Does Education Ruin Your Posture or Can It Fix it?

Does Education Ruin Your Posture or Can it Fix it?

by Noeline Levinson, a qualified Alexander Technique Teacher, talks about re-educating your body to improve your posture


I was once asked to do an assessment for the company Johnson and Johnson, and from that assessment I concluded that education ruins your posture. I went into the factory where the people were working on assembly line and their posture was wonderful. Then I was escorted to the admin block where all the accountants and other administrators worked. There, each and every person was slumped over their computer, hence my first statement about education. Many aspects of the Alexander technique apply here.

Firstly, we are born with perfect posture, or what Alexander would call ‘use’. Just watch a young child pick something up from the floor. Then as the children go off to school, they have to sit for many hours at a desk. Sitting for long periods of time is very stressful on the spine. Then they carry very heavy bags over one shoulder for many years of schooling. Once they come home, they flop into a couch/sofa to watch hours of television. And we wonder why they look like they do. They slope about throughout their teenage years and then finally qualify and find a job only to sit for many more hours behind a desk, again, slouched over a pc, or some other device. I have worked with architects who have very difficult desk positions to get used to. Dentists have another sitting position that is most testing on the back. All the time while growing up, the awareness of body has been negated and it is only the final pain in the back and neck that drive them to find a solution.  Our environment is not user friendly, by and large, and yet many are not aware of this at all. We all know how to use our body correctly, we have just forgotten about it.

Finding your way to an Alexander technique teacher is the first step in creating a solution. Re-educating the body is the answer.

article two:

Sit up and Listen!!

NB.  photograph below shows FM Alexander teaching a student

Do you remember at school when teachers would say: “Sit up and listen!”? They were onto something, even if they did not know it.

Before I went to train to become an Alexander technique teacher, I was gifted a trip to Paris to meet and work with Professor Alfred Tomatis. He was an ear, nose and throat surgeon who was the first to devise a method of stimulating the brain with the use of the music of Mozart. Later to be dubbed by one of his students ‘the Mozart effect’.

I was lucky enough to attend a weeks singing course with him, and only a few years later did I really fully understand what I had been taught in that time. Tomatis would speak about ‘the listening posture’ (in French of course), referring to the connection between the head, neck and back. He claimed that the ears did not function, were not listening as long as the connection between all of the above was broken. A few years later I was again overseas training to become an Alexander teacher and the basis of FM Alexander’s principle is the connection between the head, neck and back. Alexander referred to it as ‘the primary control’. He, Alexander, claimed that when the primary control went out of alignment the rest of the body changed shape. Think of all those children slumped over their desks at school, and the very poor posture many of the children keep, particularly while sitting at their desks at school, exactly where we want them to be listening. As it happens, there are a number of reasons why children don’t listen, however I feel strongly that the body alignment is certainly an important factor that is often overlooked. I have seen many children and adults with low muscle tone, a condition when the back of the body is over tightened, creating a body that looks like a question mark. A number of those people also had trouble with their listening skills. As a joke, the only one it really worked for was a politician.
Anyway, I digress, my point I was making today is that listening, and keeping one’s ears open has to do with what is happening in the body alignment. As adults we think that this may only apply to our children and grandchildren, however they believe that we don’t listen. 

Listen up! Step lightly and be spritely.

Noeline's articles:
Flexibility + Mobility = Longevity
Are you exercising or just beating up your body?
Sit up and Listen


About Noeline:
Wisanow contributor, Noeline Levinson qualified as an Alexander Technique teacher in June 1990. She had studied in Israel, Tel Aviv for 4 years. Noeline taught Alexander technique to Opera students at the Cape Town College of Music and then taught at the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg, teaching aspiring actors and running workshops for professional actors. Noeline has been teaching privately for the past 21 years and has taught a variety of people from all types of performers, to people who work in companies and sit all day in front of computers. Noeline was asked to go to a number of companies to assess their staff in terms of their seating arrangements.  A number of staff suffered from headaches, neck problems and repetitive strain injury. All of which were assisted with The Alexander Technique. Noeline started out her career as a dancing teacher and then became interested in The Alexander technique and went overseas to study. Dance and exercise have always been a passion of hers. However, while she was teaching she noticed many people miss-using their body without really being aware of it. Noeline then devised a training programme for personal trainers called S.E.T. (Safe Exercise Training), which was accredited by a big gym group in SA at the time. Its aim was to exercise the body effectively and safely without the threat of injury.  Her husband is a personal trainer and used this technique with his clients and they had amazing results.

Back pain ranked very high on the list of reasons for employment absenteeism. It is a very real issue, from which many people suffer.

Noeline Levinson
email: noeline@family-focus.co.nz
09 522 8584
http://www.alextechnz.com/