How is your posture today?
When I first chat about posture with someone there is an immediate reaction, which is almost universal. The person I am with will sit more upright bring their shoulders back and often tell me that their posture is rubbish, awful and needs improving. Self-criticism emerges and continues as they will often share how a parent or schoolteacher had tried but failed to instil a sense of good posture usually involving a straight back, head up and chest out type of pose, which you may be familiar with but which you may also equally have found impossible to maintain.
So what has happened that so many of us have taken on these rules as being what posture is about, then discarded them?
Could it be that deep down we realise our relationship with posture is something very different indeed? That it is something less imposing, less rigid and something whose true influence comes from within us and not out with us. Could it be that true posture is the outward reflection of our inner world, that it is when we connect to our body that our body naturally adopts a position that can lovingly support us throughout our day?
Human life is reflected in nature all around us and so much can be learned about posture from these reflections.
Consider a willow tree and how its branches move gently and gracefully in the wind only to rest back in position when the wind drops. If it were instead to hold its branches rigid they would snap as they resist the wind blowing through them and it would not be long before all that would be left would be a tree trunk, void of its beautiful delicate network of branches and leaves.
Our bodies were never designed to be a rigid structure but rather to move in response to the impulses from within. Supporting our posture means lovingly exploring our body from within, and from there, feeling our relationship with the earth, with gravity and the world and moving in our own flow, an outward expression of our inner connection.