I love my accountant. The walls of his office display a 40-year collection of IRS cartoons, and he does everything he can to keep our yearly meeting light. But there’s nothing like an hour’s contemplation of tax code intricacies to make your head spin and put kinks in your center line. Money, when you have to part with it, compresses the body. Which is how I walked out of the office…
Read MoreBelow is a video I made for one of my Skype coaching clients. She’s a petite woman who is learning to play the sitar, a difficult and awkward instrument to tune as well as to play. I've been helping her with her sitting position, and with pain in her left shoulder that had become severe enough for her to seek medical help. The exercise I shared in this video has helped her exchange upper shoulder tension for secure support that links her shoulders to her mid-back. The video also includes a brief review of abdominal support and pelvic inclination. Many musicians—most anyone who plays a stringed instrument—could benefit from this exploration. Not to mention non-musicians who simply have a habit of loading stress into the upper shoulder area…
Read MoreA year ago I posted a piece about the relationship between joint pain and digestive abuse–an after-effect of holiday cheer. You’d think I’d learn, but guess what? This year I’m fessing up again, with a different twist. Beginning in December I experienced pain in my right hip, with radiating pain down my right leg and into my knee and low back stiffness. This was demoralizing because I’d been low back pain-free for three years, ever since becoming sincere about tending to my deep core strength. The pain was weirdly intermittent. A good Pilates class seemed to chase it away, but in a few days, back it came…
Read MoreThe attached video is a holiday gift to my subscribers—a de-stressor practice. But it actually has a further purpose. When we walk, our spines are designed to move in two counter-rotating helical patterns. This movement is the basis of our contralateral walking gait; it’s why our arms and legs swing oppositely when we walk…
Read MoreWhen you grasp a steering wheel (or anything else) tightly, you’ll feel tension generated from your hands up into your elbows, shoulders, neck and jaw. There are direct myofascial and neural connective trains between the hands and the head. Such muscle chain engagement delimits your steering movements, dulls your perception of the road, and contributes to your aching shoulders. Notice this woman’s eye and jaw tension as well as her too tightly gripping hands…
Read MoreI recently recommended to a Skype coaching client that he read pages 131-132 in The New Rules of Posture–pages that describe what I nicknamed “skintelligence”. One of this man’s goals was to improve his ballroom dancing. His partners had commented that they felt he was holding them rigidly, so I wanted to remind him of the surprising degree to which our tactile sense influences motor coordination. I knew that turning on his skin could help him turn off excess muscle tension…
Read More“My tongue?” you say. “What does my tongue have to do with my posture?” Actually, quite a lot…
Read MoreIn my last several posts, I’ve been drawing your awareness to the front of your spine. Releasing the tensions we hold within our bodies at this depth can restore mobility, ease and freedom we didn’t know were missing. Upper-cervical-facet-jointsIn this video you’ll practice a movement meditation that can restore mobility at the joint between the top of your neck and your cranium. This area so often expresses stress as rigidity, and is exacerbated by long hours spent in front of computer screens…
Read MoreIf you read between the lines, you probably sense that under the banner of “The New Rules of Posture,” I’m actually sharing a somatic practice–a physical path to self-knowledge. Here’s what I wrote in The New Rules: to improve your posture you need to 1) “create new sense memories for what feels balanced and stable…” and 2) view “your posture as an ongoing perceptual process by which you orient yourself to gravity and to your relationship with the people, objects and events in your world.” Not something you do once and forget about. It’s a practice…
Read MoreThis week I read an article about a young woman who does not experience pain. The article contains messages of human generosity and connection woven through the story of a genetic anomaly. It got me thinking about pain as a gift, as something to be thankful for in this season of giving thanks. Pain can signal danger and the need for protection—we can’t ignore that kind of pain. But I’m thinking more about the mundane, ignorable pain of getting up from the computer after sitting there too long, or of having to roll too gingerly out of bed in the morning…
Read MoreWhat are you doing with your body when you find yourself at an edge? Are there places in your life where your body defaults to a curl or twist? Concealed at those same edges may be opportunities for changing habits, postural or otherwise….
Read MoreIf you look for “hamstring stretches” in Google Images, you’ll get a page full of illustrations most of which demonstrate what I’m trying to show you not to do in the accompanying video. This young man, for example, is mostly stretching his lower back and giving himself a crick in his neck. How you position your pelvis and spine makes a huge difference in the effectiveness of your stretching. I also hope to convince you that your hamstrings don’t exist in isolation in your body and that to lengthen them effectively involves changing how you use them in daily life…
Read MoreI like this illustration for The New Rules of Posture so much that I’ve begun using it as a logo for my work in general. It depicts one of the characters in my book as she cleans a chandelier. Here’s the story with its “posture moral” at the end.
What I’ve called “posture zones” are muscular and connective tissue structures that lie roughly perpendicular to the body’s vertical mid-line. When we’re under stress—even a pleasant stress like Alison’s excitement at discovering an Art Deco treasure in her new apartment—one or more of the posture zones tightens in order to keep the body stable. The posture zones are like valves whose closing deforms the body’s mid-line and in so doing distorts posture…
Read MoreSandra Blakeslee’s book, The Body Has A Mind of Its Own, explains the neuroscience of brain mapping—the way your brain is organized to run your body. Brain maps for sensation and movement, interwoven like figures in an intricate mandala, make is possible for you to scratch your nose when it itches instead of poking yourself in the eye…
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