Kristina’s July Note: Familiarity vs Alignment

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Last month, one of my yoga teachers, Judith Lasater, asked the whole class:

"Are you comfortable because it's familiar, or are you at ease because it's aligned? Our role as teachers is to show people what is possible and guide them to it."

By what is possible, she meant the optimal alignment they can reach - when the body doesn't spend any extra energy fighting the strain of misalignment and is at ease.

And of course, my mind went straight to Etalon. It gave me chills, because Judith wasn't only talking about yoga. She was talking about how most of us move through our days, and how rarely we stop to notice our own posture habits. We rarely ask: am I comfortable because this is familiar, or am I at ease because I'm aligned?

Think about how you sat down this morning. (Mom of a toddler who was up from 4:50 a.m. today, I couldn’t keep myself upright over my morning tea - guilty as charged.) How you gripped the steering wheel in traffic. How you scooped up your kid, or hunched over your phone, or stood at the kitchen counter making coffee. Most of us don't think about any of it. We just fall into the shape our body already knows - the shape we've made ten thousand times before. It feels right because it feels familiar. But familiar and aligned aren't the same thing.

Then one day we go to the gym, or roll out a yoga mat, and - ping - the back goes. And we blame the workout. But the gym didn't cause it. The thousands of small, misaligned moments before it did.

Most back pain doesn't come from anything dramatic. It comes from the misaligned repetitive movements we do every single day. Repetitive movement, day after day, becomes a habit. And that habit defines how our body functions.

The good news is that the same thing that works against us also works for us. If ten thousand familiar moments can shape us one way, then new moments - small, repeated, a little more aligned - can shape us another.

So this is the small thing I'd offer you today: a question to carry around. The next time you sit down, or reach for your phone, or catch yourself slumped over your morning tea (no judgment - I was there at 4:50 a.m.), pause for half a second and ask: am I comfortable, or am I aligned?

You don't have to change anything. Just notice. Noticing is where it all begins.

With all my support,

Kristina

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