discover” the fact of it? It is a very wonderful and pleasant thing but in the case of the deep core it seems bigger and older than that somehow. It has a life of its own. It seems like we’ve known each other forever even though we are supposed to have just met. It is clear to me, moreover, that in many ways my own deep core knows me far better than I do myself. The reciprocity is real.

The deep core is the repository of our most meaningful tissues, filled with social and emotional associations. The myofascial system in particular represents the plasticity of the brain very well. This is where we can find deep somatic strength and heal the imbalances in our system.

It has always been there but we just weren’t aware of it. We weren’t aware that it is a single system with its own animal sense of self identity. It is like a very stable and steadfast bodily mirror of the self. Between the rider and the horse it is the horse.

A kind of a permahug might be one way to describe the muscular sensation. It is a form of knowing ourselves from the inside out, utilizing the sensory motor skill of interception. It is simple and anatomical and muscular.

Each subsystem, each major juncture, also has a strong sense of identity and stability when we engage it. We do this through the single, prominent bony affordance located at the center of the region’s skeletal structure. The jaw for example is at the center of the orofacial and cervical sensory station. It is very instructive to study these bones a little bit because they clearly seem to be designed to attract our attention. Their role is as an affordance or servomechanism and they are the center of coordination for the region.

The deep core is a body part that you want to know about. The deep core body map is a simple graphic that is easy to remember and functions like a marionette control handle. In other words when we hold it in our minds we can find our awareness, our self, coming from within the sensory motor system, our animal mind.