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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Body and emotions
I have often heard people say that their husband or wife is so much easier to live with now that they’ve had some sessions in the Alexander Technique! By changing their posture, they have become more relaxed within themselves and some of the jagged sharp corners of their nature seem to be more rounded off. The compensations that people can throw up, possibly in response to fear can make them seem unfeeling and brittle. These can be directly linked up to their physical condition and may be just an outward manifestation of imbalance and strain throughout their whole body.
But this type of situation is not isolated to just a few people, it applies to almost all of us to a greater or lesser degree, and I include myself in this. Our emotions and physique are inseparable. While we may be able to identify a physical part of us such as an arm or lung or kidney, isolating our emotions or even a specific emotion such as anger is a different matter. What part of us are we going to look at? Indeed there is a strong belief that certain emotions link to certain parts of the body; anger is related to an over-worked and toxic liver. So by attending to our diet, detoxing, drinking less caffeine and alcohol we can apparently help the condition of our liver and so become less prone to anger. But while we know where the liver is, we still have not located the emotion. It is not physically identifiable....at least not yet!
There is no question that the body works as a unified whole. And although we may feel certain symptoms, such as aching knees, a stiff neck, or anger, frustration and love, none of them are separable but just one part of the working of the whole body. If people come to see me professionally with aching knees, I will probably work far more on helping them release their neck muscles and also improving their overall balance. The symptom is only the tip of the iceberg.....the bit we can feel or see. As our body works as one, there are always compensations going on throughout. Consequently any attempt to repair, cure or gain relief from a condition needs to consider the whole picture. While temporarly relief may be gained by working on a small local area, it is likely that the symptoms will return if it's related to an overall condition throught the whole body.
An aching back is not a symptom of just the back, but how the back muscles are working in conjunction with the rest of the body....from top to toe. If we are off balance or collapsing in stature into a slouch, it is not just the back that is problematic but the overall loss of poise, the lack of expansive direction within. To function well we need to be expansive, allowing the springiness of our body to lengthen and widen, as any gregarious and physically expansive toddler will show us.
To treat emotional conditions such as depression and stress purely by discussion does not attend to the whole situation as such conditions can be brought about by a loss of natural stature and poise. By restoring our posture and ridding such habits as unnecessary physical tensing, collapsing in stature or holding our breath, we can help ourselves physically and emotionally. This requires us to use our thinking to overcome our postural habits. It becomes our choice. We can choose to function differently. As an example, make a fist with your right hand, or left if you prefer. Make a tight fist as though you were going to punch. Now relax your hand. Why did you do that? You did it not only because I asked you to, but because your brain sent the signals to the muscles in your hand to firstly tense, then to relax them. You can do the same thing with your shoulders and neck. I wouldn't suggest that you tense them, but you can choose to relax them. Think of them softening. As we release unnecessary muscle tensions we can often experience a deep sigh or deep breath. This is us letting go. And with the freer breathing we detox and feel calmer. Physical tension and emotional stress go together. And as we improve physical balance, we may also experience being more emotionally centred.
Our body works as a whole and by attending to our posture we can affect not only our physical health, but also our emotional state too.
