Being a yoga teacher it’s understandable I’d have a small obsession with posture. As a Master of Science in Mindfulness Based Interventions I have a massive obsession with posture! In my humble opinion, bringing your attention into the body at will is your super-power in living life mindfully.
You’ll notice in my Masters title is the “intervention”. Some find this is a loaded word. When you think of intervention, what comes to mind for you? I find it fascinating that it’s not a case of me “intervening” in your thinking patterns (or indeed your movements patterns) rather, my training is in teaching you, in empowering you, to intervene yourself. You learn how to notice, to pause, to adapt. You learn to skillfully navigate your life with increasing grace and ease.
Despite doing ballet as a child I didn’t always have great posture myself. As a teenager I was happy to slump around the place in sloppy jumpers hiding my big Dutch bum! At the beginning of my yoga journey in my early twenties I was not really aware of my body or my posture, in fact it took years for me to fold in an awareness of how I was holding my body into my daily movements. The awareness began when I caught my reflection in a shop window on Grafton Street and noticed how awful my posture was. Then I started noticing other people and how good posture is so influential on how one comes across in life. We can get the botox, the fillers and the fake lashes (no thank you) but nothing is as empowering and as youthful as a body moving through life with ease, good posture and a relaxed elegance.
Good posture is good for your nervous system. If you are at ease in your body your nervous system relaxes and everything relaxes. If you have bad posture your muscles are tense and tight and you are going to be tense and rigid. The brain senses when we are at ease; good posture helps us move through life with ease. Often, in my daily morning seated meditation practice I spend the whole time vaguely aware of how I am in my body and making small shifts, or small subtle movements, to refine my posture and find ease. Each moment I sense a bit more ease is, for me, a mini-moment of bliss. You know that feeling of taking off too-tight shoes after a long day, or loosening a belt? Every time we consciously reduce the stress on the body there’s relief, a relaxing, a coming back to our true selves, our true nature and our natural relaxed bodies. In a daily seated meditation practice those little moments can feel blissful.
But what is good posture, how do we know, what do we do?
Posture can be a little controversial. In yoga we might call it “alignment” and in the yoga space alignment can be very controversial. You see, we all have completely unique bodies. Like our fingerprint, the precise shape and size of each bone and joint in each human body differs. And good posture is a felt-sense, who am I to tell you what your good posture in your body should look like?
My job as a yoga teacher is to empower you to sense into, and to observe, what good alignment in your body feels like. Although we are all completely unique we have commonalities as humans as well. So often the small ways we can mis-align (or have bad posture) are similar for a lot of us. Leaning too far forward, slumping or being too tense. We learn to correct our posture in ways that bring less tension rather than more. In this process, initially we might need to strengthen muscles that have become lazy and therefore stiff and weak. This can feel uncomfortable, initially strength-training muscles can feel a bit like too much like hard work! We might have to soften muscles that are tight or stiff and initially stretching a stiff muscles can feel somewhat unpleasant. With time, patience and practice, we begin to enjoy the feeling of muscles getting stronger and we learn to love stretching and the relief and release it brings. But yes, the start of this journey can be hard, that’s why the support of a yoga class and a teacher that invites you to take it easy, and rest in child’s pose when you need to, can be invaluable.
Your own good posture is not something new you have to learn. Rather you are un-learning the patterns that keep you stuck. Slumping as a teen, or rushing around with your shoulders hunched up, rounding your shoulders to hide a big bust or trying to make yourself smaller as a tall person, we all have our thing! We were all born with a soft relaxed body and as babies we had to learn how to align the spine in order to get up from crawling to walking. At that stage in life we all had excellent posture, we wouldn’t have balanced ourselves without stacking the head over the rib cage over the pelvis over the legs. It’s nuanced and it’s subtle and it’s rewarding when we ‘get it’ … just like mindfulness practice itself. So noticing your posture is a perfect mindfulness practice!
In evaluating your posture you can use a mirror (or a shop window) or a pal. First observe and adjust. Maybe you’re slumping a little, maybe your shoulders are tensed up close to your ears. Internally we might sense if we could stack the head directly over the centre of the rib cage directly over the centre of the pelvic floor. Let’s call this the mid-line or central axis through the body. Turn to one side and see can you line up your ear over your shoulder over your hip over your ankle.
It’s one thing taking to our awareness to the body when we are standing still and focusing our full attention on it. What happens on the move? How can we both engage with life (rich, full and busy for many) and remain attentive to our posture? This is the skill we can develop in yoga. How is my posture in warrior, in plank, as I lower from plank to the floor, as I wobble in tree pose? We learn to notice how we are in all of these different shapes and planes; we learn to notice how we are as we move from one pose to the next.
In next week’s blog I will introduce some specific cues I might give you in a yoga class to see can we develop our curiosity and our intuition. I’ll teach you the terminology, or phrases you might hear in a class, and explain them. It gets interesting and rich when we can we notice small specific parts of the body, and the subtle shifts we might make. Can you find ease, centeredness and receptivity in the body, in stillness and on the move, maybe even just for now?
Sylvia.
Read More
