Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Don't pull your shoulders back
Slouching in front of a computer and a lifetime of postural habits can easily cause us to have shoulders that are almost permanently rounded. We look in the mirror and once we've gasped at the state of our hair, we may shudder once again at seeing our shoulders coming forward in a way that clothing designers don't allow for, and we think we really must learn to pull them back. How much better we would look if we were more open across our chest. But good as our intentions are, by pulling our shoulders back, we are unwittingly causing other problems.
It is likely that our shoulders are rounded because we are pulling them forward in the first place, in a way we didn't do as a young child; an age when we had perfect poise. So if children don't pull their shoulders back then why should we now? We might say, that's because they don't have hunched shoulders. Exactly. Young children don't pull their shoulders forward like that all the time. So the answer is not to pull them back as that creates more tension to fight the wrong tension that's pulling them forward. To do so will only cause pain and discomfort in our back. No. It will be best if we can just release the tension that's pulling them forward in the first place and our shoulders will find their natural resting place.
