Posture and Awareness - Sensing Space

An effective and fun way to work on your posture is to begin to notice how it is influenced by the space around you.  One of my clients who commutes daily to New York City through Grand Central Station, has learned to use her sense of this vast space to her advantage.  Improving posture could be described as more fully taking up all of your own space, so it can be interesting and useful to notice how we relate to external environments, what helps us feel expanded, compressed, contained, heavy, light, and so on.  Walking through the station helps her to feel expanded, especially in an upward direction.  She imagines the top of her head aiming toward the ceiling 125 feet (84m) above as she passes through the main concourse., which lends itself especially well to this experiment.  

Now let's change scenes and enter a different sort of space that she frequently inhabits...a corporate environment.  One day she arrived at her lesson after a day of work, which she had finished up in her cubicle on a phone call.  As her call came to a close, preparations for an office relocation were beginning to unfold (literally around her).  As she sat in her cubicle, the panels of the other workstations were coming down and her cube gradually became an enclosed little island in a vast office space...almost like working in a little pod in the middle of an empty main concourse at Grand Central.

Cubicles divide up large, open office spaces to cut down on distraction, to help us focus, and offer some privacy while working.  Add in a screen, a phone, and a deadline though and you might become so focused that you literally forget where you are.  When you forget your body, you are probably compromising your posture and creating a lot of tension and strain by jutting your chin toward the screen, slumping, pulling your shoulders forward, lifting your chest, or tensing your legs and feet.  I'm not suggesting that you take down your cubicle walls, but you could simply use your awareness and attention to bring some of your focus out into the broader space above you, behind you and out to your sides.  Listen to the sounds around you to help bring your focus out.  Get creative with it and think about how the room would feel if the cubicle walls were removed.  Imagine you're in your cubicle in the middle of Grand Central Station!  Even if you're in a open-layout workspace, you can use your awareness and focus to help you stay centered and balanced in your body.  Try it out for yourself!