Become involved!
If you are interested in feeling good all the days of your life, you have to become involved with your body. You can’t leave this up to anyone else. Others are busy and your well-being is too important to leave to chance.
Here’s why.
Each of us has acquired unconscious patterns of sitting and standing. In these unconscious patterns almost everyone sits and stands with the spine misaligned. No one knows for sure when and where we got out-of-whack. It may have started with imitating an older person we admired. Perhaps it was an injury, like falling off our trike, or an attempt to hide our emotions, or to fit in.
Wrinkles reveal
It doesn’t matter what caused our misalignments. What does matter is that we wake up now to our present out-of-Balance sitting and standing habits. At whatever spot our spine is asymmetrical, we’re doing damage. Asymmetry creates wear and tear in the discs, bones, muscles, ligaments, and tendons. The first step is to see the asymmetry. Then we can learn how to resolve the problem and take the undue pressure off the areas of stress.
Here’s a happy fact: your clothes are ready and waiting to reveal any spinal problems you may have.
Here’s an example:
Most of us see ourselves in the mirror over the bathroom sink. So it’s a good bet that what this woman notices is that her left shoulder is higher than her right.
However, she could learn a lot more by looking at herself in a full-length mirror, where she could see what the wrinkles are in her clothing are trying to tell her.
Frequently, when I point the wrinkles out to a student, they pull their clothing straight like the woman below.
But where the spine is misaligned the clothing will wrinkle again, because the misalignment hasn’t been addressed.
The wrinkles in the clothing of both of these women reveal that they are holding up their right hip. In the lady in gray, notice all the wrinkles from her right breast to the hem of her shirt. The material is shortened there as are the muscles of her body specifically in that area.
In the lady in red the wrinkles slant from her left hip to her right shoulder.
Neither of these women can feel how the muscles are holding their right hips up because they have been doing it for so long. They may be bothered by sensations of uncomfortable tightness but they are used to it. Unless it escalates they don’t pay attention because they don’t know what to do about it anyway.
Live wrinkle-free
Below is a photo I took some years ago of a gentleman in Beijing. His wrinkle-free clothing reflects his aligned spine. Unless something happens, like an accident, he will go into his old age with very little wear and tear, and minimal stress in his muscular-skeletal system.
When you learn to sit and stand as he does (and you can!) you will feel better instantly and better and better as time goes on, which it will.
Begin with awareness
You can begin right now. When you look in the mirror – full length is best – notice where you have wrinkles. You will probably notice that one shoulder is higher than the other. So guess what? A difference in shoulder height is almost always caused by a collapse in one side of your waist area. Check it out, see what you observe.
This week in the Balance zoom class Wednesday at 5:30 pm PT or Friday at noon PT you will learn to wipe out the wrinkles in your clothing by aligning your spine right to left, front to back.
Come one, come all. Bring your body and a mirror. Wear any color but black.
~ Jean Couch
