Paradigms of Posture

An excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life, 2nd edition (Crowood Press)

Good posture is good for you, and bad posture is bad for you! On this we can agree immediately.

Now for the harder task: What is, in fact, “good posture”? And since we’re playing this useful game, what is “posture” altogether, independently of judgments of good and bad?

To answer these questions, I suggest we take a further step back. A paradigm is a set of principles, concepts, practices, and priorities—a set of life values, if you wish. We can safely say that a traditionalist Christian living in solitude on a remote hill in Greece has a different paradigm from a hard-headed, profit-driven capitalist living in New York City. They may be in agreement about a thing or two, but for the most part they think differently from each other. Their actions, too, go in opposite directions. In short, they adhere to different paradigms.

The number of paradigms is incalculable. Our New York City capitalist has friends and colleagues who share some of his convictions, but who also disagree with him over many subjects—for instance, how to raise a child, how to vote in a national election, how to treat their elders, and so on. Their paradigms don’t match a hundred per cent.

The word “posture” is defined, conceptualized, and lived in various ways, depending on the paradigm that you employ to define it.

If your paradigm says that the body and the mind are independent entities, your posture is likely to be an arrangement of body parts that you hold in space. If your paradigm says that the body and the mind are completely intertwined, your posture is likely to be an attitude, a reaction to a situation, a total embodied response.

In both paradigms it’s possible to work on your posture. Deciding to improve your posture and lessen backache, for instance, you practice planks, abs, weight-lifting, and other health-giving exercises. And you see improvements in how you hold your body up, at work and at play.

Or perhaps you decide to become more alert to your suppositions, your overall habits, your manner of approaching stressful situations, the way you project your personality in public. You notice that the rush to affirm an opinion in a professional meeting tends to make you tighten your neck and raise your voice. You decide not to say too much too soon, and to keep your voice moderately low. You’ll see improvements in how your neck behaves, and in how you sit and stand, and in how you think and feel all day long. It takes a lot of training, but you really change your posture.

In one paradigm, posture is a physical pursuit, and it’s position-oriented. Good posture is strengthening your core muscles, standing straight, and keeping your shoulders back—and I do think all of this is good. In the other paradigm, posture is a psychophysical response, a function of self-awareness, an ongoing series of adaptations and choices. Good posture is being open-minded and open-hearted—and I do think all of this is good, too!

Depending on context, the two paradigms might agree on certain points. Here’s a posture that melds the two paradigms. Train yourself to become able to sit on your sitting bones, as if perching at the edge of the seat of the chair or stool. With feet flat on the ground, sit relatively upright but without worrying too much about being ramrod-straight. At first you may be uncomfortable. Your back and neck and shoulders might complain. One of your habits might say, “Why not simply sit back and relax?” Another habit might want to scream, “This chair is horrible!” But if you persist and find the needed balance and poise, you’ll become comfortable and alert, able to sit through meetings, conferences, and family dinners irrespective of chair design. Then you’ll have two good postures, as it were: you’ll sit straight with shoulders back, and you’ll sit attentive and open-minded.

A subtle word, well chosen, can help you express yourself and connect with your listeners. A crude word, poorly chosen, can impede dialogue and even harm a friendship. Beyond dialogue and friendship, words also help you form your self-image and your vision of the world. There’s a big difference between these two statements:

“I want to improve the way I use my body. That’s the way I sit and stand and move.”

“I want to improve the way I use myself. That’s the way I react to the world, in the world.”

Each of these expressed wishes comes with its aims, its preferences, its practices. Think about it all, and then decide for yourself what is posture, what is good posture, and how to improve your posture. It’s possible that you’ll eventually choose not to employ the word “posture” altogether, simply because your aims and preferences and practices have shifted away from what the word implies to most people.