This is the twelfth post in a series on primitive reflexes and Blomberg Rhythmic Movement Training. If you’re new here, start with the Field Guide to Primitive Reflexes for the big picture. The previous post covered the Emotional Triad — how Fear Paralysis, Moro, and Tendon Guard work together as a stress response cascade.
You’ve tried massage. It helped for a few days. Maybe a couple weeks. Then the shoulders crept back up toward your ears, the low back seized again, the jaw tightened overnight.
You’ve tried chiropractic. The adjustment felt wonderful. The alignment held for a couple weeks, maybe a month, and then the rotation returned; same side, same pattern, same conversation with your chiropractor.
You’ve tried physical therapy. You did the exercises faithfully. The weak muscles got stronger. But the tension patterns didn’t change. The pain shifted, adapted, found new territory. Shifting pain is, in my opinion, not a bad thing! Quite the contrary, it signifies things are moving. However, the pain is still there. And things get very, very frustrating. What is missing?
You’ve tried stretching. Yoga. Foam rolling. Epsom salt baths. Anti-inflammatories. You’ve spent years and thousands of dollars addressing a body that keeps returning to the same patterns of tension and pain, no matter what you do. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet question has been forming: Is there a layer that all of these attempts still haven’t reached?
There is. And if you’ve been following this series, you’ve already met it reflex by reflex, post after post. This is the post where those threads converge.
The Argument in One Sentence
Chronic muscle tension is not a muscle problem. It’s not even, ultimately, a tension problem. It’s an energy flow problem nested in a reflex problem.
And I’m using the word “problem” here just because everyone can agree on its meaning. I disagree with the fact that this “problem” is a bad thing. This “problem” that conventional approaches keep trying to fix, to eliminate, to get rid of, is an exquisite survival response from a body that is just doing its job! The muscles are doing exactly what a retained primitive reflex is telling them to do. They’re contracting, guarding, shortening, bracing, not because they’re damaged, not because they’re weak, not because you have “bad posture”, but because a pattern in the brainstem is issuing an instruction, and the muscles are following it. They’ve been following it for years. Maybe decades.
The muscle tension itself is only the most palpable layer of something deeper. The body’s connective tissue, fascia, is a continuous, body-wide network that conducts mechanical force, electrical signals, and cellular information. When a retained reflex holds a region of the body in chronic contraction, it doesn’t just tighten muscles. It restricts the flow of energy and information through the fascial network. The tissue thickens. Its capacity to transmit signals diminishes. The local cellular environment shifts from one of repair and regeneration to one of protection and defense. The tension you can feel is the surface expression of a disruption you can’t feel, a disruption in how energy moves through the body’s connective tissue matrix.
Until the reflex is addressed, the muscles will keep obeying the instruction, and the energetic disruption beneath them will persist. You can release them, stretch them, strengthen them, adjust the joints they’re pulling on, and the reflex will refill the pattern. Every time.
The logic chain looks like this:
This is not a metaphor. It’s a physiological sequence. And each link in the chain is observable, testable, and addressable (Blomberg, 2015; Gieysztor et al., 2018).
A Body Map of Reflex-Driven Tension
If you’ve been reading this series, you’ve already seen how each reflex creates its own characteristic pattern when it stays active. What this post adds is the cumulative picture: what happens when you lay all of those patterns on top of each other and let them run for years in an adult body.
The TLR: Head, Neck, and Global Tone
In Post 4, we explored how the Tonic Labyrinthine Reflex establishes the body’s relationship with gravity through the vestibulospinal pathways (the neural tracts that set muscle tone throughout the trunk and limbs). When the TLR remains active, postural tone is being regulated by a reflex rather than by the mature postural system. Tone is either too low (hypotonic - the person slumps, fatigues easily, can’t hold themselves up) or too high (hypertonic - the person is rigid, stiff, can’t relax); and sometimes it fluctuates between both (Capute et al., 1978; Goddard, 2005).
In the adult body, a retained TLR often shows up as chronic forward head posture: the head drifts ahead of the shoulders, loading the cervical spine with weight it wasn’t designed to carry. Research has shown that cervical spine forces increase dramatically with forward head position, reaching 40–60 pounds of effective load at the angles most people adopt when looking at a phone or working at a desk (Hansraj, 2014). Over years, this drives cervical disc compression, tension headaches originating at the base of the skull (Cailliet, 2004), TMJ dysfunction, which is significantly associated with increased forward head posture (Xiao et al., 2023), and the constellation of neck-shoulder pain sometimes called upper crossed syndrome (Janda, 1988).
The person whose “posture is terrible no matter how hard they try” isn’t lacking effort. They’re managing a reflex that’s setting their postural default.
The Landau: Back Extensors and Collapsed Core
In Post 5, we explored how the Landau Reflex builds core strength, back extensor tone, and the capacity to lift and extend. When the Landau doesn’t fully develop, the extensor muscles of the back and trunk never get the workout they were supposed to receive during tummy time and prone play.
In the adult body, this shows up as chronic mid-back and thoracic pain, a posture that collapses forward into flexion, a core that fatigues quickly, and difficulty sustaining upright sitting without leaning on something. The chest is chronically compressed. Breathing is restricted. And, as discussed in the Landau post, the physical collapse often carries an emotional signature. When the body can’t easily extend and lift, the mood tends to follow the posture.
The Spinal Galant: Lumbar Spine, Pelvis, and Asymmetry
In Post 6, we explored how the Spinal Galant drives lateral hip movement and how, when retained, it creates chronic fidgeting, tactile sensitivity, and postural asymmetry. Gieysztor et al. (2018) documented measurable trunk rotation in school-age children correlated with persistent primitive reflexes; they found that the Spinal Galant is a primary driver of that asymmetry.
Now imagine that asymmetry sustained over twenty, thirty, forty years. The reflex may be more active on one side than the other, creating a habitual lateral pull in the lumbar spine. Over decades, this becomes a rotated pelvis (one ilium pulled forward, one pulled back). The sacroiliac joint compresses unevenly. The lumbar discs bear asymmetrical load. A functional leg-length discrepancy develops because the pelvis is tilted, which ripples into the knees, ankles, and feet below and into the thoracic spine and shoulders above.
A classic example of this is the person whose pelvis is always rotated, whose chiropractor adjusts them every two weeks and the rotation returns within days: the reflex is refilling the pattern. The adjustment addresses the fourth link in the chain. The reflex is the first.
The Babinski: Feet and the Ascending Chain
In Post 7, we explored how the Babinski reflex governs whether the toes fan and extend (the immature pattern) or flex and grip (the mature pattern). When the Babinski remains active, the feet can’t reliably anchor the body to the ground.
In the adult body, the consequences ascend. Unstable feet create compensatory tension in the ankles, which alters knee tracking, which shifts hip loading, which destabilizes the pelvis. And when the feet can’t do their stabilizing job, the upper body takes over. The shoulders rise. The neck stiffens. The arms hold slightly away from the body for balance. Chronic shoulder and neck tension that seems to have no direct cause may, in fact, originate at the feet.
You treat the shoulder tension. It comes back. You stretch the neck. It tightens again. Because the root isn’t at the top of the chain. It’s at the foundation.
The STNR: The Desk-Work Complex
In Post 8, we explored how the Symmetric Tonic Neck Reflex links head position to limb position: head down, arms bend; head up, arms straighten. In a child, this shows up as slumping at the desk and difficulty copying from the board. In an adult, it shows up as chronic neck and shoulder pain that worsens with desk work.
Every time the person looks down at their screen or keyboard, the STNR fires, the arms reflexively want to bend, and the trunk wants to collapse forward. The muscles of the neck and upper back spend hours every day compensating for a reflex that’s trying to fold the body in half. The resulting tension pattern (tight upper trapezius, stiff cervical spine, aching shoulders, headaches behind the eyes) is so common it has its own informal name: tech neck.
But it’s not the technology. It’s the reflex that the technology’s posture keeps activating.
The Stress Reflex Triad: The Entire Posterior Chain
In Posts 1, 2, 10, and 11, we explored the three stress reflexes, Fear Paralysis, Moro, and Tendon Guard, and how they form a cascade: FREEZE - ALARM - BRACE.
The Tendon Guard’s anatomical chain tells the pain story most directly. When the TGR is chronically active, the contraction runs from the big toe up through the Achilles tendon, the calves, the hamstrings, the low back, the thoracic spine, the shoulders, the neck, and the jaw. This maps almost exactly onto the superficial back line, a continuous fascial chain from sole to skull. This chain isn’t just a structural connection; it’s a conduction pathway. When it’s free and elastic, it transmits force and information fluidly throughout the body. When it’s locked in chronic contraction, it becomes a corridor of restricted energy flow. The person whose entire back body is tense (tight calves, short hamstrings, rigid low back, elevated shoulders, clenched jaw) is likely running a chronically active Tendon Guard, and the fascial network that should be conducting information through that region has become a wall instead of a wire.
Shackleford et al. (2017) documented hyperactive Tendon Guard Reflexes in trauma survivors for four to twelve months after flood events. Four to twelve months of whole-body bracing, even after the acute threat had long passed. Now extend that timeline. What happens when the brace runs for years? For decades? For a lifetime?
The Moro adds the chemical layer: chronically elevated cortisol and adrenaline, immune dysregulation, poor sleep, adrenal fatigue. The body isn’t just tense, it’s chemically stressed. And Fear Paralysis adds its own physical signature: collapsed posture, shallow breathing, core guarding. The body is simultaneously collapsed and braced, which sounds paradoxical until one understands that the freeze and the brace are two different reflexes operating on two different systems at the same time.
From Tension to Degeneration: The Compounding Effect
Tension that persists for years doesn’t just hurt. It reshapes the body.
Muscles held in chronic contraction pull bones out of alignment. Joints that are chronically compressed or loaded asymmetrically develop wear patterns. Cartilage wears unevenly. Discs compress asymmetrically. And fascia (the body’s continuous connective tissue network) thickens, adheres, and loses its conductivity in the patterns of chronic tension. This last point matters more than it might seem. Healthy fascia isn’t just structural scaffolding. It’s a signaling medium; it transmits mechanical force, conducts bioelectric information, and provides the physical substrate through which cells communicate across distances. When fascia thickens and adheres under chronic tension, it’s not just restricting movement. It’s disrupting the body’s capacity to conduct energy and coordinate repair. The tissue becomes an insulator where it should be a conductor.
The structural consequences are specific and predictable:
A rotated pelvis from a retained Spinal Galant, sustained for decades, tilts the sacrum, compresses the SI joint, creates a functional leg-length discrepancy, and drives degenerative changes in the lumbar spine and hips.
Functional scoliosis, not a structural bone deformity, but a muscular pulling of the spine into a lateral curve, can develop from the asymmetrical tension of retained reflexes. Gieysztor et al. (2018) documented this in children. The adult body has had decades more time to remodel around the curve.
Cervical degeneration from forward head posture driven by the TLR and STNR; here, the cervical spine bears chronically excessive load, and the discs, facet joints, and ligaments degrade accordingly.
Osteoarthritis in the hips, knees, and ankles from the abnormal loading patterns that retained Babinski and TGR create in the lower extremities. The joints were designed for balanced, symmetrical loading. When the active primitive reflexes create asymmetry, the cartilage wears where it shouldn’t and spares where it shouldn’t.
TMJ dysfunction from the Tendon Guard’s chain terminating at the jaw. Chronic clenching drives joint inflammation, disc displacement, tooth grinding, dental damage, and pain that radiates through the face and skull.
The compounding logic is relentless:
Each cycle makes the next one worse. And conventional treatment, applied to the downstream links, provides temporary relief but can’t stop the cycle because the first link, i.e. the reflex, is still running the show.
Why Conventional Pain Treatments Hit a Ceiling
This is not a dismissal of massage, chiropractic, physical therapy, stretching, or medication. These interventions work. They often provide significant relief. They address real, measurable dysfunction in the musculoskeletal system.
But they address the consequences of the active reflex, not the active reflex itself:
Massage releases the tight muscles, but the reflex re-tenses them.
Chiropractic adjusts the misaligned joints; but the reflex pulls them back.
Physical therapy strengthens the weak muscles, but the reflex patterns override the new strength.
Stretching lengthens the shortened tissues, but the reflex re-shortens them.
Pain medication dampens the signal, but the mechanical cause continues generating it.
The interventions aren’t wrong. They’re incomplete. They’re treating the second, third, and fourth links in the chain while the first link keeps regenerating the pattern.
When reflex integration is added, i.e. when the first link is addressed, the downstream interventions suddenly work better and hold longer. The massage doesn’t have to compete with a reflex that’s re-tensing the muscles overnight. The chiropractic adjustment holds because the muscular pull that was displacing the joint has been resolved at its source. The stretching produces lasting flexibility because the reflex is no longer re-shortening the tissue.
The reflex was the missing piece. And once it’s addressed, the rest of the work can finally do what it was always capable of doing.
What Can Be Done
Blomberg’s pain resolution approach works with conventional treatment, not instead of it. But it changes the order of operations. And that changes everything.
The Rhythmic Movement Approach
The movements used in BRMT are gentle, specific, and rhythmic. They’re done on the floor, lying prone, supine, or on the side, and they involve slow, rocking, whole-body patterns that mirror the spontaneous movements infants make when their development is on track. These aren’t exercises in the fitness sense. They aren’t stretching. They aren’t strengthening. They’re a specific kind of input that speaks directly to the brainstem (the level of the nervous system where the reflexes live).
The rhythm matters. The brainstem responds to rhythm the way a tuning fork responds to vibration: it entrains. Slow, predictable, repetitive movement signals safety in a language the brainstem understands, beneath and before cognition.
This is why the movements are gentle and brief; typically no more than a few minutes per day. More is not better. The nervous system needs time to process the input, and forcing or rushing the process activates the very protective patterns you’re trying to help release. The pause after the movement is as important as the movement itself.
For chronic pain, the work often may begin with the Tendon Guard, releasing the posterior chain brace, because the TGR creates the most immediately palpable tension and its release provides felt relief that builds trust in the process. From there, the stress reflex triad (Fear Paralysis, Moro, Tendon Guard) may be addressed as a group, since the emotional and muscular layers are deeply intertwined. Isometric pressure techniques specific to each reflex are used alongside the rhythmic movements, and the BRMT Level 1 foundational reflexes (TLR, Landau, Spinal Galant, Babinski, STNR) are often addressed in parallel, since the postural base needs to stabilize for the emotional layer to resolve fully.
The Part That Matters Most
But here’s the thing I most want you to hear, because it’s the piece that changes the framework entirely:
The rhythmic movements don’t heal you.
Your body heals you.
The movements remove what was in the way, and reestablish the order the system is expecting.
When a retained reflex is holding the body in a chronic protective pattern (muscles braced, fascia thickened and dehydrated, energy flow restricted, the autonomic nervous system locked in survival mode), the body’s own repair systems are suppressed. Not because they’re broken. Because they’ve been overridden. The brainstem is running a danger program, and as long as that program is active, the cellular machinery that repairs tissue, resolves inflammation, restores fascial conductivity, and regenerates cartilage stays in standby mode. Healing is not prioritized when the system believes it’s under threat.
Robert Naviaux’s Cell Danger Response research describes this at the cellular level: when mitochondria detect danger signals (chronic stress, inflammation, unresolved threat), they shift from energy production and repair to a defensive, inflammatory posture. The healing cycle stalls. The body holds. It waits for the all-clear that never comes (Naviaux, 2014, 2019, 2023).
Integrating the reflex IS the all-clear.
When the brainstem’s danger program finally completes, when the reflex that’s been holding the pattern for years or decades is gently guided to resolution, the downstream effects are not just muscular. The autonomic nervous system shifts. The fascial network begins to soften and restore its conductivity. The mitochondria shift from defense to repair. The body’s own healing systems come back online, not because you added something, but because you removed the obstruction.
This is why the results of reflex integration are often gradual but cumulative in a way that feels different from other interventions. First the fear of pain, and what that pain “might mean” melts away. The tension eases. Then the posture shifts. Then the pain diminishes. Then, over time (and this is the part that surprises people) the joints begin to heal. Cartilage degeneration slows or stops. Disc spaces that were compressing stabilize. Inflammation that was chronic begins to resolve. Not because you’ve done anything to those tissues directly, but because the body has finally been given permission to do what it was always capable of doing.
The body is not broken. It was never broken. It was held; held in a pattern that started as protection, persisted as habit, and accumulated as damage. Remove the pattern, and the body knows what to do. It has always known. It was waiting for the signal that the danger had passed.
What This Asks of You
There’s a dimension to this work that no protocol can prepare you for.
When you’ve lived in a body that’s been braced, guarded, and contracted for decades, the experience of that pattern releasing can be disorienting. It can feel like the ground is shifting, because, in a real sense, it is. The postural patterns you’ve built your life around begin to reorganize. Emotions that were held in the tissue begin to surface. Sleep changes. Dreams intensify. There may be days when you feel worse before you feel better, not because something is going wrong, but because the body is finally processing what it’s been holding.
This is not unlike stepping out of a cave into sunlight. The light doesn’t hurt because it’s harmful, it’s disorienting because you’ve been in the dark. The adjustment period is real, and it asks for something that our results-oriented culture doesn’t always value: patience. Trust. A willingness to be in the process without demanding that it conform to a timeline. I wrote about this HERE.
The body heals at its own pace. It has its own sequence. It knows which layers to release first and which to hold until the system is ready. The work of reflex integration is not about imposing a program on the body. Instead, it’s about offering the body the input it needed, then stepping back and trusting the intelligence that was always there, waiting for the obstruction to clear.
Looking Ahead
We’ve now established what retained reflexes do to the body over time - the tension, the postural deformity, the joint degeneration, the pain that keeps returning no matter what you try.
But we haven’t yet asked the deeper question: why do gentle, rhythmic movements (rocking on the floor for a few minutes a day) actually resolve these patterns? What is the mechanism by which rhythm reaches the brainstem, the connective tissue, the cellular level? And what does it mean to say that chronic pain is an energy flow problem, not just a tension problem?
The answer lives at the intersection of three systems that conventional medicine is only now just starting to consider together: fascia, mitochondria, and the brainstem.
Robert Naviaux’s Cell Danger Response research offers a critical piece of the picture. When the body is stuck in a chronic protective pattern, whether from trauma, retained reflexes, or sustained stress, mitochondria shift from energy production and repair mode to a defensive, inflammatory mode. The cellular machinery that regenerates tissue, resolves inflammation, and restores function gets suppressed, because the body’s danger signal hasn’t been resolved. The brainstem hasn’t sent the all-clear (Naviaux, 2014, 2019, 2020, 2023).
Meanwhile, the fascia, thickened and adhered under years of reflexive tension, has lost its capacity to conduct the mechanical and bioelectric signals that coordinate healing across the body. The energy that should be flowing through the connective tissue matrix is restricted, fragmented, blocked.
I believe rhythmic movement may be the signal that restores both. The rhythm reaches the brainstem through the vestibular system and tells it the environment is safe. The brainstem sends the all-clear. Mitochondria shift from defense to repair. And the gentle, rhythmic loading of the fascia begins to restore its conductivity, reopening the pathways through which energy and information flow.
The next post will develop this idea fully: The Fascia-Mitochondria-Brain Axis: A Proposed Mechanism of Action for Rhythmic Movement Training. It’s the post that asks how and proposes an answer that connects the brainstem, the connective tissue, and the cell.
If you’re recognizing these patterns and want to explore whether primitive reflex integration might be relevant for you or your child, consider connecting with a certified BRMT practitioner. You can find more information at brmtusa.com. Not in the US? Check out blombergrmt.com.
I am a BRMT consultant and I’d be more than happy to connect with you and answer any questions you may have. Feel free to book a Complimentary Discovery Call so we can chat.
Learn This Work From the Inside Out
If this series has you wanting to move beyond reading and into practice, I’m teaching BRMT Level 1 and BRMT Level 2 this fall. In BRMT Level 1 you’ll learn the foundational reflexes, how to test for them, and the specific rhythmic movements and isometric techniques used to integrate them. In Level 2 you’ll learn the stress reflexes and how to support a system that arrives in full fight-flight or freeze. Taking Level 1 is a pre-requisite for Level 2. Aside from that, come as you are. No additional training needed! Whether you’re a parent, therapist, educator, or someone who simply recognizes these patterns in your own body, these courses give you the tools to work with them directly. No prerequisites. Just curiosity and a willingness to get on the floor.
Next in the series: The Fascia-Mitochondria-Brain Axis: A Proposed Mechanism of Action for Rhythmic Movement Training
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