I've been thinking a lot lately about how Ortho-Bionomy goes great with yoga.
Several forms of yoga, a discipline with over 5000 years of history, include the physical practice of positioning the body to enhance function and release tension. These positions put certain parts of the body under stretch while other parts are placed in a position of relaxation.
At first, you wouldn't think that this is similar to Ortho-Bionomy, but it is.
Probably because Ortho-Bionomy releases are based on the principle of exaggerating a position of ease while yoga asanas (poses) aren't always positions that are easy. In fact, many asanas are quite challenging to us at first, especially because of the sedentary life that we're living these days.
Also, Ortho-Bionomy usually consists of shortening or "slackening" tissues which can be summed up to be like speaking to the body in a language of likes, while yoga poses often require us to lengthen or stretch our tissues, which is a language of opposites.
However, I bet you didn't realize that often during yoga, when you're stretching one region of your body, you're also slackening another. As is in the case of the Bow pose where we're stretching and opening up the front line of our body while simultaneously slackening our posterior chain.
How about the Plough pose? Your neck is fully flexed and slackened in the front of the body while being stretched in the back. Same goes for your abdomen and all those tissues.
Bow Pose - Dhanurasana
Plough Pose - Halasana
The thing is, what we must consider is that in order to get a complete release to a region such as we do in positional release therapy and Ortho-Bionomy, we must hold that position for a total of 3-30 seconds, depending on the persons nervous system.
So think about what's possible if we hold certain yoga poses and use yoga as a way to release our contractions, rather than just taking a Vinyasa/Power yoga class and using it as a workout.
What other yoga poses do you consider to be positional releases?