As children we are generally told to stand up straight, push our shoulders back and to stop slouching. I thought that this was just another formality or ritual within our society, like placing our knife and fork together when we had finished eating a meal. But now, in becoming an adult (or the age of one) I can see that being aware of my body and how I hold it is as important as any other activity or process involved in maintaining or restoring my health.
Posture; coming from the root word penere, meaning to hold, in other words how we hold our body from head to toe, has been known for centuries as has the importance of posture and its effects on our well-being. In evolutionary terms, our body is designed to move about gracefully as we roam this planet, however, in the last hundred or so years, with the invention of things like the car, television, computers, desk jobs, and in more recent times, the internet, we find ourselves performing relatively repetitive tasks in regard to the way we hold or move our bodies, often being in one position for hours at a time, and at the same time being so focused on the task at hand that we shut out the subtle messages that our bodies are trying to tell us.
