I know shamefully little of 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Ask me to free-associate on his name, and I will come up with the Monty Python drinking song, not the Critique of Pure Reason. But ever since I saw the photo above, in Sander L. Gilman’s Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture, Kant has been on my mind. …
Read more Annals of Catastrophic Posture: Immaneul Kant edition
Ever since Newton watched the apple drop, gravity has been getting a bad rap. From Newton’s insight – masses attract each other, and larger masses pull smaller masses toward them – we’ve created a tragedy. In upright cultures like our own, we have, after all, a duty to resist the downward pull. The plot is David and …
I’m back from New Zealand and looking forward to starting a new session of Spineful Yoga on Sunday mornings at 10 am and Mondays at 5:30 pm. Apart from the reassurance that summer does exist, somewhere on the planet, the trip gave me an unexpected gift of perspective. Slow and steady change can be hard to …
Read more Best thing I learned on my holidays? Long car rides don’t hurt any more
Do you believe that your back pain is normal? That the pain you feel when you get out of bed in the morning is just a sign of aging? Or that your pain while sitting is caused by sitting itself? If so, you’re wrong, but you’re not alone. I was reminded of this when I read …
Read more Do you think your back pain is normal? Think again.
Fashion photography always exaggerates. That’s why the pages of fashion magazines are filled with models in catastrophic posture, like the one above, from a 2018 Elle magazine. When I chanced upon it, I was in my ophthalmologist’s waiting room, and I swear it made my eyes hurt. I have a pretty good idea what she …
Are you familiar with Gretchen Rubin, author of wildly successful self-help book, The Happiness Project? One of her “secrets of adulthood” goes like this: what you do every day is more important than what you do once in a while. It makes sense. Anyone who plays a musical instrument has learned that 15 minutes of …
As a keen observer of the yoga scene, you may be wondering: What is Spineful Yoga? You might also ask: Does the world really need another yoga style? Wasn’t our desire for novelty satisfied once and for all by goat yoga? Well, here we go. Spineful yoga is yoga in alignment with gravity. The story of …
If you’ve ever felt guilty about slouching, you can stop now. It’s not your fault. Posture is cultural. Not only do we echo the posture of the people we’re talking to, we also mimic, down to the finest details, the people, and images of people, that surround us. And what we see is largely catastrophic …
I glimpsed this mis-aligned column while being swept along in a human stream descending the steps of the Acropolis of Athens. Happily, I was able to step out and take a picture. At that moment, all my swirling thoughts about architectural columns and spinal columns suddenly gelled. So far, I had learned that columns in …
Early on Saturday morning two weeks ago, I walked up the stairs of the Duroc Metro station in Paris thinking: “You’re 70 years old. Isn’t it time you stopped doing things that scare you?” I was on my way to a seminar with Noelle Perez. For someone who works in the world of natural posture, …