SHARPEN
Posture is what your body does when you stop paying attention
In closed guard, nobody breaks your posture in one motion. They wait for the half second your attention goes somewhere else, and then they take an inch.
- Your head goes down in installments. A hand gets inside and you allow it. Then a grip, then an angle. By the time your forehead is against their chest you've agreed to the position more than once without registering any of it.
- You stop feeling a shape long before you stop holding it. Thomas Hanna, whose career was the study of muscles people lose track of, called it sensory-motor amnesia: hold a position long enough and it drops below the level you'd notice. The muscle still works. What's gone is the report, which is why you can spend a whole round bent forward without once feeling bent.
- When attention gets busy, posture is the first thing it drops. Watch someone work a grip fight. Every bit of them is in the hands, and the spine settles into whatever position costs the least to keep.
Next round, check where your head is before you start passing. Then check again after the first grip lands.
SOFTEN
Bad posture is held breath, and held breath is held emotion
Somebody drops a plate across the room and your body answers before you know what the sound was. Frank Pierce Jones spent two decades at Tufts measuring the answer.
- Fear has a posture. Jones caught it on film and the sequence barely varied: eyes first, then head forward, shoulders up, belly tight, breathing stopped, all inside about a second and none of it chosen.
- The shoulder that went up during a hard year is still up. Nothing came along to bring it down, and somewhere in there you stopped calling it tension and started calling it your posture.
- You can't relax a muscle you've stopped feeling. Telling yourself to sit up straight goes nowhere, because the instruction starts from a position you can't locate. An exhale is different. Breathing runs on its own and still answers when you take it over, the one part of the pattern you can always find.
The question isn't how to hold a better shape, since nobody holds one all day. It's where attention gets back into the body after it leaves, and the exhale is the shortest way in.
ON THE MAT
Put one heavy bell in your hand and walk. Your shoulders and your breath will both start doing things you didn't ask for.
- Walk a suitcase carry. Down the length of the mat and back. The loaded side wants to hike toward your ear, so hold both shoulders where they'd sit if your hands were empty.
- Keep breathing the whole way. Most people stop the second the bell leaves the floor. Exhale long and slow, and notice whether the shoulders come down when you do.
- Catch yourself twice more before the day ends. Exhale first, then notice where your head and shoulders already were before you fix anything.
Your phone has your shoulders far longer than any bell will, and the version of you bent over it is the one this practice is for.
OFF THE MAT
A paradox to sit with this week:
Every shape you hold on purpose is temporary, and the ones that last are the ones you never decided to take.
For the journal: What shape does your body take when nobody is asking you to hold one?
DEEP READING
Until next week...
Train hard. Breathe easy. Walk the path.
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