01/11/2025
Elena K., a former dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, once said that none of her thousand students ever needed surgery.
Her rule was simple:
you’re not allowed to hold tension that doesn’t belong to the movement.
It turns out she was describing, decades ago, what modern biomechanics now confirms.
Harvard research on chronic co-contraction - the tiny, unnecessary tightening of muscles in the jaw, shoulders, or abdomen - shows that it can increase spinal compression by up to 40%, even while sitting.¹
In other words, most pain and “poor posture” are not caused by weakness, but by irrelevant effort.
We grip through the day in microscopic ways: clenching the jaw while typing, bracing the stomach in conversation, tightening the neck when we think.
These are not muscular problems; they’re nervous-system patterns - traces of vigilance and anticipation that have outlived their purpose.
When we begin to notice and refine these micro-movements, the body reorganises itself.
It learns the difference between useful activation and defensive contraction.
This is what nervous-system regulation really is - and what “trauma release” actually refers to: not catharsis or shaking wildly, but the precise unwinding of effort that no longer serves function.
In my work, I’m less interested in what moves - and more in what moves unnecessarily.
That’s where freedom, and repair, begin.
¹ Harvard Biomechanics Study on Co-Contraction and Postural Load, Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, 2018.
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