01
Muscle Meridians
The Spontaneous Interface
About this workshop
The Muscle Meridians are your external energetics: the spontaneous interface between you and the world around you. They work beneath conscious thought, instinctively, reflexively and often out of habit. Through them you receive the world (sensory) and act on it (motor).
When stress gets locked into this interface, your relationship with the world loses its ease. In Classical Chinese Medicine this interface is associated with, and expressed through, the sinews: the muscles, tendons and ligaments. A tight jaw, a held breath or lower back pain can be read as the body’s struggle to find balance with the external environment. This workshop teaches you to read these responses with muscle monitoring and to resolve them, so you can return to a more natural, spontaneous flow with the world around you.
Day One: Learning the instrument
Muscle monitoring is the foundation of everything in the Self-Cultivation Energetics series, so we begin there. You’ll learn how a muscle works as a feedback gauge for your nervous system, how to calibrate yourself before you begin, and how to read what the muscle is telling you. Day One is hands-on from the start. You’ll practise with a partner first, then move on to testing yourself, until the technique feels natural. A week between Day One and Days Two and Three gives you time to practise.
Days Two and Three: The Muscle Meridians
The twelve Muscle Meridians follow a story: standing up and moving forward, reaching out, taking hold, letting go, and finally coming to rest in completion. Each one carries a theme within that story, and when we’re under pressure we tend to get stuck at a particular point in it.
Over the two days you’ll explore:
• an introduction to Classical Chinese Medicine and its five channel systems, and how this applied philosophy gives the whole series its map
• the Muscle Meridian sequence, and how its movement story gives each channel its psycho-emotional theme
• how to put an issue “in circuit”, find which Muscle Meridian is asking for attention, and bring in the affirmation that resonates with it
• techniques for downloading stress out of the body’s hidden compensations and into its whole energy system, so it can be worked with and resolved
• the Trinity Correction, a three-part acupressure sequence that works with Heaven, Humanity and Earth (spirit, energy and essence) to help a shift settle
What you'll leave with
A practical way of checking in with yourself that you can use any day. It is a skill you practise, not a theory you memorise.
Good to know
• This is a self-development workshop. You learn to work on yourself, not on other people (partner practice is only for learning the skill).
• No prior kinesiology experience is needed.
• The work is complementary to medical care and doesn’t replace it.
• Workshop 1 is three days and is the starting point for the series. Muscle monitoring is learned in person.