what is posture, anyway?
For sure, certain environmental factors and a sedentary lifestyle are associated with the epidemic of 'bad posture', and anyone who has travelled in Asia or Africa will have noticed that the people there are capable of feats of 'good posture' such as sitting upright for long periods of time or carrying heavy loads (like 20 litres of water) on their heads for many miles.
Uphill.
Which is beyond most denizens of the 'developed countries'. But is this all there is to it? Is living a life where you must work physically to survive the only way to have a lovely strong back?
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Photo: Leonard Tedd/DFID
Or is it that we have lost the knack of using our intelligence to coordinate ourselves appropriately for whatever activity we may be engaged in? Alexander saw that what we call posture results from the way we project our intention to act on a moment-by-moment basis. In time, the structure of the spine does its best to accommodate the strains we are subjecting it to when we insist that it bears our weight in a way that is out of balance in relation to gravity.
Humans are bipeds. One of the reasons we have large brains is that we need them to balance upright on two legs. The challenge this poses can be easily seen if one tips a chair ('an animal with 4 legs') to balance onto two of its legs. If we let go it will fall. We need to keep paying attention to it to prevent it from falling in either direction, and we may achieve this with more or less muscular effort. Intelligence can help us to achieve this balance with minimal effort, and therefore do it for longer without tiring. This would be 'good posture' for the chair.
Seems simple, but real animals have many movable joints thrown into the equation. It becomes desirable to keep some of them stable in relation to each other at certain times, but not when we want to move them again. But because we spend so much of our lives lost in the details of a computer or television screen we tend to forget to manage the relationship of all our parts with the result that the whole person becomes more and more disintegrated.
Image: Skoivuma via Wikimedia Commons
Intelligence is no longer being applied to dealing efficiently with gravity and so bit by bit, the downwards slide begins. Until one day 'bad posture' is detected, either by way of pain or unpleasant slump seen in the mirror.
Trying to correct this, we put a lot of muscular effort into hoisting ourselves up to look straight. But by now we are so insensitive to what is required, that this action will actually further compress the spine and rigidify it, and we will not be able to maintain the pose for very long before getting tired and slumping again.
So what is the solution?
To re-learn ('re-' because it's a skill we already learned as babies) to deliberately include sensitivity to certain key signs of whether we are in balance or not in our sphere of attention. The more often we can stop interfering with our attitudinal reflexes and consciously check in with the wealth of information our senses give us about our orientation in space, the more regularly we can refresh our attitude. Posture ceases to be a fixed, hoisted or hunched response to a sense of strain at having to drag our bodies around and becomes... poise. At any moment we can choose to use gravity to our advantage, like a judo fighter uses the opponent's own weight and momentum to foil him.
Once the vicious circle is broken it becomes easier and easier to feel lighter, we free up a lot of misdirected energy, and have more attention to give to what we a trying to do and what is going on around us.
