What does your posture say about you?
Have you ever tried to change your posture through conscious thought?
How successful was it?
My guess is that as long as you had your attention on your posture, it was good, but as soon as you focused on something else, like, looking to see if a car was coming before crossing the street, you lost your focus on your posture.
This happens because posture is not regulated by the part of the brain that is conscious. It is practiced and then relegated to the non conscious parts of your brain, in order to be able to think and function and focus on other things.
Brain Gym uses movement to create a change in the brain, and therefore is a simple, effective, and long lasting way to change your posture very quickly and efficiently.
I recently had a man in his early 60's attend one of my classes. He was tall and hunched over, with stiff lower back and knees. He said in his introduction to the rest of the class,
"I'm here in this Brain Gym class because I want to make my transitions in dance better".
Looking at this man and his posture, it was a wonder to imagine him dancing.
In a room full of therapists who usually show up to my classes to learn techniques to "fix" kids, he was an anomaly.
He was wanting to learn how to smoothly transition from one dance move to another, but all I noticed that he kept consciously unlocking his knees and felt like he was consciously holding up his upper body all the time.
Sometimes during the class he would tune out completely, and after a long stretch of me speaking or teaching a concept, he would raise his hand and say, "I didn't get that whole last section you talked about, can you say it again?".
The second time he did this, I burst out laughing because the timing of it was so funny, but I also realized that he is spending so much mental energy on keeping his body upright and relaxed, that it was taking away mental energy from being able to focus and comprehend the information being taught.
I asked him to come up and be a demonstration model for a brain balancing sequence on focus.
As a little background, Brain Gym uses observation of the body movements and it's postural habits to see what could be going on in the brain as it relates to learning.
Not in every single case, but poor posture can be related to a breakdown in focus(how your brain stem is talking to the cortex).
So he came up and I had him go through a process called 3 Dimension Repatterning, while he was lying on the floor.
I was busy talking to the rest of the class about the process and leading him through the steps in the hopes that this process would help his focus at least a little bit for being able to listen and understand what was going on in class.
What I did not expect was what happened next.
When he stood up I heard all of the therapists in the room gasp.
He looked totally relaxes and is back was completely straight.
You could also see that his knees were looser and more relaxed.
Everyone watched in awe as he walked back to his seat.
No one understood how in a matter of 10 minutes his posture could change so dramatically and easily. My understanding is that it is because his body and brain are now working in concert to provide support through his core.
He did not ask again for the rest of the duration of the class for me to repeat anything else.
AND he also achieved his goal of more easily transitioning between steps in his dancing. His comment at the end of the workshop was,
"I came here to work on my dancing, but I did not expect to also leave with better posture."
I found this TED talk given by a social scientist who studies posture and has come up with a quick way to change it to change your life. I like it because it goes much in line with using the body and movement to change the brain and behavior.
I hope that you enjoy and please leave your comments in the section below.
http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are.html