Are you tired of the effects of poor posture in your life? Do you feel frustrated that anything you do to try to improve your posture doesn’t seem to work? Would you like a relaxed, yet upright posture, beautiful balance and graceful coordination? If so, then this book is for you!
In this book I hope to convey a simple message: your posture directly affects your body’s overall functioning and has a major influence on how you think and feel. Poor posture can also adversely affect the position and functioning of your vital organs and cause more health problems than you realize. Many people with chronic pain can trace their problems to years of faulty postural habits.
Good posture, by contrast, promotes free movement and physical and mental endurance, improves appearance and contributes to an overall feeling of wellbeing. Good posture allows the body’s healing processes to work more efficiently and effectively, and helps to prevent future illness. Good posture aligns your body and helps your muscles, joints and ligaments to do their job as nature intended. Improving posture reduces fatigue, muscular strain and pain. Good posture brings the body back into balance, physically, mentally and emotionally. A person who has good, natural posture tends to project poise, confidence, integrity and dignity.
This book is emphatically not about sitting up straight, pulling your shoulders back and arching your back, as you may often have been told to do in the past. It is about finding your natural poise again: that wonderful, graceful posture that you naturally had as a child. You will find that if you improve your posture, you will improve the quality of your life. Although the main theme of this book is to explain what the Alexander Technique is and how it can be used to improve posture, I will also explore the effects of external factors, such as chairs and shoes, on posture. I need to make it clear, however, that although these are nothing to do with the Technique as such, I have personally found that these can also be very helpful in my life and when teaching others.
Before we start exploring ways of improving posture, let me first explain how this book came about. Over the last 20 years I have run hundreds of Alexander Technique classes and workshops, and the number of people who have attended must be over 10,000 by now. One of the first things I ask the participants is: ‘How many of you would like to improve your posture?’ Every time, without fail, nearly everyone puts their hand up without a moment’s hesitation. The reasons given for wanting to improve posture vary greatly. Some people suffer from various muscular complaints, such as hip, back or neck problems, while others have asthma, stress or various types of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). Quite a few may have no physical pain at all, but just want to look better and improve their general coordination and ease of movement. Some simply want to improve their self-esteem. Whatever the reason, however, it seems that many, many people are aware that ‘bad posture’ is a large part of their problem.
I wasn’t really surprised that some people in the class wanted to improve their posture, after all, it is well known that the Alexander Technique can be very beneficial in this area; what surprised me though was that in every class, practically everyone felt that they had poor posture and everyone wanted to improve it! In fact, in a recent survey conducted by a leading glamour magazine, women were asked if they were happy with their general posture. Out of the thousands of women who were questioned, not one woman said that she was happy with it. After a while it dawned on me – practically everyone wants to improve something about their posture, but hardly anyone knows how to go about it in a way that is effective and long-lasting.
The other thing that I found very interesting was that although many people knew that muscular tension was causing or exacerbating their poor posture, they were still trying to improve it by tensing up even further. So for example, I saw people attempting to sit or stand up ‘straight’, but actually over-arching their backs in the attempt, or trying to ‘pull their shoulders back’ but in fact over-tensing their shoulders and upper back muscles. If you look at the natural and beautiful posture of a young child, it is evident that they are often very upright, but they are not doing anything to be upright. It is their natural way of being and they do not have to use any extra muscular effort to obtain such beautiful posture. It is just there because of their inbuilt postural reflexes doing the job for them without any conscious effort on their part – it is their birthright, and it is ours too.
I sincerely hope that you enjoy the book and find it helpful, not only in improving your posture but also in helping you to lead a more fulfilling and conscious life.