What does years of stooping do to self-esteem? Ellie Pithers puts the record straight.
“Stand up straight.” I am 13 years old, patiently waiting for the organ to launch into “O Thou the Central Orb”, when I hear these words and feel two hands yanking back my cassocked shoulders. As I tower over my peers in the choir stalls of Holy Trinity Church Northwood, in north-west London, my face flushes. I am tall for my age, and already developing an apologetic stoop as a result.
Why are we so obsessed with “good” posture? Why do we still have the mistaken belief that ramrod-straight backs – which can be traced back, by the way, to military drill formation on the turn of the 17th century – are synonymous with good deportment, and even moral uprightness? “We are the way we stand, ideally,” according to Sander L Gilman, whose 2014 bookexplores why posture is evoked again and again to represent the ideal, the beautiful, the perfect body.
As the Alexander technique focuses on how we react to our everyday stimuli, “release” is an apt word for its objectives, suggests de Obaldia, sipping a cup of tea, impressively vertical. “When you overreact to stimuli – to your own thoughts, feelings, to the things that you have to achieve that day – you tend to contract, to tighten, to pull down, to narrow,” she explains, tilting her head slightly to illustrate how even a downturned chin can throw one off balance.
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