Standing Is Just A Story You Tell Your Self

What did you feel when you woke up today?

How did you make sense of it?

You don’t need to make sense of your positive experiences – they are wonderful! It is the negative experiences you want to examine. When you experience a strong negative emotion, what do you do?

My guess is that you give this negative experience a name.

You call it “tired” or “worried” or “depressed” or “sad” – whatever. Words are called forth to give your experience a name.

Words – in the form of thoughts - try to make sense of your world. However, your experiences are all in the past.

At a motor-sensory level of movement control, a feeling is a sensory report on what just happened. That is not my opinion, that is neuroscience.

Emotions are the same. We react to something that happened. It is all in the past.

Whatever happened is just now over, but your experience leads you into making a story to describe what happened. Maybe it happened that way, maybe it didn’t. Your experience was real, but the story you assembled to describe it is your personal version of the event. Another person at the same place has written their own quite different version.

So your version and their version: both are fiction.

We believe in in this world of fiction, based on the story we tell of our experience.

Eventually, it is only the story you remember: “He was bad to me.” or “She cheated me.” Or “They don’t like me.”

Then the story keeps pulling you back into the old experience.

Eventually, you are trapped. The story keeps reminding you of your past, and you never escape that past. Because of your words, your thoughts, your story: you keep going backwards to your past.

Now pay attention because this next simple exercise could change your life!

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In BodyChance’s ThinkingBody Pro course, you can learn that how your story works with even the simple act of standing.

Many people complain about standing – their back hurts, they get tired, their legs become sore. Have you experienced any of this?

What you believe about standing is what pulls you back into standing the way you do.

Many people overextend their hips while they are standing. This is fact. I can line up 10 people, and at least 8 will be doing this. It looks like this…

The hips are thrust forward a little, and because of this, the upper body bends back slightly. Today - make it a project to look around at people standing. Are they just ever so slightly leaning backwards from the lower back while they stand?

Are you?

Most people are.

I see hundreds of new people every year, and almost every one of them has this slight forward extension of their hip joints while standing. We copy each other, so it eventually becomes universal.

However, just because it is universal, it does not mean it is helpful.

Because this thrusting forward of your hips can cause extra pressure on your lower back. It also means you need to bend your neck forward to counteract your upper body leaning back. All of this takes a lot of work, much more work than the original design that naturally evolved.

When you come to BodyChance, one of the first things you discover is that Nature’s original design for standing beats your story of it. It involves standing without thrusting your hips forward so that the bones of the leg support you, rather than a lot of muscular work in the legs. It’s way more efficient energetically.

When you launch into walking from this naturally evolved organisation, your walking is transformed. People report feel lighter, easier, freer. They often smile too.

However, there is a problem…

This new story of standing doesn’t fit with the old story of standing!

You have been standing with your hips extended forward for so long, this has come to feel “straight”. You give your habitual experience of standing the name: “stand straight”

Then you come to BodyChance. From one of our highly skilled teachers (it could be you one day) you discover a different kind of standing.

Once you have worked with a BodyChance teacher, you will feel like you are bending forward. You will not feel “straight” because your idea of “straight” matches your old experience of leaning back.

When you think of your old story “stand straight” you pull back your old experience: hips extend forward, upper body leans back, neck bends forward.

It hurts, yet you have come to be believe in your story of “standing straight”.

This is how you keep living in the past: by retelling your old story. It happens with standing, it happens with your partner, it happens everywhere in your life.

Living a wonderful life starts with examining all these old stories. You start by asking a simple question – is it true? Am I really sure that my idea of “straight” really is “straight”?

After going to BodyChance – you are not so sure!

In ThinkingBody, you start with the practical ways of how to stand, sit, walk and do the ordinary activities of life. Through these activities, you slowly learn how mind and body are working together. In fact, I usually avoid the word “body” if I can.

Bodies are dead. You are alive. You are a whole person: who thinks, moves and wonders.

If you want to understand you, your life and how to live, there is no better place to start than with the story of how you stand. The science of how you are standing, sitting, walking and doing all the little things of life.

At BodyChance we don’t try to change the big things – we start with little things.

Like how you sit at the computer, how you play your musical instrument, how you do an Asana, how you sing or chop carrots or get into the bath. Anything. The everyday activities of life are a great place to discover that a wonderful life depends on truth.

And the truth is what sets you free.

This is the third way to leading a wonderful life!

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This is the third in my series of five messages about BodyChance’s ProCourse training in Japan. Next, I will write about how your communication with others is part of BodyChance’s TeachingMethods Course.

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