The Body's Pressure System
You have more than one diaphragm. On the most important muscle in the body, and the quiet architecture of pressure that holds us together.
If you asked me to name the most important muscle in the body, I would not say the heart, and I would not say anything you can see in a mirror. I would say the respiratory diaphragm — the wide dome of muscle that sits beneath your lungs and moves every breath of your life.
If I could only work one muscle, that would be it.
Consider what lives against it. The kidneys and the spleen tuck up into it. The liver rests beneath it. The esophagus and the vagus nerve — the great calming nerve of the body — pass directly through it. When the diaphragm is free, everything around it gets gently massaged thousands of times a day. When it is restricted, everything around it holds its breath too.
More than one diaphragm
And here is the part almost nobody is taught: you have more than one. The pelvic floor is a diaphragm at the base of you. There is another at the top, inside the head. Between them, the body is built as a series of pressurized chambers, and those diaphragms keep the pressures in relationship — chest to belly to pelvis to head.
This is why a restriction in one chamber can show up as a symptom in another. It is why breath reaches places you would never expect, and why freeing a diaphragm can change something that seemed unrelated — digestion, a headache, a low back that would not let go.
Try noticing your own breath today — not changing it, just noticing. Where does it move? Where does it not? The places that do not move are usually the places with a story to tell.
— Leigh Ankrum