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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How to sit?
I am often asked what is the best position to sit in, or how should we hold ourselves when sitting or standing. It's understandable that we want to know what to do, so we can practice the correct thing and become good at it. The answer to this however, is not quite what people expect.
While there are important considerations to do with chair height, feet to rest on the floor or footrest, desk, keyboard and screen height, there are also some other important considerations to do with ourselves and how we 'hold ourselves'.
It may be surprising, but there is not a correct position in which to stand or sit. Not one. Look at it this way, if I demonstrated a correct position and said " There you are, Voila! That's how you should sit." What do you do when you want to move? Nor are there six or ten positions that we could say are 'correct' because again, this is too restricting and regimental. Do we just switch from position A to position B and then when we want to tie our shoelaces it's position C or D? We're not robots or statues, but living, organic creatures where staying still is probably one of the hardest things to do as we have evolved for movement.
The idea of 'holding' a position too is unnatural. The very process of 'holding on' to a posture requires tensions and effort and itself is a problem as we end up with fixation. .....stuck in one place.
Some of the best examples of good poise or posture can be seen in children of around 2-4 years old. They are free of habit, they don't slouch, stoop, hunch or stiffen in any way. They are naturally gregarious and outgoing in nature, and also expansive in stature. They are free in all their joints yet they stand at their full height without effort. That is the way we have evolved to be and should still.
There isn't a correct position that we can say is correct because it is too restrictive of the myriad of movements required in daily life. But there is such a thing as having a good condition in the body. I don't mean strength or stamina that we may get from a gym. I'm talking about a quality of freedom and looseness in our joints, and also a quality of expansiveness. We need to be in balance, loose and tall and broad all at the same time. It's a quality we can see in young children and we all had it and it is still available to us in later years.
But for many of us, we understandably think that when we're loose, we collapse on the sofa or bed, and when we're tall we need to 'hold ourselves up'. We may fluctuate between one extreme and the other depending on our commitment to improving our poise or fatigue as we collapse down again. But you don't see young children doing that. They are free and tall at the same time.....all the time, without effort.
With over 500 muscles in our body, they need to work together in a well coordinated way to provide support and enable us to move around easily and smoothly. But the habits of posture that we develop, such as stooping or slouching, interfere with this subtle coordination, so we get some muscles doing far too much effort and others not enough. This is why good posture seems like hard work. But if we can encourage and re-train our muscles to work together better and avoid repeating our postural habits, we will find that we can regain our natural poise....and it truly feels effortless.
We have an instinct for good poise. We have it from birth and it is in our genetic make-up, inherited from our ancestors over millions of years of evolution. We have it until we die. So we don't need to learn 'how to do good posture'. Our body, our instincts and subconscious know how to do it. What we need to do is avoid the wrong things from happening. If we prevent the wrong things (habits such as stiffening, slouching), the right thing and healthy poise will just happen. Good poise happens when we let it.
Getting out of these bad habits and encouraging good co-ordination is not really achieved by doing exercise. But it is achieved by becoming more aware of how we do things, and aware of our habits and by using our thinking, we can take more control over what is going on. this is the basis of the Alexander Technique. Once the principles have become established, good poise is relatively simple to maintain through improved awareness while also getting on with the thousands of things we need to do each day. Using this technique helps us do everything to our best ability, without strain.
Don't think of positions to sit or how to hold yourself. Think of being free, loose in your joints and tall at your full height at the same time. Free and tall. Better still, get a teacher of the Alexander Technique to demonstrate to you.
