Light is flooding the room and I am looking into the greenery somewhere in the centre of Lisbon. Next to me is Gillian, my conscious alignment therapist and one of the recent additions to the tribe of mentors, guides and coaches that are propelling me forward.
I have been learning more about myself in the past months than I have in all the years before. Suddenly, it is all coming together and I am getting to know the real me. And I get to see how broken I am, also in a physical sense. By how broken I don’t mean that it’s a lot or little, not quantity-wise, but I get to see how I am broken.
And with Gillian, we are looking at my body, my posture. It is incredible how much the body is a reflection of how we carry ourselves and for that matter our wounding. It’s all in the body and Gillian is very good at spotting and adjusting it. She can perceive how my posture subtly changes when I move my awareness in my body. I can't see it but I can feel it.
My posture is a mirror of how I have been going through life. Facing the world with my forehead and belly thereby hyperextending my legs creating a hollow back and putting all the pressure onto my lower back - and a few other things. Taking a profile picture of me, she shows me how it’s looking, and I laugh and cringe at the same time. It looks like I am having a beer belly though I have barely any excess body fat (see picture below).
It doesn’t look healthy. Just as my life has not been internally healthy for four decades. Unconsciously that was, until now. That’s why I am here. I initially sought out Gillian to help me fix my alignment. Little did I know that she would seamlessly fit into my spiritual journey and turn into one more force of connecting with my true self.
Leading with my forehead and belly is a representation of me facing the world through thinking (head) and the second, sacral chakra (belly), the chakra of sex, power, money, creativity/creation and emotions. According to her, this unhealthy posture is very common as most of us are living through our minds and are driven by basic desires (sex, money and power).
This unnatural, non-vertical alignment requires my body to stabilise and compensate with all kinds of muscles that are now overworked, stiff, and as a result, are physically reinforcing this misaligned posture. Even with her instructions and me feeling into my body, I am having a hard time standing in a perfect vertical line. If I did it right, there would be little effort and muscles needed because my body would be stacked and sit on top of each other .
Decades in the wrong posture make standing correctly feel like I am hanging over. It requires real effort. Plus many muscles have hardened that keep me in the status quo, including really hard fascia all over my body. Yet, it all boils down to one thing I need to learn, as Gillian points out: To feel my body. Don’t try to think and correct my posture, again: Feel my body. Feel the inside of my legs, torso, etc. everywhere. Feel the volume.
After several sessions, I start succeeding in feeling myself into the right posture. No thinking wanted or needed. It’s counterproductive. Isn’t it funny that that is also the exact same thing I have been learning on my spiritual journey? To feel and be connected with myself rather than to think and strategise. It is all the same. It is all connected. Body, mind, health, relationships - it's all one thing.
The path to freedom is to feel through life. That’s it. I keep learning the same message in different places and from different people. And so I continue unlearning “always thinking” by which I have created the very obstacles and (health) issues I was hoping to avoid.
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