Читать книгу BodyStories - Andrea Olsen - Страница 11

DAY

1

BASIC CONCEPTS: Change, Posture, Structure, Choice

“Who are you,” said the Caterpillar …. Alice replied rather shyly, “I – I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Our bodies are dynamic entities. Our cells are reproducing, processing, and dying constantly as we live. Within a year, a month, the time it takes to read these words, we literally are not the same person we were before. Change is constant throughout the life cycle of the body.

Structure is our physical body: the bones, muscles, and other tissues which comprise our bodies. Structure is affected by our heredity and by our life experience in terms of nutrition, illness, and body use and abuse. Posture is the way we live in our structure – the energy and attitudes which moment by moment shape our bodies. Our posture affects our structure, and our structure affects our posture, and both can change. For example, if we are born with an extra vertebra or curved lower legs, our posture will be affected by our structure. If we stand with our head forward for many years, our bones will respond to the stresses of our posture. We can observe this dialogue between posture and structure by looking around a room at a group of people: we can see that we share a common structure, but the way we inhabit that structure is very different.

Both posture and structure are about choice. We choose how we live in our bodies and our life choices affect our underlying structure. A healthy body remains able to respond – responsible – to the changes in situations, people, and personal growth which occur moment by moment throughout our lives. ❖

Claiming Your Height

I lived one summer in the house of a bright, young anesthesiologist who was involved in heart transplant surgery. He was also a runner and complained to me of back problems. We worked with his alignment and noticed that his chest was retreated and that this, combined with a forward head, put stress on his lower back. As we brought his posture into vertical alignment, he took a deep breath and said, “I could never stand like this. I would threaten my colleagues and my patients.” He had unconsciously adopted a posture that was nonthreatening and noncompetitive in order to work in an environment which was both. It had given him a certain amount of emotional safety while he developed in his career, but it was now literally hurting him. The question became, was he ready to stand at his full height?

TO DO

Drawing your skeleton 15 minutes

Draw your skeleton. Rely on what you know and remember, and what you can feel by touching and imagining body parts as you work.

Draw a view from the front, and one from the side. Be as detailed as possible. (No checking pictures.)