Would the world be a better place if you had better posture?

This week’s video is about postural exercise and healing, or rehabilitation. In this interview with my colleague Dr. Ron Lavine, we cover important topics such as:

• What is good posture? Depends on what you want to do with it.

• How better posture prevents chronic conditions like piriformis pain, gluteal tendonitis, or iliotibial tendon syndrome.

• Could the quality of education and treatment in rehabilitation be better? Yes!

• Is your brain really in control of your body? Nope! That’s why thinkers have come up with the idea of embodied cognition, which has upended western philosophy.

When I asked Ron how the world would be different if everyone had access to high quality postural exercise and re-education, he said “well…we wouldn’t have elected Donald Trump.”

It’s a big leap…but in a weird way I think that’s true!

Posture is not just about getting your body out of pain; it’s what you are using that posture for.

Is it a posture for readiness, for stability…for aggression, or for peace? For me, the better our posture is for our true purpose, the better we can feel our bodies and the more alive we are to our surroundings.

We experience the world through the living tissues of our body, not just in our brain. We make better, life affirming decisions when we can feel and perceive this way.

The more we make life affirming decisions for our own bodies, the more we work together for the greater good. There’s joy in that, even if it’s scary and challenging.

And yet…my usual positive mindset is tempered by grief today. Bear with me.

It’s Memorial Day again, and we haven’t learned from it.

I never fail to be astounded by the fact that we continue to have more senseless wars and lose more precious lives with each passing year.

My great-great grandfather fought in the US Civil War. His father fought in WW1. My own father, at the age of 17, went into service during WW2. While all of them survived, they did not survive emotionally intact. The posture of a soldier, if you look at it, is one of fear. The chest lifted, the chin pulled back, withdrawn under a helmet if they are lucky enough to have the protection.

My greatest fear as a teenager was that I would lose my older brother to war as well. He didn’t have to serve, thankfully (this was during the Reagan years), but he did have to register for the draft in order to get funding for college. That is so wrong!

My father, typical of many soldiers, wouldn’t talk about his war experiences. The one thing he would say was “there was nothing heroic about it”. It was only many years later that I learned some of the truly heroic stories from his service. Not heroic in the way you would think though, just stories about people caring for each other in impossible situations.

They were really spiritual stories about the human spirit transcending circumstances. That’s how I’ve come to understand them, anyway.

Somehow, my familial history of war is deeply connected to why I became a dancer and embodiment teacher.

One of the movements that emerged from WW2 was the international folk dance scene, which my parents were part of. It was way of affirming international humanity and the offering of dances across cultures. The different music, colors, gestures of expressions, and rhythms of world dance filled our house.

Of course, even the history of that movement has colonization and oppression within it…as dancer and choreographer Hadar Ahuvia’s work around Israeli folk dance has so eloquently expressed and excavated.

My own experience studying Hawaiian dance, song/poetry, and language (Hula, Mele, and ʻŌlelo) revealed that it is so much more than what my parents understood as “folk dance.” It is a contemporary, moving, living body of practice and knowledge essential to the survival of an entire people.

Still, when we meet as learners of movement, we are much more able to see the joy in each other and heal the suffering we may have caused. Connecting with each other dance to dance, arm to arm, ear to ear, rhythm to rhythm, this is what helps us solve our problems together.

This all connects to how we balance our bodies on the planet.

Just think: how does your body balance if you are getting ready to step into a circle dance?

How is that posture different than readiness for war?

Let us prepare ourselves as best we can for making peace where we can find it; taking care of each other as we try.

Much love to you on this Memorial Day Weekend. May the lives of all who died not be wasted.