Learning to stand again

When I was in Year 9 as part our our physical education class, we had to strip down to our bras and shorts and have our profile photo taken to assess our posture. I remember sitting there staring at the Polaroid and being disgusted by what I saw. I was just 14 years of age and yet, I thought, my body has already betrayed me.

My posture was terrible. My head went too far forward. My shoulders rounded, inward. A lot. Giving a kind of curve to my back in places where there was not meant to be any curves. I can’t remember what, if anything, I was given as a strategy to correct my posture. But I do remember the photo. I can see it clearly even now, as I think of it. See it as if I am holding it right now. I sometimes wonder if that photograph actually hindered, rather than helped. If it actually visually reinforced for me what was ‘me’ and so my poor posture stayed. Became part of my identity. My body image. My poor body image. I knew I slouched. And the photo just confirmed for me that I did. And I continued to afterwards. Nothing changed. Perhaps I just didn’t get the advice I needed in that class, or maybe I just didn’t listen to the advice I was given to correct it. Regardless, I wish I had done something about it. Because, correcting your posture at 14 years of age, I imagine, is a lot easier than when you are over 40.

I have had a few ideas as to why my posture even at the age of 14 was the way it was. One idea was that it was because I was taller to begin with than most. In grade 5 and 6, I grew fast and was tall as a primary school student. I was above average height compared to most of the students, and particularly some of the boys. As children we like to fit in. Correction, even as adults, we like to fit in. And fitting in for me at that age meant being similar. I used to think I stooped my body downwards slightly, in an attempt to be like my friends. Or perhaps I had to stoop a little to have conversations. Although, I wasn’t ridiculously tall, and looking back at photos I don’t look uniquely tall. So this explanation has always felt a little absurd. There were plenty of other kids who were a similar height. And not long before this time, just a couple of years before, I had been doing ballet. Where it was all about standing straight. So I don’t think this was it.

I have wondered before if it was learnt behaviour. As an adult I have seen other people’s children mimic their parents in the way they stand or walk. But neither my mum, nor my dad or any of my siblings slouched the way I did. So I don’t think it was that either. Another thought I had about why it might have been the case is that I just simply got into a bad habit. As a kid I was pretty active but I also really liked to write and read. All that sitting, hunched over a book as I read for hours, or hunched over a notebook as I wrote my imagination out onto the paper, probably led to some habits or muscle memory which, when standing, my body decided was the ‘default’. But if that was the case, I think there would be a lot more people out there with rounded shoulders.

I feel like I have always had bad posture, and it impacted me from a very young age. As a young child I was completely and utterly haunted by an old woman I would see each week when my mum dragged us all to church. This old woman was extremely hunched over. Probably from age-related osteoporosis. Something I wouldn’t have known anything about at the time, I was way too young. I didn’t know the cause of her deformed shape, I just felt such anguish every time I saw her. I would feel a real tenderness for her, it looked like it must be painful and I felt so sorry for her suffering. It also scared me in a way I did not understand, until I was older. It seems I was scared, even at that age, that she would be me. Me when I was older. That this was my destiny that I was looking at. That she was what I would become.

A number of interventions did not solved the issue for me as a young adult. My dance classes in first year university, and trying to apply the Alexander Technique, didn’t help. I had some ridiculous notion that it would magically correct my posture over a short period of time and I would be this elegant perfect postured person for the rest of my life. Free from the dread of becoming a hunch back, the old lady in the church. The physiotherapist and chiropractors I visited throughout the years, were not able to correct my posture. Yoga helped to a small degree, but the physical restrictions my body presented made some postures impossible. And I got in my head I was no good at yoga. That I was perhaps not made for yoga. It just all felt too hard. And at the time I did not realise it, but it was also too confronting. A constant reminder of what was not right about me.

It is funny. Interesting funny, not humorous funny. I hadn’t realised until this very moment writing this post, how much shame I have carried in my heart about my posture. It was the thing, which was always wrong about me. The thing people always tried to correct. ‘Stand up straight,’ they would say. ‘Stop slouching,’ I would be told. I had ‘bad posture’. And I was ashamed. It never helped when people would yank my shoulders back, trying to get me to stand up straight. That doesn’t actually fix the issue. So please if you know anyone who slouches, refrain from this gesture, no matter how helpful you are trying to be. My year and a half of attending pilates has taught me so much about my posture and all the elements which need to work together to stand straight. And the shoulders are almost the last bit of your body to adjust. Yanking them back, without engaging your core muscles or your gluteal muscles, is pointless. And you really need to use the muscles along the side of your body too. You need to use them a lot. So, unless when you yank someone’s shoulders backwards they spontaneously engage all the other parts of their body which work together to support that posture, and have the strength to hold it there, it is kind of pointless. Not to mention rude.

Practising meditation over Easter I would sit for half an hour on the beach concentrating on my posture as I went through my guided meditation. I would engage all the muscles I understood I needed to recruit for good posture. During these daily meditations on the beach, something started to shift, not so much in my physical body, but more in my awareness. In my understanding of myself. I started the journey of uncovering the essence of my poor posture. Realised that perhaps it wasn’t about my physical body habits alone. That perhaps I was protecting my heart centre.

Yes my heart centre. Think about it. If you round your shoulders, your heart centre moves inwards. This realisation resonated. It felt true. I couldn’t shake it. But up until right this very instance tonight, I had not been able to unlock why I was protecting my heart centre. Couldn’t think of any event, or particular moment that would make me protect it. But I know what it was now. I was protecting my heart centre because I was ashamed to be me. Ashamed of being tall, of being an awkward stick of a girl with short hair (while all the rest of the girls sported really long locks). Ashamed of my buck teeth. Which were really bad when I was younger. And of the vampire baby teeth on either side of my rabbit sized front teeth. And as I slouched to protect my heart centre, to protect showing ‘me’ to the world, I would be criticised for my posture. More shame. Shame upon shame. Compounded shame.

And yet, I always presented as a happy-go-lucky, confident young girl. With a fierceness and determination to do whatever I really wanted to. And yet, deep inside was a self loathing, a lack of self love, a feeling of shame. I don’t know if this was just a product of being a 70s child and an 80s teenager. But this realisation makes me stop in my tracks, to think about how important it is for us to instil in the younger generations, the children we bring into this world, to love who they are. To love their bodies regardless of shape, form or function.

It is blatantly clear right now, anything I do which only focuses on working on the physical side of me is never going to succeed in fixing my posture. It will help. But really, it will only be adjusted permanently if I do the inner work alongside the outer work. If I address this shame. As I write this, I suddenly have tears in my eyes. I am a little surprised at the emotion that this post is stirring for me. And suddenly now, something else makes sense. I now understand why I have procrastinated about writing this very post. You see, I have been wanting to write about my posture journey, about my Easter discovery and protecting my heart centre. Wanted to share my journey about that day in my physical education class to today. Wanted to share it since Easter, and for almost the entire month of Blogtober. Yet, every day of October, a different idea for a post would call to be written instead.

The words of Shaka Sengor rings true: ‘Inside us all, is a broken child.’ Yes, in every single one of us. And if you remember this, when you know this, it is impossible to show anything but compassion to people. And here, right here is my broken child inside me. She has stepped out tonight to face me. To show me who she is and what she needs.

And yet, to begin with I did not show her compassion. Shame is a funny thing. You can actually feel shame about being ashamed. Yes, we so quickly judge ourselves. As I have been writing and discovering tonight, I could hear the critical me in my head asking, ‘How can you be so emotional about this? How can you feel shame about simply not standing straight?’ And telling me, ‘You didn’t do something terrible as a young person. You weren’t physically deformed. You don’t deserve to feel shame. It isn’t bad enough.’ But really, is it about that? Comparing our shame? And only allowing and justifying the existence of your own if it is the most ‘deserving’ shame? No. It is not. I feel it. The shame, which I have carried for years inside me. The shame I have just shared tonight and written out. The first step in accepting who I am and letting my posture be whatever it will be, which could possibly mean it sorts itself out, as I realise I don’t need to protect my heart centre anymore. And can walk with my heart leading the way.