Stand Up Straight!

Happy Monday! I hope you had a lovely weekend.

If your mother is/was anything like mine (and frankly, you could do a whole lot worse) (hi Mom!), she was consistently reminding you to stand up straight. Now, I have no idea what our mothers' objective was in this, but we have to admit that they were on to something. Because good posture is the next step you can take in making your whole deal better.

Modern life promotes a really dreadful body position: if you work at a desk, drive a car, or use your cellphone for anything besides talking you're regularly encouraging your spine and hips into an unnatural and uncomfortable question-mark shape that, due to a lot of biomechanical factors that are a little too boring to get into here, gradually becomes ... not your natural shape, but the shape your body most wants to revert to even though it's not the healthiest place for you to be. Over time this shape has a highly negative effect on our organ function, an effect we can glimpse even in the short term: try doing last Tuesday's breathing exercise from a slouched body position. Not so easy, is it? Or think about how you feel after you've eaten a little too much - do you want to slump over, or do you want to stretch out as long as you can just to give your stomach a little more room? And those are just the obvious examples - every single organ in your body is happier when you give it that extra space created by a nice long spine.

I'm not going to give you a set number of times for today's assignment, just do this whenever you think of it: lift up through the top of your head like there's a string attached to it and someone above you is pulling on that string. Once you've found that length in your torso, engage your abdominal muscles by pulling your bellybutton in toward your spine and give your shoulders a big roll up and back, feeling your shoulderblades flatten against the back of your seat (if you're sitting down, of course. If you're standing, just let yourself experience your chest and shoulders opening up). Take a few deep breaths here for good measure! Notice how much better the world looks when you yourself are walking tall.

Tomorrow I'm talking about guilty pleasures, and probably not in the way you're expecting. I'll see you then!

- Sarah