Pleasure Healing by Mary Beth Janssen

Author:Mary Beth Janssen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608825219
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

Posture Perfect

Let’s begin at the beginning, by talking about our posture, or perhaps more accurately, postural derangement. More people are experiencing severe back issues that they believe require serious intervention when simple postural alignment might help. Most of us are born with healthy spines, but more than half of all adults develop back problems by age thirty. Lower-back pain is second only to the common cold as the major cause of absenteeism from work, costing upwards of seventy billion dollars a year in the United States alone. Yet, you only have to observe a young child sitting on the floor with a perfectly balanced back or visit India or Africa and notice the old women squatting on their heels to know that it’s possible to have a perfectly easy, natural, and pain-free relationship with your spine. Its roots in Western civilization (where our modern lifestyle causes much of our dysfunction), back pain is not so common in China, where large numbers of the population practice gentle, rhythmic tai chi in the parks in the morning, and in Muslim countries, where people’s spines ritually bend and stretch in worship up to five times a day.

Are your lower-back muscles tight and tense? Do you regularly experience muscle spasms? Do you walk around with your shoulders rolled forward and hoisted up somewhere near your ears? Poor posture affects our health on every level, triggering a cascade of tiny structural changes throughout the body that have painful consequences. The shoulders, neck, and head push forward; and the pelvis tilts and shifts the spine, putting added pressure on muscles and joints. When combined, these habits distort and compress the spine.

When the spine is out of balance, the rest of the body repatterns itself to compensate. Some muscles tighten up and shorten, while others become overstretched and weak. Certain muscles work overtime to stabilize the body, and over time this repatterning becomes habitual, which is when true imbalances set in, causing pain and injury. Neurological problems result as well, given that the spinal cord houses the central nervous system. On an energetic level, poor posture greatly depletes our energy. When your shoulders consistently hunch forward so that your rib cage collapses over your solar plexus, you can’t breathe optimally. You can’t effectively exhale tension.

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