To B(union) or not to B(union) that’s the question….or is it.

Bunions

Yes I know it’s Sunday morning and most people are weirded out by feet especially before 8am but come on, hands up, who has a bunion??

Whose big toe is pointing inwards rather than forwards??

I have worked with numerous clients who struggle with bunions and pain around their feet and toes which the medical teams have said….”SURGERY….ITS THE ONLY OPTION…..CUT THAT FUCKER UP!!!”

Ok maybe they didn’t use that language or shout it but that’s their basic gist.

Far to often the idea is just to cut and shut things which don’t look/feel right…but what if that bunion is there for a reason?

The body is bloody clever and will not do things without a good cause or reason and when it comes to the feet, they are no exception. 

The big toe (along with every other stucture in the foot) should constantly be moving in 3 planes of motion throughout the gait cycle. There should be up and downy movements, left and righty movements and round and rounds movements (those aren’t the technical terms) 

So what if you hurt some part of the foot and it stops moving properly? Could another part of the foot start to have to move more to make up for the lack of movement in that part?

Well yes. 

The movement seen at the 1st toe joint is actually an exaggerated version of what should happen when our foot pronates (which it should do every step we take) but due to issues within the foot or body is unable to stop doing it. 

If your foot cannot probate, your body may well try one or more of a bunch of things to try to get the same loading of tissues that is required for effective efficient movement…and abduction (the big toe moving towards the second toe) is one such option it can take. 

It’s like it’s trying to say “LOOK IM PULLING THIS FUCKING TOE IN THIS DIRECTION…WHEN IS THE REST OF THE FOOT/LEG/BODY GOING TO FOLLOW!!!!”

Without use understanding the 3 dimensional movement of the foot and working to improve how the foot moves as a whole, cutting the bunion back and just pulling the toe straight NEVER gets to the root cause of the issue. So guess what, the toe returns back to the same space again asking the same question

“SERIOUSLY GUYS….LOOK IM PULLING THIS FUCKING TOE IN THIS DIRECTION FOR A LEGITIMATE REASON, LISTEN TO ME THIS TIME…WHEN IS THE REST OF THE FOOT/LEG/BODY GOING TO FOLLOW AND GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK FROM DOING ALL THE PISSING WORK DOWN HERE!!!!”

So the moral of the story is that your body is WAY cleverer than you are. Admit it, accept it and begin to learn from it. 

A bunion is there to tell you something needs to change in the way you move your feet and body. That pain it’s causing is asking you, not so politely, to take some interest in understanding how this wonder of evolution that we stroll about in works and functions and to give it some better inputs. 

If you have a bunion and you have been told that it needs surgery, before you go down that route, hit me up, surgery should always and only ever be a last resort.

Let’s work together to make you feel better in your feet so you can spread the word and we can take a whole heap of pressure off the NHS by stopping do so many needless operations. 

Remember I work in person and online both equally successfully so no reason to not let me help you learn more about your feet and get them moving better for less pain. 

Why is breathing so important for meditation??

There is so much talk these days about the important of yoga and meditation for a myriad of mental and physical health conditions. 

Gp’s prescribing meditation for anxiety and depression and much more. Same with yoga, you have back pain?? Go do yoga ( il come back to this for another blog soon) but the meditation one is important and needs to be broken down a little bit. 

How many people have you heard say, I can’t meditate, my brain is too busy, too full etc etc?!? Maybe you are one of them. 

If so, just know that it’s not, you’re not alone and that it’s a completely normal thing to feel. Most of the people feeling this are people who, as already mentioned are doing it for anxiety/depression/mental health reasons and already don’t really understand why their headspace is where their headspace is. 

Why can’t i shut off?! Why does my mind never let me get a minutes peace?!! I can’t just sit cos my brain is too busy….these are all tropes I’ve heard sooo many times and who know what?!? It’s not their fault, our society has basically enforced this pattern of thinking, this bodily response on us and yet know one has pointed it out to us.

Modern society has evolved and developed so rapidly in the last 150 years that we can’t keep up, our nervous system evolved on the wide open planes of the savanna (well certainly in Africa) and it hasn’t had the ability to suddenly get used to 24/7 news, shopping, smart phones, light in our eyes 20 hours a day, working more hours than resting, exciting/scary/funny tv shows, cunts on the road cutting us up…anything, put anything from the modern world in here and it basically fits to put us into a bodily response of “oh shit”

So what?!? What’s your point wibbs, just fucking get on with why breathing is key to mediation. 

Ok,

In yoga (well raja yoga) we have 8 limbs. 8 steps that lead us to unity (after all that’s what yoga means, unity) with ourselves and our world and surroundings, both on the gross and subtle meanings. The first 2 are basically like the 10 commandments, the do’s and ding’s to live a good life (more on these to come) 

THEN we have the asana….this is what everyone thinks yoga is, the physical practice, the bending yourself into a pretzel, the sweet ass skinny sexy middle age, white women looking wonderful in the lulu lemon shops window. This part of the practice is suppose to help build a body that’s comfortable sitting. That’s it’s, it’s designed to removed the discomforts and allow you to sit. It’s all just the beginning of the journey, a little prep for what’s to come. 

NOW we come to pranayama, or the breathing side of things, notice movement is a prep for the breathing, interesting ay, how many of you go to a yoga class and do 1-2 minutes breathing followed by an hours movement, got that the wrong way round ay. So the idea is that in this fourth limb of the practice, we slow and calm the body and the mind. We use the breath, which is really the ultimate tool we have at our disposal, to calm our nervous system. Unlike any other animal on the planet, we can deliberately take control of our breath to harness different physiological states. THIS is what’s so important

The ability to spend 5-10 minutes focusing on slowing the breath, brings the body back to the savanna, back to a state of equilibrium. It slows the heart rate, lowers the blood pressure, up regulates the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) ans down regulates the sympathetic (fight or flight). 

All those things we mentioned earlier (cunts, tv shows, 24/7 everything) keep us permanently trapped in our fight and flight response. This keeps us on high alert, waiting for the tiger/lion/snake/hippo whatever other African animals might wanna eat us. How do you think you can meditate if you don’t prepare for it first?!? 

The next 4 limbs of the 8 yogic limbs are then where we begin the mediation journey…but of course as with everything, us westerners just want to skip all the important prep work and just do the 10 Minutes meditation. We just want a quick fix pull, we don’t actually wanna put any work in. 

Well I say to you, if that’s the case, don’t worry so much about paying for a meditation app, instead come join me every Wednesday evening 7-7:30pm (quick plug for my online yoga membership 😝🤣😉🤷‍♂️) and instead of trying to meditate for your mental health, why not try and breathe for it instead. 

You might just find that the states you find in the breathwork practice do actually just lead you to a place that meditation then just becomes the natural next step and you do it not for medical/Health reason but more to discover much more about your self fundamentally. 

I hope this little overview was of interest, if you are looking for a simple breathing practice To follow until you come join me online every Wednesday (just click here to sign up www.mandukyayoga.com/become-a-member)  try just sitting, setting a alarm for 3 minutes, close your eyes and breathe through your nose, just focus on nothing but breathing through your nose for 3 minutes. If you do need something a bit more definite to follow, try breathing in for a count of 3-4 seconds and 5-6 seconds out (adjust these as needed if they are too long just focus on the exhale being longer than the inhale). When the 3 minutes is up see how you feel. Hopefully you will just feel a bit more settled calm and quiet in the head. If so you have found a practice that you can go to as and when your brain gets busy ay. 

Why I went from being a nurse to a yoga teacher.

Life on the front line in Accident and Emergency as a nurse

Having been a nurse for 10 years ish, I had really started to get fed up with seeing the short sighted way patients were treated within the hospital/general practice. I had spent half my career in coronary care and half in accident and emergency and I always felt as if we were trying to shut the gate after the horse had bolted (or what ever the saying is.)

Now I understand that by the time people get into hospital teaching people to understand their health and physiology is too late, but it inspired me to want to help prevent people having to get to the stage of being in hospital. There are a whole bunch of things that we can’t do a whole bunch about with our health (environment toxins, genetic variability etc), but there is also so so so so much that can be done to improve your chances of living a happy and healthy life. 

One of the biggest things I notice is the amount of people who come into hospital chronically, overly mouth breathing. It is now seen as normal for people to have a respiratory rate (amount of times breathing in and out a minute) of 20.

Yoga teaches us, through the practice of pranayama, to be able to slow our breathing and find self awareness. When we slow our breathing and use our noses in particular, there is/should be  a knock on effect which slows our heart rates and lowers our blood pressure (and can even help control blood sugars for you diabetics too) Cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the western world these days and having higher bloody pressure and heart rates will play a major part in this (hence why you get prescribed medication to help lower both) 

A slower life of stillness in yoga

Pranayama teaches us to become far more aware of being present and in the moment which helps to alleviate feelings of stress and anxiety which also increase our risk of cardiovascular disease. In todays modern busy go go go society, stress and anxiety have become ubiquitous and something that many actually look on like a badge of honour. In my eyes this really really needs to change. Stress causing anxiety and panic attacks can play havoc with mental health and is becoming increasingly common, especially among teens and younger adults. There is a physiological reason stress can cause people to panic and cause anxiety which if understood can be leveraged to bring back a sense of calm and inner peace

Yoga isn’t exactly a panacea for all lifestyle conditions, I have realised many things in yoga miss out a lot on an understanding of modern physiology but there is so much that we as health professionals could learn from the world of yoga .

So if you are someone who is worrying about there health or have been told they need to start looking after themselves, finding a decent yoga teacher that has a decent understanding of movement, breathing and the physiology behind them, can be a great place to start. I have tried to just highlight a little bit about how the breathing side of yoga can play a crucial roll in taking control of your own lifestyle and health, there is another essay that can be written about the joy that can come from the physical aspect of asana (yoga poses) but I will save that for another day.

If you are interested in learning more about yoga/breath work and health why not sign up for our news letter and our online membership at https://www.mandukyayoga.com/become-a-member (the news letter sign up will appear as a pop up) where you can have access to 11 weekly classes of movement, yoga, Breathwork and meditation all for £15 a month with both myself and my beautiful wife Jenny, who is also a long standing nurse with backgrounds in vascular care, accident and emergency and much more

"6 million adults do not do a monthly brisk 10 minute walk..."

Oh..pre-lockdown unsocially distanced walks…weren’t they just the best

4 out of 10 (41%) adults aged 40 to 60 in England walk less than 10 minutes continuously each month at a brisk pace - PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND!

Thats right…You read that correctly. 6 million adults aged 40-60 dont even get 10 minutes of alking in A MONTH…A FUCKING MONTH. how crazy is that?!?! This statistic is taken from the govenements own website, gov.uk.

Now there are obviously numerous health benefits to moving. We are all told about the benefits to our cardiovascular health, the reduced chance of heart attacks, strokes, raised blood pressure etc etc, but i want to bring up some ideas of moving for our skeleton.

Approximatly 5% of the uk population as a diagnosis of Osteoporosis. This is a a condition in which bones loose their strength and density and are more prone to breaking (sometimes just a sneeze can break a rib) but why do our bones become fragile?

Throughout “human” history (im talking the last million or so years) bone density was never an issue (obvs there was a lot else to worry about ) and that actually since bone scans show that our ancestors had far better bone density than we do now.

“Density remained high throughout human evolution until it decreased signigicantly in modern humans, suggesting a possible link between chaged in our skeletn and increased sedentism.”

— Habiba Chirhir, Tracy Kivell - recent origins of low reabecular bone density in modern humans. 2015

Image taken from Primate Change - Vybarr Cregan-Reid. (great book well worth a read)

So us getting cleverer with out time and ability to pass off work to machines has had a pretty massive affect on out bodies. It has meant that all the hard manual work we once would have done doesnt need to be done by hand any more. It means that we dont need to walk the 5 minutes to the shop cos we can drive.

As a species we literally evolved to walk and run..we came out of the trees and off 4 limbs and onto the african plains on two legs. we discovered the world through walking. Our hips, our spines our feet all evolved to make this our go to form of movement. Fuck exercise and the gym…we all know no one likes them things really (jokes all my gym loving buddies i know how much you guys really do haha) but walking is the greatest tool at your disposal to help load your bones. yes loading with weights is helpful but your own body weight is more than enough, you just need to give it a good old go.

Start with 5 minutes walk a day. thats basically around the block right?!?! thats totally doable, right?

After a week and when your bored of those views up it to 10 minutes. Thats like 1/3 of an episode of friend/scrubs/insert favourite sitcom...Nothing Ay?!?!

“Everything Needs to move”

— Gary Ward - Anatomy In Motion

Just remember that while pretty much EVERY fit person has to will themselves to get up and at it, our whole body does need to move and be loaded. We as a species have not evolved to want to “exercise”. Traditionally Its a massive waste of hard fought for energy (im talkimg hunter gatherer era humans here) and so why the fuck would they walk/run/jump/climb/build muscle in excess, when they needed all the energy from their catch to last them till their next meal.

Also remember that its NORMAL to want to take the lift/esculator rather than the stairs..but again, our whole body NEEDS TO MOVE, just start looking at these movements as your free gym. Fuck going and getting all sweaty on a treadmill, just take your body for a walk and pay attention to it. Go slow and steady and let it build up and adapt to the new loads (this is important and as humans our egos tell us we can do that…what ever that is….most of the time it cant and then you get put off doing it again when everything starts to ache and hurt.)

If you need to, come see me or another AiM practioner to ge your feet and legs moving as they should and enjoy moving your own body again. Its amazing the difference you will feel and how much you will enjoy it when things move as they should

Why dont we look at this whole 2020 lockdown bullshit as the perfect oppertunity to get out of the house for small little walks and strolls and to get back in touch with ourselves and with nature. Why not also take your shoes off and walk about barefoot in the grass..let all them nerves in the feet actually feel something. you won’t regret it.