Pain Free Living

You have if you looked into the mirror today or glanced at a passing stranger. Posture is autobiography, an external embodiment of our inner state. It records and explains what we did and who we are.

Your distinctive postural profile exposes all secrets of commission, omission, and submission. Don’t worry—the evidence is not admissible in a court of law. Yet it is extraordinarily useful if you want to be truly free of pain, depression, self-doubt, and self-destructive habits.

We already looked at the fact collector personality type; the second personality type is the skeptic, who is fated to live a life in doubt.

The skeptic expects to be cheated. The world, he is sure, is full of bandits, incompetents, and hidden pitfalls. Only the vigilant, the canny, the tough survive. He armor-plates his ego and refuses to be lured out into the open, where his superior IQ might be defeated by trickery or bad luck.

Skeptics are indeed smart. Quick witted and usually well educated, they can be fun to be around. But there is more darkness than light to their personality. Their cynical expectations rob them of their primary power and their greatest gifts: positive energy, joy, and peace of mind. When they come to the clinic, the typical skeptic is in pain. There is a postural condition (most likely) that has left them unbalanced and energy depleted. Without being directly conscious of it, they are afraid—afraid of illness, injury, aging, limitation. Their actions are intended to make fear easier to bear, but it actually makes things worse. Much worse.

The skeptic’s mantra is a form of absolution, full of self-forgiveness and self-soothing: I am not to blame; I was cheated by the system; I had no choice; I inherited my grandfather’s high blood pressure. There are many variations. Still, the skeptic can’t escape the fear: Since I am clearly not to blame, maybe I won’t be punished. Our egos punish us when we fall short of perfection. A perfect person does not get sick or injured. Of course that’s nonsense, but our inner scold, a critic and all-around harpy, bedevils us with a steady stream of backseat driving.

She rationalizes her doubting, blame-shifting attitude as awareness and acceptance of personal responsibility. It seems safer and easier to hide behind a tough, know-it-all negativity than to face up to the responsibilities that come from putting herself out there. To the skeptic, it seems much harder to take on the tasks of recovering lost balance, retrieving lost knowing, and rediscovering peace of mind than sitting firmly behind the tough exterior.

As a postural therapist, skeptics used to give me fits. They have always been among the brightest of my clients, yet when they had completed an item from their menu of balancing E-cises and I asked how they felt, often the answer was, “Feels the same.” I could see with one quick glance that the E-cises had done their work—the shoulder, hip, or whatever it was that had been misaligned was at least beginning to move back into its proper place. It surprised and baffled me that these patients didn’t feel the effects. For many years, I assumed they were either willfully, perversely refusing to cooperate, or that some physiological mechanism was overriding what they should have been feeling.

By being patient and forcing myself to listen and observe closely, I detected that skeptics did feel the change; they simply did not trust it enough to acknowledge it to me or to themselves. What they felt came and went too fast, or didn’t stand out against the background noise and distractions of their self-abnegation. The positive feelings associated with realignment seemed like the memories of a fleeting dream. I had to find a way to make those quick flashes of feeling good cohere into an enduring awareness.

A client, L.J., gave me the first breakthrough. There was pain in his right hip. I asked him to stand on his right foot with the left leg bent at the knee. In this position, the left foot could be stretched back to allow the toes to hook behind him on the front edge of a waist-high countertop.^* He had been standing that way for three minutes. When I asked him to put both feet back on the floor and move his right hip a little to see if it still hurt, he muttered flippantly, “Dream on.” As soon as his foot was off the countertop, though, his eyes widened in disbelief.

It was a complete lie. Actually, it was an incomplete lie—L.J.’s eyes revealed the truth. The E-cise had repositioned his hip, putting his pelvis in a level (right to left) position instead of dropping away to the right, which left the hip joint grinding in the socket. Rather than challenge him, I surrendered, or at least I pretended to. “I guess you’ve stumped me.” I went on to say something to the effect that what the clinic was offering just wasn’t right for him and that we would refund his money. L.J. immediately rejected the offer and suggested that I was being too hasty and that maybe, now that he had a chance to think about it, he could feel a change in his hip.

That was the buy-in I was looking for. Instead of closing the sale, I borrowed a little of his cynicism: “Just got lucky, I guess.” That response endures to this day whenever we deal with a skeptic in one of our clinics. I advise my therapists not to attack the story—instead, I recommend that they ride it home in triumph. Just got lucky is okay with me. After thinking it over, very soon the skeptic—make that the former skeptic—will realize it too.

I have always suspected that even self-proclaimed cynics (what I like to call “skeptics on steroids”) never completely succeed in fooling themselves into believing their own cynicism. They are actually seeking confirmation in the form of road-tested personal experience that it is safe to have faith. We all know that having faith in oneself is the source of peace of mind. Knowing that we are enough is indeed enough. Thoughts, even cynical ones, pertain to a human being’s role in co-creating his or her own health. By not immediately requiring a cynic to buy into the need for an unshakable faith in self, I am briefly sharing their story, their secret, and allowing them to be present and aware of what’s taking place. It won’t be long before this causes the cynical story to fall away, revealing the truth.

Skeptics look as if they are moving sideways—and they are. They use their wits and deep distrust to slip around obstacles. A shoulder or a hip, often both, are rotated forward and to the left, which gives skeptics, both male and female, an appearance of drifting off at an angle as they walk forward. And they would drift without some artful counter-torquing by their knees, by the sockets of the hip joints, and by head fake-outs (tilting, turning, and thrusting) that serve as rudders to keep them on course.

Am I saying that there is a skeptic musculoskeletal system type that is paired with the corresponding personality type? Yes.

If the musculoskeletal system is fully functional, your major load-bearing joints are in horizontal and vertical planar alignment. A plane is a boundless flat surface of infinite extent and no thickness, encompassing three or more points not on a straight line.

Our posture reveals how we move. How we move is who we are. Skeptics’ movement is based on trying to protect their heart, both as a working pump and the place where love, courage, and generosity dwell. A skeptic feels extremely vulnerable advancing straight at the world with his precious heart, spiritual and otherwise, exposed; consequently, he adopts a defensive posture by rotating the pelvis and the upper torso so that the shoulders and rib cage shield the heart. This rotation is the crux of musculoskeletal system dysfunction. It disrupts the vertical load-bearing alignment that allows us to move forward smoothly in a straight line, change direction without losing our balance, hop on one foot, carry a load, and, in general, get around without mishap and injury. The precisely calibrated, invisible scaffolding that makes us one of the most mobile creatures on earth is comprised of the alignment of and interaction between just a few planes. The four horizontal parallel planes of the body consist of those created by the shoulders, the hips, the knees, and the ankles/feet. When combined with two vertical parallel planes formed by the paired load joints (right or left shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle/foot), the mobile body is formed.

By rotating her shoulders and hips, a skeptic disrupts her balance. To avoid falling, she resorts to a variety of dodges that strain her muscles, damage her joints, and severely limit her range of movement. At the same time, this creates a distinct, misaligned, non-vertical posture that is mistakenly regarded as a family trait, lifestyle choice, random selection, or aging.

When you lose your vertical and horizontal integrity, the posture displayed is a symptom of illness. It may not hurt yet, but it soon will. The dysfunctional posture is interfering with the body’s need for healthy, unrestricted movement, and it is relentlessly undermining vital physiological processes.

Natural, unrestricted movement allows several degrees of smooth, spontaneous, rotating motion both horizontally and vertically. It serves as a regulating mechanism that will continue as long as the bones involved can return to rest in neutral. There’s nothing wrong with rotation; in an emergency we may need extra flexibility to avoid stumbling or to jump out of harm’s way. Incomplete rotation is the problem—frozen, stuck, jammed rotation that never returns to neutral and thereby prevents muscles from resetting for repeated contractions.

Skeptics are always rotated; usually right to left so that the heart is pulled back with the right shoulder and side interposed toward the front. As I pointed out in The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion, you can see the rotation in the mirror. One shoulder or hip looks closer than the other. If there is shoulder or hip rotation (or both, which is common), your posture is off balance.

Everything is connected to everything else. If your shoulders are rotated, that affects your spine. Your spine affects your head, and your head’s position affects vision, balance, hearing, and neural functions. And that’s just for openers—rotated shoulders have an impact on the lower back and the hips too. The hips are in close collaboration with the knees, the ankles, and feet.

I used to rely on the pain-on/pain-off approach. I thought that turning off the pain by eliminating the rotation would convince a client that the restoration of postural balance was the cure he or she sought. I didn’t understand that the skeptic’s need to protect the heart took precedence. Their fear of being deceived, tripped up, and trapped blocked their awareness. They stuck with their story unless I gave them time and encouragement to realize that by being fully balanced there was no danger that they couldn’t surmount.

I set out to create a non-threatening atmosphere that allows balance to slowly re-emerge for the skeptic. Without undergoing the humiliation and fear, they gradually wean themselves away from the need for their story. By becoming balanced, plugging back into the universal power grid, re-energizing, and being present in the moment, they gain peace of mind. They’ve got energy, strength, calmness, gratitude, and great joy. How do they know? They feel it.

• You’ve already sampled some of the E-cises and don’t think they seem very effective.

• You bought one of my other books and your back, knee, shoulder, or whatever still hurts . . . so this book must be more of the same old, same old.

• You are a pessimist, or maybe an optimist? Or is it a little of both? Maybe you don’t even know.

• Your body is letting you down. Or are you letting your body down? (Was that a stupid question?)

• You haven’t looked at yourself in the mirror lately, especially not in a full-length mirror. If you did, perhaps you didn’t like what you saw or didn’t know what to do about what you saw.

Take a long, leisurely walk. Think about those questions and answer two or three of them. By the time you get back home, decide if you are a skeptic. If you are, do the E-cises that follow. If you decide that you are not a skeptic—and that is entirely possible— go on to the next chapter.

To learn more about the exercises in this chapter, please refer to the E-Cise Menu for Skeptics on the Pain Free Living DVD.