Posture & Alignment

Posture should not be adjusted – it should be resolved. Making physical adjustments to an incorrect posture is just adding more tension to an already tense situation. Instead the teacher should address the sources of the tension that are causing the posture to be misaligned: he should have at his fingertips a body of exercises that help the students release the tensions in their postures so that the natural process of realignment can slowly begin. Given that there are likely to be multiple tensions in a misaligned posture, and that these tensions will not all release equally, the students' postures may change and adjust themselves strangely – often getting worse before they improve. The teacher should have the wisdom to let this happen and not interfere. Of all instructions, the blanket phrase: Keep your bum in, is probably the one most responsible for wrongly adjusted posture. Students who take this instruction to heart invariably apply an overcompensating force to their sacrum and pelvis with the muscles of the belly and groin, giving them a stiff or collapsed posture with a semblance of slouched relaxation and rootedness but with none of the real fluid connectedness to the ground, or more importantly to their own structure, that a naturally relaxed verticality would give them. For me, whether the bum is out or in is of no real consequence; what is far more important is whether the sacrum/pelvis/groin area is relaxed and loose. If it is then I know that it's not this area that is responsible for misaligned posture.

If I sincerely want a student's posture to improve I personally have to locate the tensions responsible for misalignment in their body, and then I have to help these tensions release. This requires me to manipulate the problem areas – it is my hands that must do the job. My hands don't realign the posture, they work into the tensions in the posture until they melt away, at least momentarily – whilst I have hands on, so that the student has an experience of clarity and awareness in that area that he can try to remember and retrieve when he practises. I then need to give him exercises he can practice alone that will assist in this retrieval. Without this personal touch I don't feel that I am teaching.