Holiday Posture and the Habit of Stress

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Holiday Posture and the Habit of Stress

Here are two great suggestions for your holiday shopping:  first, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  This clear and interesting read applies the insights of neuroscience to the mundane matter of changing our habits.  Our brains are plastic—bodies too!—so why not use that plasticity to our advantage? Duhigg says a habit is composed of a cue, a routine, and a reward. It only takes a little self-examination and some perseverance to unpack these parts and make a change. The other suggestion, of course, is my DVD, Heal Your Posture, and my New Rules book, which tell and show you how to change your brain’s postural mapping of your body…

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Posture and Politics

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Posture and Politics

What 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….

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The New Rules of Posture

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The New Rules of Posture

I 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…

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Heal Your Posture: A Review

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Heal Your Posture: A Review

Rolf Movement Instructor Mary Bond has a gift for relating ideas on functional ease in movement to daily life, offering ways to practice whether at dinner, while brushing your teeth, changing a light bulb, or standing in line. She did this in her book The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World (Healing Arts Press, 2006; now also available as an ebook), and she offers more in her recently released DVD Heal Your Posture: A 7-Week Workshop with Mary Bond, which I consider an invaluable resource for both Rolfers and our clients…

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When to Build Good Posture

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When to Build Good Posture

When do you become most aware of your posture? When you’re checking out the fit of some new jeans? When walking into a new situation, uncertain as to how you might be received? You can be dressed to the nines, but if your posture projects shyness or uncertainty it sabotages the impression you want to convey. But by then, it’s too late to develop good posture…

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