Posture is the manifestation
of the automatic, underlying tensions.
Photo by Trudi Cooper
The bones go where the muscles hold them. The muscles have no will of their own. The nervous system (your brain and spinal cord) control the muscles.
Your spine is flexible, like a snake. Your brain uses the muscles to hold your bones actively (24/7,even while you sleep) in the postion that is perceives as your normalized tension equilibrium.
Hidden tensions that you can’t control become automatic. You can barely feel them. You can tell your body is tense, but you can’t turn it off. Stretching only confuses the brain-body system.
• Maybe your back is tight and occasionally spasms.
• Maybe you feel your body wants to hunch over.
• Your breathing feels constricted.
• In the mirror, you see one shoulder always a little lower than the other.• One eye may be higher than the other.
• Perhaps you even feel twisted.
• Maybe you feel your body wants to hunch over.
• Your breathing feels constricted.
• In the mirror, you see one shoulder always a little lower than the other.• One eye may be higher than the other.
• Perhaps you even feel twisted.
Posture is the expression of the tensions that are largely outside your awareness. They are the tensions being run on autopilot.
24 hours a day, the brain actively holds you in these tensions. Posture is a living, dynamic, ongoing event that can be changed at any time.
You didn’t always have these tension problems. Your nervous system learned, rehearsed, habituated them.
It is like an amnesia, a forgetting of the possibilities of movement. Learn to overcome your Sensory- Motor Amnesia.
The secrets of postural maladaptation; how one can lose certain controls, and how to regain them, are addressed by this process of Somatic Education, combining movement and sensory feedback, and focusing your awareness.
-Eric Cooper