01/13/2026
The Muscle of the Soul - The Psoas. So many of you have had my psoas work. This should all be familiar.
Lets get educated 📕 👩🎓
The psoas is a deep core muscle, actually a pair of them, running on either side of the spine. It starts at the lower thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, T12 through L5, and travels down through the pelvis to attach at the top of the femur on the inner hip. You can’t see it, it's hard to touch it. It lives behind the organs, the surface muscles, woven into the your body that literally holds you upright. It is the only muscle that directly connects your spine to your legs, which already tells you it has opinions about how safe it is to stand, move, or exist.
Because of where it sits, the psoas is in constant conversation with the nervous system. It responds reflexively to threat, contracting to flex the hips and protect the vital organs, pulling the body into a defensive curl or preparing it to flee. This happens faster than thought. Before you label fear or decide anything, the psoas has already tightened. It is a survival muscle first, a movement muscle second, and it remembers everything.
When fear is repeated, chronic, or unresolved, the psoas stays shortened. It holds that pattern as a kind of embodied memory. Not a story you can recall on demand, but a felt sense of vigilance, a background tension that shapes posture, breath, and emotional tone. This is why the psoas carries so much of the body’s stress load. It is central to nervous system regulation, quietly determining whether you feel safe enough to soften or must remain braced against the world.
Releasing the psoas can feel strangely emotional, disorienting, or relieving in ways people don’t expect. You’re signaling safety to one of the oldest survival systems in the body. The release happens slowly, through gentleness rather than force, because the psoas only lets go when it trusts that the danger is over.
This is where the phrase “muscle of the soul” comes from as physiology meeting experience. When the psoas softens, the spine reorganizes, the breath drops deeper, the nervous system shifts out of survival mode. People report feeling grounded, present, and inhabiting their bodies more fully, as if they’ve stopped hovering above themselves and finally landed.
The psoas needs to be reassured, and when it finally believes you, it gives back something profound... a body that no longer has to hold fear in place just to keep you alive.
How to release - with ease.
They’re deceptively simple, which is exactly why they work and why people dismiss them. The psoas doesn’t respond to force. It responds to safety, rhythm, and repetition.
1. Knees bent, gentle hip lift and drop
On your back, knees bent, feet on the floor. You slowly raise your hips a few inches and let them drop back down. Not a thrust. Not a bridge. Just a soft lift and a surrender back to gravity. This creates a passive lengthening and a rebound through the psoas, sending a clear signal to the nervous system that it can discharge without effort. The drop is the important part. That’s where the letting go happens. Do it for one minute and resist the urge to “do” anything more.
2. Legs flat, gentle side-to-side jiggle
Still on your back, legs long and relaxed. You softly jiggle the legs side to side, letting the movement ripple up through the hips and into the low spine. This oscillation interrupts holding patterns and invites involuntary release. Think soothing, not shaking. This is vagal tone work as much as it is muscular. The psoas begins to soften when it senses rhythm without demand. One minute is enough if you’re actually letting the legs be loose.
3. Legs straight, tapping the big toes together
On your back, legs straight, you gently tap the big toes together and apart. Small movement. Almost boring. That subtle midline activation engages the deep hip flexors without triggering defense. It brings the nervous system into coherence and encourages bilateral release through the psoas. People often feel warmth, tingling, or a deep exhale here. Again, one minute. No strain.
Done daily, these work because they retrain the baseline. You’re teaching the psoas that release is safe and familiar. Over time, the muscle stops gripping preemptively. The nervous system spends less energy on background vigilance. Breath deepens, sleep improves, emotional reactivity drops.
