Recently, a student said something to me that I suspect many people can relate to. She has been told that improving her posture might help with her pain, so she has become increasingly vigilant about how she sits and stands.

Am I sitting up straight enough? Are my shoulders in the right place? Is my head too far forward? Am I slouching again?

She is trying very hard to have “good posture.” But constantly monitoring and correcting herself is becoming exhausting.

I can relate to this from my own experience.

For years, people told me that I had wonderful posture. I never slouched. I sat and stood very upright, and from the outside it looked like exactly what “good posture” was supposed to look like.

What wasn’t so obvious was how hard I was working to maintain it.

I wasn’t consciously telling myself to sit up straight all day. The effort had become so habitual that I didn’t even know I was making it. But my muscles were working constantly to hold me in that upright position, and I lived with chronic muscular tension, headaches, neck aches, and back pain.

Then, one day, I was fortunate to be matched with a doctor who suggested that I look into the Feldenkrais Method. Over time, Feldenkrais gave me a very different way of thinking about posture—not as a position I needed to achieve and maintain, but as a way of organizing myself in relation to gravity and the ground beneath me.

Which brings me to the very first lesson in Moshe Feldenkrais’s book Awareness Through Movement. The lesson is called, appropriately enough, “What is Good Posture?”

Feldenkrais begins with a familiar instruction: “Sit straight!” or “Stand straight!” When people are given this instruction, he observes, they usually respond by straightening their back or lifting their head. For a while, they may look more upright. But maintaining this corrected position requires continuous effort. As soon as their attention turns toward something more interesting or important, they tend to return to their habitual posture.

When I read this now, it resonates deeply with my own experience. The difference was that I didn’t need anyone to remind me to “sit straight.” I had learned to maintain that effort automatically.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that we aren’t trying hard enough.

Perhaps good posture isn’t something we should have to hold in the first place.

What does “straight” actually mean?

Feldenkrais questions the whole idea that good posture means standing straight. Anatomically, the human skeleton isn’t actually straight. Very few of our bones are precisely vertical when we stand, and our spine has multiple curves.

For Feldenkrais, “straight” is primarily an aesthetic idea rather than a useful functional description of posture. A static position that looks good from the outside doesn’t necessarily tell us how comfortably or efficiently someone is organizing themselves.

Instead, he offers a very different way of thinking about posture:

“the skeletal structure should counteract the pull of gravity, leaving the muscles free for movement.”

– Moshe Feldenkrais

I find this a much more useful idea.

Your skeleton is designed to transmit forces through your body and into the ground. When your weight is well supported through your skeleton, your muscles don’t have to work so hard simply to hold you up. They can be more available for what muscles are especially good at doing: moving you.

This doesn’t mean that good posture requires no muscular activity. We aren’t stacks of bones balanced motionlessly on top of one another. Muscles are continually making subtle adjustments that keep us upright in gravity—most of which happen without our conscious attention. Feldenkrais points out that we normally aren’t even aware of much of this antigravity muscular activity.

The question, then, isn’t whether your muscles are working.

It’s whether they are doing more work than they need to.

Posture is not a position

One of my favorite ideas in this chapter comes when Feldenkrais stops looking at posture as something static and begins looking at it dynamically.

Standing is not really a destination. It is one moment within movement.

You stand before taking a step. You sit before reaching for something. You turn to look behind you. You shift your weight when someone walks past. Even while apparently still, you are breathing and making countless small adjustments in response to gravity.

From this perspective, good posture isn’t the position that looks most correct in a photograph.

Feldenkrais describes good upright posture as an organization from which a minimum of muscular effort can move the body with equal ease in any desired direction.

I think that changes the question in an important way.

Instead of asking:

“Am I in the right position?”

we might ask:

“From here, how available am I to move?”

Could you easily turn your head?

Could you reach for something?

Could you take a step?

Could you change direction?

Could you breathe comfortably?

Or do you first have to let go of the position you’ve been carefully maintaining?

When trying harder becomes part of the problem

This is where I think Feldenkrais’s perspective can be particularly helpful for someone who has been told repeatedly to “work on” their posture.

Pain can understandably make us protective. We may stiffen certain areas, avoid certain movements, or brace ourselves without realizing it.

Feldenkrais suggests that pain and nervous tension can gradually reduce our sensitivity to these habitual muscular efforts. Eventually, we may be working much harder than we realize simply to sit, stand, or move.

Then someone tells us our posture is poor.

So we add another layer of muscular effort to correct it.

Shoulders back.
Chest up.
Head straight.
Core engaged.

And perhaps we look better. But have we actually become better organized? Or have we simply become better at holding ourselves in a particular shape?

This doesn’t mean that posture has nothing to do with discomfort, or that changing how we sit, stand, and move can’t help. It certainly can.

But consciously policing your posture throughout the day may not be the most useful way to create that change.

Try this instead

• Stand somewhere comfortable for a moment.
  Don’t try to improve anything. Simply notice your contact with the floor. Where do you feel your weight through your feet?
• Allow yourself to sway very slightly forward and backward.
  Make the movement small enough that you don’t need to brace yourself.
• Then sway gently from side to side.
  You might eventually let the movement become a small circle.
• As you explore, notice whether there is somewhere near the middle where standing becomes particularly easy.
  Don’t try to stay there. Just pass through it. Can you begin to recognize the feeling of being supported by the ground, rather than holding yourself up?
• From there, how easy would it be to take a step?

Feldenkrais uses explorations like this in “What is Good Posture?” to help us discover stability through movement rather than trying to manufacture it by standing still.

From vigilance to awareness

This may be the distinction I most want my students to understand.

Awareness is not the same thing as vigilance.

Vigilance says: Am I doing this right? I need to correct myself.

Awareness asks: What am I doing? What does it feel like? Is there another possibility?

The first can become exhausting. The second gives us information.

Feldenkrais wasn’t proposing another ideal posture for us to imitate. His approach was to improve our ability to sense how we organize ourselves, recognize unnecessary effort, and discover other possibilities.

Good posture, from this perspective, isn’t something you achieve once and then remember to maintain.

It is something more adaptable.

You feel the support of the ground beneath you. Your skeleton carries your weight. Your muscles don’t have to work quite so hard to hold you together. And because you aren’t investing so much effort in staying in one “correct” position, you are more available to breathe, turn, reach, walk—and respond to whatever comes next.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to get better at holding yourself up.

Perhaps it’s to discover how much less holding is necessary.

Further reading: Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement. The ideas discussed here are drawn particularly from Lesson 1, “What is Good Posture?”