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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Look a million dollars
Jamie Lee Curtis uses the Alexander Technique
Imagine that you’ve got a hot date this evening. You’ve groomed yourself nicely and selected a stunning outfit by your favourite designer. And when you put it on, you’re suddenly looking at the real ‘you’ in the mirror and it’s possible that part of your mental image of yourself is shattered. Your posture is letting you down. Suddenly your expensive outfit doesn’t look quite the price you paid for it. If we were able to stand tall and upright in a relaxed manner, then our clothes would hang beautifully in the way that they were envisaged by the designer. And if we were to have such posture, we would be able to wear just about any clothes we liked and still look a million dollars.
Use this exercise – Thinking tall
This procedure is based on the principles of the Alexander Technique.
In order to maintain your proper slim shape, you should free your neck and ‘send’ your head upwards. Do this by thinking only. Also think of your back lengthening. Your body is very springy and it’s more than likely that your full height is taller than you normally experience. (!)The important thing is that you don’t make physical effort to achieve this as you will only get stiff. Think loose and tall as often as you can. You are tapping into the natural instinct you have for good poise that you’ve had from birth. It’s just that you’re now encouraging it consciously.
It’s very difficult to look in the mirror and not actually do something about our dissatisfaction like pull our shoulders backwards, or brace our backs so we ‘appear’ more upright, or suck our tummy in so it looks a bit flatter. When we do this, you can imagine of all the tension we’re creating to try and correct what we think is the outer failing. Do we see young children pulling their shoulders back or making a huge effort to be upright? You might say that they don’t have sticky-out-tummies or a slouch. But in them, their poise is happening naturally, because they haven’t yet developed any bad habits.
If we’ve become rounded in the shoulders it’s because we’re pulling them forwards out of alignment. If we don’t tighten the muscles that pull our shoulders forward in the first place, they won’t be displaced in such a way. It’s clear that it doesn’t make sense to create a whole lot of tension elsewhere to correct something that is already tense in the wrong way. We should release the tension that’s pulling them out of their natural alignment and restore our natural poise. . To help your shoulders open out in front, think of widening between them. Think of your left shoulder going away in that direction and the other widening to the right. Think of taking up more space. You should also give yourself 10 minutes to do the ‘Lying Down’ exercise called Semi-supine.
By improving your posture so that you are more upright and open across your shoulders your clothes will hang far more like the way the designer intended and look far better for it.
