I think posture is a big deal. Nowadays, the physical self and how it relates to your mental attitude is something I’m getting more and more aware of. As a strength and conditioning consultant in my earlier career, I was helping people stand up straight, get good posture, stretch the right muscles, strengthen other muscles, improve their awareness of their stance and how they hold themselves. But more lately, I’ve been using posture as a means to recentre myself, and my mind, more importantly.
So what is good posture, and why do we need to consider it in our day-to-day life? When I was coaching track and field athletes, I used to talk about chest over knees over toes. This stance, where you’re stacked up straight, is a state of readiness, a state to go forward, backwards, sideways, or wherever you need to, in a balanced way. More recently I’ve been combining this with some thinking around meditation posture: a slight upward tug on the back of your neck, chin slightly tucked in, pulling the spine upwards. One is meant to allow you to execute action in the physical world; the other aims to allow you to consider your relationship with thoughts and whether they drive you to behave differently. But overall, both under the term of posture.
The mind-body connection for traditions such as Zen Buddhism is so tight that they don’t actually differentiate between the mind and the body. Taking the position, or the form, in meditation means that you’ve achieved everything the practice offers. In other words, the benefits are in taking the position, not necessarily doing it to achieve anything.
So I suppose I’m offering you to consider what it means to get your body in good shape and maintain it in good shape, and how it affects your mental state and your cognitive performance, which in turn allows you to maintain composure, think clearly and perform at your best, without being buffeted by the noise and distractions around you. To be making decisions from a place of centredness and detached perspective. To be mindfully aware not only of what’s going on around you externally, but of the internal dialogue you’re having with yourself: what you should do, when you should speak up, what’s your value in the current situation. Posture is a really amazing way to come back to a calm place from which you can execute a response, as opposed to an instinctive reaction to the stimulus that are constantly coming at us in the busy world we make our way through on a day-to-day basis.
So whether you’re doing stretching, flexibility, yoga, weight training, calisthenics or any combination of the above, I think we shouldn’t be ignoring the physical self and the impact it has on our ability to remain calm and make the wisest decisions we can with the experience we have. Being able to take control of our posture and use it as a means to return back to a centre has become more and more central in my life. And certainly it’s something I’m encouraging coaching clients to consider when they feel the external environment is overwhelming them, or their internal dialogue leads them to behave in ways that don’t let their best self come forth into their life and the world.