Psoas pain can be a genuinely weird thing. If you break a bone you know it. If you sprain your ankle you feel it. If you have a strange groin pain that wraps around from the front towards your back you have no idea what is going on. Welcome to the mystery of psoas pain.
Psoas pain can take many different forms but it is rarely something you can directly point to. And more often than psoas pain itself, is the fact that psoas dysfunction can lead to trouble in many different areas of the body. Going back to the broken leg— if you compensate for the broke leg while healing and then go back to your previous patterns (which rarely happens but that’s another post) then no harm done. When psoas pain leads the body astray it often manifests far from the source. It gets to be a bit of a cliché when a client comes in complaining about knee pain and I say. “It’s a problem with your psoas.” And then the next person comes in with a neck problem and I say again, “psoas”. One reason is that this mysterious muscle is simply not on the radar of so many healthcare practitioners so I am sort of cheating when I can blithely tell clients that their psoas is at the heart of the issue. What I offer takes a leap of faith. I advertise that I can help your assorted pains simply by the way you walk. While I genuinely think that what I do will eventually be a mainstream practice/therapy, right now I am often an option of last resort after people have seen numerous doctors and practitioners who have not helped them. So it might be simplifying things but my basic take is that if a host of qualified professionals has not helped someone the mystery of psoas pain is probably in play. The psoas is the most important muscle in the body for three reasons:
- It holds us upright above the pelvis
- It walks us through life
- It warehouses our unprocessed trauma
Learning about this muscle can help with unresolved pain that you might be experiencing and also inform you as to how critical it is to the general functioning of the body and our ageing process
