Notes from ATO Posture Presentation
Firstly, thank you for your time and attendance at the talk and apologies for the delay in listing this information. Thank you to Lauren Ashby for the invitation to present. I am offering anybody who attended this talk the opportunity to receive a 50% discount off the regular cost of a private treatment and consultation (the offer is good throughout 2011). Contact me via email.
Notes
The most useful information to be gained about posture will come from you yourself trying on suggestions and seeing how they can work best for you. There is no perfect posture, however there are ways of organising yourself when it comes to sitting that will be easier, more mobile (ie you can move more freely) and have a better outcome for your body over the course of time.
I mentioned in the talk that the collagen fibers of your body will begin to adapt to whatever position they are arranged in after about 20 minutes, so if you sit in a position that compromises your overall alignment and ease of movement you are educating your body to that positioning/posture.
The word posture is more commonly thought of as a noun, although in reality it is more correctly a verb, – think of how your arrange yourself to sitting as an element of your ‘posturing’. Consider it more of a dynamic process that does involve you in so much as you are free to choose moment by moment how you organise yourself physically to undertake the task of your interactions at the desk.
I discussed the idea of feedback loops in the class, and I communicated about this in relationship to the signals your body gives you that require consideration and then response. I used the example of thirst, or your bodies need for water as an example of one form of biofeedback, however there are many. Painful sensations are communications from your body that require some kind of responding. Adjust to find comfort, move to find comfort.
Some of you may be in the habit of dulling down the sensations or awareness of your body in order to complete a task. If this is you I would request that you consider whether this is for your ultimate good. This may take the form of disregarding or invalidating your physiological needs while you focus on a piece of work. In my experience it most commonly is accompanied by somehow having your head no longer centered over your body. It is also commonly associated with shallow breathing. My suggestion is as follows: do the exercise we did in class where you align or center yourself (sitting or standing), close your eyes and slowly, slowly, slowly allow your head to come forward (think chin to chest) until you go as far forward as you can without strain. Then move slowly, slowly, slowly in the opposite direction, keeping eyes closed as you tilt your head back all the way, breathing consciously during the process. Then slowly, slowly, slowly come forward until you feel your head is no longer forward, nor backward, but where you feel it ultimately centred and in a neutral location. Allow your eyes to drift open and register the new location. Take a minute to allow the rest of your body to adjust and then continue to go about your business from this new position.
Remember the breathing exercise we started with? I asked you to sit on the edge of the chair and gently accentuate the movement of your spine as you inhaled and then exhaled. As you inhaled you allowed your head to gently arch back as you reached the top of your inhale. As you exhaled you allowed your chest cavity to fall with gravity and your head to come forward as you released the air on your exhale. Is this something you could practice on occasion? Be sure to involve your lower spine and pelvis in the rhythm of this breathing exercise.
The greatest challenge I see facing people who sit as long as you do is this, – without awareness you will naturally function out of habit. You may function largely unconsciously with respect to your posturing. If you learned wonderful habits related to the organisation of your body in the past then you will have good unconscious habits related to sitting. If you didn’t then now is a good time to begin the re-education. If you feel that it is too late or too difficult etc you might consider this response as something arising from your current posturing rather than to be any true statement of what is possible for you. So if you function out of habit (as everyone generally does), and your habit is to sit forward or slouch back or lean on one hip this will be the way you operate. I mentioned that we are consciously considered to be able to process 40 bits of information per second, whereas we are unconsciously processing 10,000,000 bits of information in the same second. Those 40 bits of information can leverage a change in the functioning of the unconscious operation with 2 important qualities, – intention and willingness.
The real question we are facing is to do with movement and I need to qualify what is meant here. I mentioned the collagen fibres and how they adapt, and no doubt they have adapted over time to make certain postures feel ‘easier’ or more familiar although they are well and truly ‘out of alignment’. The movement I am talking about is actually something called ‘motility’ – or internal movement. It is an expression of how freely your body allows the translation of movement. It is expressed, as one example, in how freely you can breath and how much the translation of each breath washes through the fibres of your body. You are approximately 60% water. Habituated posturing that can occur while you work for a couple of hours without even thinking about your body – having a compressive effect on your natural rhythms, and these natural rhythms need internal space to operate optimally.
One way I am considering you can respond to the physical effects of your interaction with your working environment then is movement. Breath with awareness for 5 minutes from an aligned perspective. Keep your knees slightly below your hips to allow mobility of your lower spine. How you do an exercise is of ultimate importance to the outcome, so I suggest you do such exercises slowly, consciously, and listen to your body.
There are many things you can do to improve the overall awareness of your body. The value in improving your body awareness is that you can now respond to sensations and feedback that may have been forgotten. I did the exercise of touching each others spine to indicate that some areas have more sensation than others. The more aware you are of your body, the greater the opportunity to take care of issues before they become problems.
I mentioned an article worth reading, and here is the reference: New Scientist article (Mag issue 2747 – can be purchased online) The healing touch – The secret to repairing our bodies and growing new organs is getting all touchy-feely”. The article is written by Bob Holmes.