This week I fix my posture
If you’ve done yoga you might know the frog pose. Ooooh, yes, the frog pose! When people do the frog – on their stomach with their bent legs splayed out at each side, stretching at a right angle to the torso – they cry. I’ve been in classes where the whole room is weeping, all sweaty and snotty, hoping no one’s noticing. Not from pain, but from a deep, sad emotional release as the pelvis slowly opens.
This is because, as I learnt during this week’s journey to stand up straight, the pelvis is the body’s brain, and like our brain it stores a stack of emotion in its dark recesses. The frog, then, is The Notebook for the groin, the “Hallelujah” (Jeff Buckley’s moving version) for the hip-flexer. And the pelvis, my friends, is a joint in serious need of a good hug.
I don’t know about you, but everyone around me these days is in hip/back/neck pain, sees their osteo/physio/chiro more often than their own mother and is constantly “getting back into” pilates/yoga/Core Attack classes. Surely this isn’t right. Surely there’s a better way. As they say in the NatGeo docos, I decided to find out.
Me, I come from a long line of women with dowager’s humps and men with tilted gaits. Add to this a career behind a computer and a very fat brother (well, he was fat as a baby; I was eight when he was born – at a hefty 12 pounds – and I’d carry him on my hip; it’s thrown my spine out to the right) and I now resemble a Twistie. A stale, soggy one.
This week, the contorted pain of being a Twistie finally had me see Anna-Louise Bouvier author of The Feel Good Body (who developed the Physiocise technique for posture) and the bubbly mood expert on ABC’s recent Making Australia Happy series. She calls me a “floppy”. I have super flexible joints that I struggle to keep vertically aligned, which is affecting my energy levels.
But she also says the way I slouch is making me sad, it’s dragging me down.
