You want to learn to sit and stand with ease, efficiency, and a beautifully lengthened spine.
You want to mindfully connect with your body and use it to its full power.
You are sick of expensive products and therapies that only provide short term relief.
As infants, we all display this ability. In the first year of life, we sit beautifully and powerfully, without instruction. We do it by allowing gravity to take our body mass straight down to earth.
At 3 or 4 years old, we begin losing our easy manner of sitting simply by imitating what everyone around us is doing: throwing our body mass backwards into chairs, sofas, car seats, etc.
This turns the power of our body weight into a self-destructive force.
By 5 years old, we’ve lost our innate sitting ability entirely, without recognizing that we’ve lost it, and with no conscious memory of ever having employed it.
As young, supple children, however, we don’t feel the impact of our backwards body weight commitment. We are unaware of all the muscular strain and skeletal distortion - until at one point in life, through pain and/or injury, we are alerted to the state of our bodies.
Despite losing sensory awareness of our weight and its impact, we never lose the ability to sit. We just lose the ability to sit well. This is a society-wide problem; we all undergo the same conditioning.
Our collective kinesthetic disconnect has left society with rampant slumping and a high incidence of low back and neck pain . . . with no understanding of the source of it all. Society’s view is that sitting is an act of maintaining a “posture.” While we do posture at times -- when we pose for a photo or other wise assume a position intentionally, in our daily lives, what we are fundamentally doing is not posturing, but lifting.
. . . lifting the spine into verticality to put the head in position to see what it is we want to see. Without an act of lifting, we’d have no posture at all. We’d just be a pile of flesh and bones on the ground.
The question we should be asking then is: what makes for the efficient or inefficient lifting of the spine? And the basic answer is: how we wield the power of our body weight.
By regaining sensory awareness of our body weight and recognizing its moment-by- moment impact on the quality of our lifting, we can recover the ability to sit and stand easily and efficiently.
