Domes of Uplift

About 5 years ago I was at a Pilates Conference taking a mat class with a teacher from Britain. (unfortunately I can’t remember her name).  She had us do a standing meditation where we aligned the domes of our arches with the dome of pelvic floor, the dome of our diaphragm and the roof of our mouth.  (For those of you who don’t know this; the roof of our mouth is where the top of the spine ends).

Once we were lined up, the instruction was simply to root down from our pelvic floor through our feet and to pull up from our pelvic floor up and out the top of the head.

This is an alternative method to finding our posture and experience centering.  It creates a completely different feeling than finding our posture through placing every bone and muscle in its correct place.  The sensation it creates is oddly freeing, and floaty, yet you are still arriving at improved alignment. 

Personally, the great thing for me was the ‘aha’ moment when I started doming up from my pelvic floor.  I finally got the strong internal lift that I had been missing with cues that referenced using my ‘pee’ muscles.  Adding a little squeeze together from my sitz bones and I was finally on my way to feeling the root of my pelvic floor and connecting to my transverse abdominals.

Wendy Leblance Arbuckle talks a lot about the domes of uplift.  It’s pretty interesting stuff.  Here’s a link: http://pilates.about.com/od/technique/a/Good-Posture-and-Gravity.htm