Connect to the ground of your being
Connect to the ground of your being
Developing 'skeletal consciousness' radically enhances perception & action
photo by Kelly Sikkema
My next workshop offering takes place on Sunday, October 20, 1-3pm EST, when I invite you to explore with me the Musicality of Ground.
As I did last month, in relation to breath, I have collected here a wide variety of resources to support you in developing your embodied understanding of a crucial relationship that is present in every moment of your life, your relationship to ground.
A more popular notion of what we will be exploring in this month’s workshop is the question of ‘posture’ or ‘alignment.’ While these words are relevant to our inquiry, they all too easily become distractions when we get hung up on overly simplified definitions of what makes posture ‘good’ or ‘bad.’
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I will advocate for a different perspective, following the teaching of the pioneering somatic educator, Moshe Feldenkrais, who once joked that “posture is for posts.”
Feldenkrais invented a new word, acture, to emphasize that our capacity to function successfully in gravity is a not about following prescriptions for the maintenance of static positions. Instead, we must become skillfully adaptable within the inherent instability of our uprightness as it dynamically shifts on a moment-by-moment basis.
‘Good posture’ (acture) for Feldenkrais, then, was not a ‘correct’ position, but rather an ideal state of poise or readiness which he often described as “the capacity to move in any direction without preparation or hesitation.”
From this starting point, the resources I’m sharing in this post invite you into direct experiences of body-based learning designed to illuminate several key aspects of how your relationship to ground is fundamental to your wellbeing:
- Clarity of ground connection
- Weight distribution & balance
- Sitting comfortably upright
- Standing comfortably upright
- Developing skeletal consciousness
Clarity of ground connection
Working ‘from the ground up’, a logical starting point might be to ask how clear you are about the way your body connects to the ground.
Unless you are an astronaut, you will live your whole live in the field of gravity. From this point of view, the ground below you is the foundation of your support for being upright and also your key source of leverage for movement - ie., what you “push off of.”
Human civilization has produced many wonders, but generally speaking has handicapped most of us by imprisoning our feet inside shoes. This is why many movement enthusiasts these days are reclaiming barefoot walking.
But even if you don’t want to go that far, it’s well worth your while to reawaken the intelligence of your feet - expressed through their complex, but beautiful architecture of 26 bones and 33 joints.
If you search on YouTube for videos of people without hands, you will see evidence of the incredible flexibility and agility that our feet are potentially capable of.
Once your feet are more awake, you can begin to understand how the way you shape your feet and connect them to the ground affects your experience from head to toe.
A gentle process for waking up the dexterity of your feet
This full length class introduces you to dynamic strategies for working with ‘ground forces’
Weight distribution & balance
Only part of the surface of your body connects to the ground. The rest of you hovers over the base of support - and the skill with which you organize the ‘airborne’ aspects of your body has everything to do with your balance.
Ideally, your muscles do a minimum of work because you are making the most efficient use of your skeleton, positioning yourself in such a way that any part of you that is moving outside of your base of support is counterbalanced by an equal weight moving in the opposite direction.
The tricky thing is to continuously counterbalance even as you move from one position to the next. The good news is that your joints afford you an amazing range of possibilities to continuously find ground in a variety of shapes.
A basic starting point is exploring your habits of weight bearing
A crucial point of investigation is how you balance your pelvis on top of your legs
Sitting comfortably upright
Because we humans spend so much time sitting these days, learning how to sit comfortably upright is crucial to your well-being. It’s important here to remember the idea of ‘good posture’ as a dynamic potential for action rather than thinking that there is one single ‘correct’ position for sitting.
That said, it’s also important to recognize certain common habits that many people have in relation to sitting in chairs. It’s an inconvenient truth that sitting on squishy surfaces, using swivel chairs, or constantly relying on a back rest for support will degrade your posture because these situations disconnect you from your skeleton.
A conversation with a client with some basic pointers for comfortable sitting posture
A more in depth exploration of sitting - you don’t have to meditate to benefit from this video!
This full-length class improves sitting by teaching the transition to standing
Standing comfortably upright
To stand comfortably upright is not simple! But you can improve your ability to stand upright dramatically by developing more skeletal awareness and by learning about your own postural habits, so that you can ‘catch yourself in the act’ when you begin to collapse in familiar ways.
A basic orientation that is always useful is the idea that your body is being lifted by the ground below you - rather than thinking that you are ‘sinking into’ the ground.
Yes, of course, your weight moves down towards the ground. Yet, if you are standing on solid ground, the force of your weight rebounds back up into you - as if you had just jumped onto a trampoline and depressed its surface as far as possible.
Strange as it may sound, your biology is designed in such a way that you can produce an experience of standing or walking that is essentially effortless - and if that’s not how it feels right now, you can definitely move closer to that ideal in stages.
Start by identifying habits which undermine your skeletal support
This full length class will help you ‘find your spine’ - which is unique to you
A crucial question of upright posture is how you support your head on top of your spine
Developing skeletal consciousness
All the resources in this post point to a general path of learning where you become increasingly aware of the interaction of your bones and joints - with each other and in relation to supporting surfaces and the bearing of weight.
Several of the videos come from my class series, Biological Fitness, which is an excellent overall training in developing skeletal consciousness (full playlist here).
The more you learn to know your whole skeleton “like the back of your hand”, the more skillful you can become with more complex motor patterns.
This video helps show how the functioning of each of your joints depends on all the others
To use your arms effectively, you must coordinate them with the movement of your spine
The capacity to be comfortable upright is the embodiment of dignity. The solidity of the ground under your feet is what trust feels like. When you learn to extend that feeling into your body, you will experience new levels of confidence and competence.
Likewise, clarifying your relationship to ground reduces the need for muscular effort, increasing the ease of movement and breathing. This reduction of “noise” in your system will also enhance perception and intuition, the sense of knowing it in your bones.
See below for information about the Musicality of Ground workshop. Subscribe to join.
Musicality of Ground
October 20, 1-3pm EST
Your capacity to be upright depends on your relationship to the earth below and the bones of your skeleton. Ground provides leverage for movement, support for rest, dignity for the soul.
The ground of being is your most fundamental resource. You have no idea how deep it goes.
It goes deeper than ideas. Orientation begins with sensation. Knowing grows out of feeling.