It's the Psoas, stupid!

Before I had my hip replacement, Jeff Martens (one of my favorite yoga teachers) , came to visit me. He brought with him a book about the muscles involved in yoga, and somehow we got into a big discussion about the psoas. In yoga, the psoas is known as the place where people hold unpleasant emotional memories. Clearly, before my surgery, my psoas had gotten so tight that I couldn't extend my left leg flat on the ground while laying on my back. Jeff's thought was that the holding in my psoas represented a failure to deal properly with the grief from both my mother's and my husband's deaths six months apart --which I tried to shove under the rug because I was working for Intel at the time.

But after my surgery, I'm still in pain when I try to bear weight on my left leg. And where? At the site of the psoas.

I had asked my physical therapist why I still limped when I tried to walk without the cane, and she merely dismissed me as too early in the process. However, I disagreed, and today when I went into the PT place I saw a different therapist. This therapist tagged it immediately: my psoas was still contracted. She spent most of the therapy releasing it, and at the end of the session, I walked with almost no limp! This is promising.