So here we go… the first of the Big 3, the beginning of doing ‘The Ride’ proper – the secrets of Posture, Attention and Practice. These are the key ones for the gifted, should you decide to practice, as they are all you need to ‘start’… Yep, you need to be gifted because I’m just going to show you what’s already there, there is nothing added, that’s the beauty of this approach, you will feel something or your won’t… Excited?
Before we start, know this – the real secret here IS NOT YOUR POOR POSTURE, it’s the PERSISTENT CAUSE OF IT, why you can’t fix it. Yes, I can replace your poor posture with Spiritual Posture in a few mins (it’s very specific), but unless you deal with the cause, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME. Indeed, without this constant cause, your distorted, unnatural posture would actually fix ‘itself’, if you just walked around a bit..
Ok, I see the VACANCY sign in your eyes right now, appearing after just the mention of the very ‘passe’ word that is ‘Posture’.. I know it’s not earth-shattering news, but poor Spiritual Posture does have an earth-shattering effect – it’s (very) Bad Blocker. It not only stops progress but often causes real problems for the gifted, who tend to suffer from the big 2 spiritual posture issues, ‘Mania’ caused by raised/locked shoulders and very ‘Low Mood’ bred into you over time by text neck/downward stare. Be clear, both of those will stop your spiritual progress dead, indeed poor spiritual posture generally will keep you stuck at the adolescent ‘high libido’ stage, like a ‘villain’.
Let’s start… So, wanna know what the greatest ‘BLOCK’ you have to spiritual progress is, indeed why you are not really that spiritual, even though you think you are gifted?
Organized religion? No.. Miss-translated texts? No.. Laziness, Shallowness, Stupidness? No.. To-cool-for-school-ness? No.. Bored-out-of-your-mind-so-live-on-social-media-ness? No.. You’re-a-‘Gamergirl’-streaming-yourself-on-Twitch-24/7-whilst-playing-Fortnite-in-Bikini-ness? NO (and that’s just fecking sad – don’t they pay more on OF?) The Progressive dumbing down of society? No.. Relying on the State to protect you? No.. Your Sexual Fantasies and Secret Life? Well, actually…ahh sorry, that’s a No again (close second though..)
Big News for ya – it’s Chairs, BLOODY CHAIRS.
See without Chairs, without sitting in chairs for half your little life (so far), you would already be WAY more spiritual because your body would ‘still’ work correctly, if you are gifted… See chairs are fecking Evil because CHAIRS DESTROY YOUR NATURAL POSTURE. Without chairs, your posture would be more than good enough..
Going to keep this very focused on what you need to do, and not so much why you need to do it (too much Daoism), but I am going to discuss the problem. These 3 secrets get progressively more technical and less chatty as we go, so make the most of this, nice and light to start. I’ll skim walking with correct posture in this Post, but overall its the 8th Secret so will be hit much harder later.
If nothing else you should start to realize, slowly but surely, why I’ve called it THE RIDE now…
Secret No 5 – For your spiritual self to work CONSCIOUSLY at any level of proficiency your POSTURE HAS TO BE CORRECT. Your posture specifically is how you hold yourself up, centering everything on the correct opening and lengthening of your SPINE. Your back, your spine is EVERYTHING in terms of your spiritual body. All else follows that in terms of every other part of your body ‘hangs’ casually off your spine, as loosely as possible, while your spine is held up, long and straight, like a missile pointing at the sky. All the time. This makes your body work spiritually, indeed physically as well, then all you have to do is walk, to move your whole body together, it’s that bloody simple. Remember this, for your body to work correctly, you have to MOVE while holding the CORRECT POSTURE. Your body is one big PUMP, and what it’s pumping is your LIFE. Once you stop doing one or both of these things you are ALREADY DEAD.
Check yourself in the mirror with the lights up in your B’day suit, just stand like you would at the bus stop, at the water cooler….. mmmm, not what you hoped for eh? That’s what chairs (and acidosis) do to you…
Here you are, in your early/mid/late 30/40s and already you are half-crippled – lower back totally slumped, so much that you can’t even pull it up anymore, pelvis rotated forward so you look like a baby, shoulders up around your ears, neck permanently leaning forward like a fecking Turkey, and that oh so attractive hump in your upper back, coming along nicely then…
But hang on a second, you used to be hot, you used to turn heads, you could strut, striding out like proper beeyatch….. Where the hell did that go?
Might as well face it, laughing boy… Chairs found your ass, CHAIRS – big soft ones, shinning black leather ones, pretty paisley print ones.. got you stuck right in em, wedged, all comfortable and sedated. Chairs are where you spent the MAJORITY of your life, sitting there, happy as a clam, while your ‘Spirit’ silently screams in pain and despair, as it slowly ebbs away. (Sorry – Drama)
Know this, please… YOUR BODY IS NOT DESIGNED TO SIT IN CHAIRS.
BUT You are ADDICTED to sitting in chairs. Sitting in chairs, day after day, month after month, year after year, all your life in fact, destroy’s your posture.. Slowly at first but it gets quicker and quicker as you age, until, at a certain point unique to you, your spiritual body is permanently closed. Then everything starts to fail, and I mean everything – your life depends on life force flowing, and when that stops flowing you die pretty damn quick. The ‘horror’…
Wanna fix that….? Did you read my Breathing Post from a few months ago? Easy yes?
Ahhh, you forgot already, ok.. here it is again, the full version of Posture this time, how to hold yourself.. It’s real simple, cause we focus on ONE thing that fixes everything else, in time, all by itself, but I’ll give you a small head start with the other bits too.. I’m good like that…
Stand up, then ignore every other part of your body except your lower back. Rotate your hips backward and lift your lower back up with some force, then hold it, pause for a few seconds. Then do it again, then again. You will notice that you can actually lift your back higher the 2nd or 3rd times, as you get used to it, as you get some sense of the range of motion that has gone because you are crouching forward like a rodent. Once you have done this a few times, combine lifting your back with pushing a deep breath down all the way into the pit of your belly. And I mean all the way and hold it, keep your abs flat with light tension.. you should eventually feel the pressure at the bottom of your groin, at the edge of your body. You will need to try a few times to get this if you have never done it before. You should now be able to lift your back even higher. Try and hold it there, but drop a little if you need to so you can maintain that position for as long as possible, if not all the time.
Then drop your shoulders, as low as you can, practice this offline by holding heavy waits in both hands, by your sides then bounce up and down quite quickly as this will slowly lower your shoulders, should they be locked up from too much keyboard work. I’ve often found over the years people need to do this more than they thought. To finish check your alignment front to back, how vertical you are by pointing the crown of your head at the sky, whilst doing the above. Every day reset this position by doing the same exercise, get as high as you can, over time. That’s it, just keep it there now.
The other bits? Ok then, this will happen naturally over time but a head start – drop your shoulders as much as you can as and pull them back far enough so the back of your neck goes with them, you will feel like you are leaning slightly back, you are not, you were leaning forward before, hunched over like some medieval french bell ringer. Pull your chin in as the same time, tuck it under a little, while narrowing your eyes, yep strangely they work together. You will stand like a Samurai now, and that’s a good thing – from now on, always look straight ahead, flat and level, use your attention within your gaze to look at things, try not to move your eyes as that will then move your head, but more later in the 6th Secret..
The key tells to getting this right – when you ‘start’ to get this right, at the highest point of your back lift you will notice the very top of your back (across the top of your shoulders) has a tendency to hook backward, that what it wants to do, it’s the natural ‘high back’ position. When that happens try and set that location and hold it there all the time. It will actually be surprisingly easy to do, as that is what your ‘maker’ was aiming for. Understand, once you get good at this you should actively look for the height your back ‘naturally’ wants to sit at, and for most that’s a hell of a lot higher than you think..
Practice just standing there and examining yourself. Within a few seconds you can relax your effort and just hold it there, just feel it.. And then magically, you are going to start to feel better, your state of mind is going to change, become calmer in a commanding, powerful in control type of way. Subtly at first, but it will grow and grow, quite quickly to the point that you will start to understand the concept of Spiritual Character, which on the Left-Hand path is about being Aristocratic. Yes, it’s going to twinge a little now but that won’t last. It is slowly unfreezing, and that is what you are looking for. Yes, if you have locked shoulders you will have to be a little more aggressive, weighting them down as per the bouncing exercise above, but they will move if you try..
All kinds of magical things will now start to happen, including the ‘healing crisis’ associated with giving your stomach the space and ‘encouragement’ to work correctly, but don’t worry about that. For some, however, you will notice your digestion improves to such an extent that you become way more sensitive to what you eat.. particularly the drugs and poisons. You have been warned..
Now want some really good news? You won’t be able to do this a lot AND still sit in chairs the same anymore, indeed it will rapidly become painful to sit in chairs… as it should be, as it will help keep you out of the bloody things.. The more you correct what Chairs do to you, the more you won’t be able to bear them for more than a few minutes. And that’s it, could not be simpler, all you have to do all the time to fix yourself – the benefits spiritually speaking are off the chart, its a truly life-changing thing.
Want the bad news? Sadly it won’t be enough, you will regress, you will weaken, and go back to your old ways, slowly but surely, because everybody else you know sits down ALL THE FECKING TIME.. So, I’m going to do you a favor now, however hard it comes across, nail this point to keep you honest and motivated…
See you need to get that this post is not really about good posture, you have that NATURALLY, this post is about the REASON you have BAD POSTURE – You need to deal with the cause of bad posture, otherwise you will just go back to it OVER and OVER AGAIN, whatever I get you to do. YOU NEED TO CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE TO SITTING DOWN ALL THE TIME, you need to stop walking in a room and looking for the chairs.
See, you think there are 3 states the human being can rest in – Standing/Lying Down/Sitting Down. You are wrong.. There is only 2, sitting down is unnatural and dangerous, and is ONLY permissible, BOLT UPRIGHT when you ‘have to’ functionally or in the full lotus should you be able to practice that. Got that – YOU NEED TO AVOID SITTING DOWN AT ALL COSTS. When you want to relax, LIE DOWN, don’t sit!
So, know how long we have had chairs as part of daily life, and I don’t mean the privileged, I mean everyone? – barely a 100years, before that everyone sat on low benches, which are so uncomfortable people actually want to get off them, soon enough. See chairs were a luxury, chairs were an honor, chairs were special. You were not meant to spend your life sitting in them, they were for special occasions. Yes, the Egyptians invented chairs thousands of years ago but they were not chairs as you know them, they were Thrones, they had power ‘in them’, magic symbols carved on them, richly ‘decorated’ stuff. Only Royalty sat on chairs – to this day the British Monarchy sits on a Throne with a magic rock under it, much as the original is long gone. The first ones did not have a back even, they were stools, you had to sit Bolt Upright in them. This is the point of them – they empowered you, made you better at making decisions. Even in Europe, the famous Chair of Dagobert, from the semi-mythical Merovingians started life as a stool, they call them ‘faldstools’, they were the seats of warrior gods. The Chinese never even bothered with chairs, even the rulers sat full lotus on the ground, back straight up, legs crossed, the clever bastards. The Japanese prefer to sit on stools to this day..
Some cold hard facts for you – it has long been a mystery to Western science why, at a certain age, even when apparently all else is healthy, people start to dramatically decline, often literally overnight… get multiple types of sickness, dementia, organ failure, and just collapse, all of a sudden. It has been put down to retirement, that retirement actually kills you through lack of any real stress on your body maybe.. But it’s not, it’s that your posture becomes so bad, your movement so limited because of that ‘stopping’, that you are now just running on empty. It’s because they don’t get out of their bloody chairs, often for 10-12hrs a day. When you start to sit down ALL THE TIME know that you truly are just sitting in ‘God’s’ waiting room…
Now, let’s be fair here, Medical science has recently woken up to ALL of this, to just how bad Chairs are you – headlines like ‘Chairs are the new Smoking’ et al. The evidence of the last 100 years from all the work being done 6, 8, even 10 hours a day by folks sitting in chairs and just how bloody crippled they end is a lovely class action lawsuit just waiting to happen. Trust me, if you work or own shares in the office furniture sector, sell up and move on..
Starting to get it..? No? Ohh… ‘What do Chairs actually do then…’ you cry, ‘how the hell does a chair cripple me so quickly?’
Simple – chairs hold your thighs at right angles to your hips for huge amounts of time. The muscles in your lower back then start to compress and get ‘set’ in a rigid position and no longer move much, causing what they call anterior pelvic tilt, which is why folks get back problems – the function of that part of your back is so distorted that it can no longer cope with much movement, much weight on your frame. You become very weak when you have back problems, cause ALL your strength, in every muscle group depends on your lower back to work.
Worse, MUCH WORSE, your lower spine slumps down, either forward/backward, and in spiritual terms, we call that closing, locking you out from the movement of your Gift, your birthright. You literally get progressively shorter, month after month, as your lower back progressively collapses, killing you. Normal healthy people who work standing up or outside even DON’T get shorter as they age, until they sit down in retirement.. go figure eh?
Then over a slightly longer period of time, your inner thigh muscles start to shorten, start to contract to the point that they start to pull at everything else, your hips, your knees, your groin causing all kinds of chaos, often totally miss diagnosed. The doctor’s offices are so full of people with these symptoms of old age these days there is an explosion of osteopaths or back quacks, physiotherapists out there, all treating the symptoms, all trying to stretch those muscles out again. But virtually no one treats the source. Surely you don’t actually want BIRD FEET do you, standing with your toes pointing off at a right angle? Your feet are supposed to point straight ahead, they point in the direction you are walking, not like a DUCK, waddling down the road, cause ducks are made to FLY. You can’t fly, you have to walk, with your feet pointing forward. Know why they don’t? BLOODY CHAIRS.
One more time.. The more you sit the weaker you get, the slower you get, the more pain you get, the dumber you get, the slower your progress is, and the quicker you die. Get it?
You are Addicted To Chairs, to sitting upright, and you NEED TO STOP. NOW. The key to this is simple – sit in chairs as little as possible and stand up as much as possible. When you are tired and have to ‘sit’ down DON’T. Lie down, on your front, your back, your side. Watching TV? lie on the couch. Reading a book? lie in your bed. Eating a meal, be a Roman, lie on the sofa in regal splendor (if at all possible..) Whatever you do, keep your thighs in line with your back, as much as possible. DON’T sleep in the fetal position, stretch out, actually make sure the bed is warmer than it needs to be to make you stretch out so you don’t do it in your sleep. Don’t curl up, sleep like your a greek god, stretched out, like you are taking a nap in a sunny meadow..
But you cry.. ‘In the office though, I have to sit down?’ NO you fecking don’t. Demand a Standing Desk, yep in the Western World you can do this now. Fake a back problem if necessary but GET ONE. If not then spend as much time walking around as you can. Literally, travel around the office, meet people, chat away, go for a walk, do the management by walking about thing.. I did, back then it was the only way to get it done – TO GET OUT OF THE CHAIR. But, you say ‘I have to sit down eventually, for meetings, for my zoom calls, plus my boss is a tool!’ First, be sure you ‘have’ to sit down, you don’t for Zoom calls, do you? But if you have to, no more than 10mins at a stretch, then get up, reset your posture, lift your lower back and strut around the place for a solid few mins before you sit again.. But you go on..’ surely there is a way I can sit in a normal chair with correct posture, my work says if I sit like this or that I’ll be fine?’ They are lying, they are just covering themselves, the bastards… Do what I have told you to do, save yourself – you are all you have got.
Ahhh… you (still) moan.. ‘But I have to DRIVE, how the hell do I do that then..’ Well, aren’t you a clever knickers then. So, yes, you may want to consider giving up driving asap, causing driving, particularly long distances (anything over 20mins) is ONE OF THE VERY WORSE THINGS FOR YOUR LOWER BACK. See you have to sit in this distorted position AND then use your arms and feet to further distort your position, you are distorting your muscles even more. Driving is bad news for your lower back, just ask any commercial driver who is forced to it for hour after hour, the huge lengths they go to with set covers, back protectors, adjustable seats etc. Really, take the Train or Bus and stand the fuck up the whole time if you can. Indeed use those journeys to actively work on your posture, they are a blessing in that regard.
Ok then, so now and again you have to sit down, your life stuff just gets in the way of all this practice, so here is what you do… SIT BOLT UPRIGHT WITHOUT USING THE BACKREST. Stretch up high, for as long as you can, and when you get tired STAND-UP AND WALK AROUND. Plant your feet on the floor and literally push and lift your whole back up, checking it every few seconds and then pushing it up again. In this way you ‘use’ sitting in the ONLY POSITIVE way there is, much as its far from perfect. Do not lie back, your lower back will collapse back and you are right back where you started.
But then you smile, (in that overly familiar Gen Z way) ‘I have a Gamer chair, classic Recaro style, straight high back an all, I can sit for hours with a straight back..?’ No your can’t, you slump, little by little, inch by inch.. You are deluding yourself.. Sit bolt upright for as long as you can, or don’t sit at all. BTW, stop fantasizing by playing games, through pretending to be other than you are via simulations of some fantastical life you’d like, pretending to be Hero. Working on actually being a Hero is way better for you, get you out of the DAMN chair too…
Get this one last time – DON’T. SIT. IN. CHAIRS. all the bloody time.
Now, as promised, I’m not going to bore you by explaining the supernatural mechanisms of this, particularly for the Gifted, but feel free if you want to go and look up the incredible amount of crap online about your Lower Dantien, about your core meridians, about water wheels of circulation, about blockages and energy flows. It’s a lifetimes study just to know all the names frankly, and that’s is the point – you don’t need to know any of that. You JUST NEED TO BREAK YOUR CHAIR ADDICTION, FIX YOUR POSTURE, AND WALK SOME MORE. Ok?
Yes, the real way you make this work is to change your posture and then WALK like that. Now Walking is another big ass topic in spiritual practice and will get its own Secret No.8 later on, itself linked to Secret no. 9, ‘Girding Your Loins’, of learning how to ‘wag your tail’ even, but its way too soon for that. There are so many different types of walking its a long chat, but for now, you only need to know one, the walk that will have a dramatic effect on your lower back, so much so that it will DRAMATICALLY ACCELERATE THE RESETTING OF THE MUSCLES AND HENCE POSTURE.
So, this is the real key to positively changing your posture – ‘Snake Hips Stroll’ is a nice way to relate to it.., or ‘Stripper Strut’ as some call it on this path, learning how to ‘put your back’ into walking. This is not normal walking, normal walking is to walk like a Cat on this path, on the balls of your feet with straight legs, but you are way off that just now. Be clear, this is walking as an ‘exercise’, not walking normally as it’s very tiring at first. Also, people may point and stare so do this by yourself, outside if you can.
First, lift your back as high as you can. Then, start walking in a very deliberate way by ‘striding’ forward and lifting your knees much higher than you would normally do. So, focus on your knees when you walk, NOT your feet, as you take a stride forward lift your knee 2/3 of the way up to your waist and let your lower leg and foot pivot back as you do so, let your knee bend as you lift it. As you do this knee lift lead that same side hip forward, don’t keep your hips inline, you must stretch forward with each hip as your stride out with each leg. Then repeat.. Don’t ‘mince’ – don’t walk with flat hips and short steps, feet wide apart, put the next foot in front of the other one, directly inline.
This will put a tremendous amount of stress on your back muscles as this method uses the muscles of your lower back almost exclusively to walk. Your leg muscles that you are used to using do almost nothing with this version. You will have a tendency to lean forward at the start and turn slightly sideways to lead your hips but don’t worry, as soon as you get some flexibility back in your hips that will go, and you will be able to lead them easily.
The key to this is – shake your ass, move it from side to side as you walk in line with your leg extension while holding a light to mid tension in your abs. Yep, that simple. Indeed it’s almost impossible to do this correctly without shaking your ass. For many men, this is a very new experience, but don’t be self-conscious in an ’embarrassed’ way, just do it by yourself until that sad aspect of your personality no longer bothers you as the benefits vastly outweigh it. For many women, this way of walking is second nature or becomes so very quickly. Sorry forgot, one last benefit – walking like this also tones your abs and flattens your belly very quickly, double bubble eh? Yep there is a reason all truly advanced Daoists are skinny as..
Still struggling to ‘get’ this? Ok, one last little method for ya, designed to attack those frozen little back muscles of yours anytime you like, when you are at home, in the house, by yourself – WALK ON TIP TOES, literally walk around for as long as you can on the balls of your feet. No need to stride about, just stay up on your toes, as you cook a meal, tidy up, make a call or 2 – keep your heels off the floor, and lift your lower back as high as you can. Pretend like you are wearing heels, and progressively try and get your heels up to 3 or 4inchs off the floor – some folks like this so much they find it hard not to walk like this after a while, takes some practice though, so stick at it. Don’t mind all the twinging and defrosting, that’s what ‘good’ pain feels like.
One more? Ok… see all the new lower back posture correctors on Amazon for 10-20 dollars, those flimsy-looking bits of curved plastic you lie on while progressively increasing the height of the curve? They work, just get a good one that has more than 3 adjustments, and USE IT, twice a day, 5-10mins at a time, more if possible. And don’t wear a thick jumper either, let the bumps sit on your skin, be a hero like.
Last one – every now and again, when doing the tippy toes thing, stand still and bounce off your heels, not too fast, in time to something if you like, maybe even swing your heels from side to side without moving your toes, but keep your shoulders loose, even clasp your hands together behind your back, low as you can, to help pull them back. Not only good for your spine, but will help get your shoulders down too…
Lastly as a taste of what’s to come:
- This is Spiritual Method, its not like Cardio, where you can make progress during the training, get better at the method. This is BodyBuilding, you just give 100% of your focus for the time allotted and stop, happy that you have simply completed it. Progress comes off line, maybe even as a sudden twinge, maybe you will see the next time you Try.
- You don’t Focus on How you do the Method, you do the Method in an ambivalent manner, off hand even, try different ways of doing it, mess around with it, that may feel better, or maybe you did not understand the instructions. Don’t force yourself to do it exactly the way you ‘think’ you should.
- You do Focus on watching yourself do the Method, you observe yourself, as intently as possible, to a very high level of detail if possible. Even better if you feel emotional for some other reason, and you know to do the method then cause that will actually help the method work.
And that is it.. Good Luck – I’m looking forward to hearing from some of you. More detail in the 8th Secret of Spiritual Practice to come on walking, however for now just know that this is about improving your posture so you can use your existing gift more effectively. To repeat there is no development here, we are trying to bring out what is already there by opening you up and making space for it.
Wash up now…
- Don’t do anything else when you start this, should you have already tried breathwork etc. We are trying to get your gift to the surface here, let it come by itself, don’t do stuff that could force or stop it. HOWEVER, if you find yourself wanting to do strange little movements, like rotate your hips for no reason, ‘s’ wave your back or walk on tiptoes in public, then go with it, help it along a little..
- In this day and age, it is very common for some folks to be told by Doctors they are ‘deformed’ in some way, they have a permanent posture-related problem they can’t fix, back/neck/shoulders are knackered, so you just have to live with it. It’s usually not true, indeed, it just means they can’t fix it without ‘surgery’, to feed you into the system. DON’T do this, try with posture work instead – if you are gifted you have tremendous power to change your body in several different ways…
- Focus on dropping your shoulders as much as you can – in this day and age everybody has raised shoulders via keyboard work, but any proper childhood trauma may also have taught you to hunch your shoulders from a young age. This is hard and correcting it can be painful but try, you might surprise yourself.
- If you practice this a lot, particularly if you stay out of chairs and do the walking exercise you will notice MANY changes, and that is for you to discover. However some folks do get a big step change in their toilet habits, so don’t be freaked if that happens to you. Just be aware that you were perhaps a little more fecked up than you thought you were..
- When you progress this practice, do the walking et al, after a while you may get the impression that things are going wrong, that there are more problems and accidents happening in your daily life. This is not true, what is happening is that you are actually noticing them, much earlier and quicker, when there are ANY problems both current and potential. You are getting a little more observant, a little more sensitive, and that’s a good thing. The generally held myth that life gets worse at the beginning of spiritual practice is just that, a misinterpretation, like pretty much every other myth you will come across.
- One of the key benefits was best described by an old student of mine 20 years ago – ‘I feel like my body just GOT YOUNGER, literally like I’ve lost 10 years off the age. I can bound upstairs like a kid, I’m as strong and flexible as I was as a teenager, and I love sex again.’ Sound good, cause that will happen if you do this correctly..
- If you are very gifted you might even feel a gentle push forward on your lower back when you move, which is really quite strange… Personally, I always think that getting the ‘bounce’ back in your body, that it starts to feel more ‘buoyant’ and CONNECTED TOGETHER is a lovely sensation. You may even notice that you literally float better in water, but don’t tell anyone – they will think you are a Witch, and not everyone loves that as much as we do.
Now, going to throw this one out there for the fun of it… High Heels are a BLESSING spiritually speaking.. heels, standing and walking in heels, make you more spiritual over time. Yep go figure eh.. There was a French woman in my extended circle years ago who made a very convincing argument that standing and walking in high heels, how you need to hold you back up and move your ass from side to side to walk quickly, is the MAIN reason women are more spiritual than men in this day and age. She did of course except that the highly ritualized process of Self Care, via beauty routines etc is also a major factor, (women focus on themselves MUCH more than men) but you would be fecking amazed at just how many Highly Gifted women would LIVE in Heels if they could, it gives them such a BUZZ.., particularly if they have a high libido.
Yes I know that many folks blame heels for back problems but you are missing the point – high heels vs chairs is the real issue, NOT the heels themselves. See heels stress your lower back to the point you HAVE to HOLD it up to walk in them, with any style. BUT chairs are progressively fucking you, so something has to give. Trust me, if you love your heels STICK WITH IT, just fix your chair addiction, QUICKLY. No guarantee, but if you love your heels, just so you know, you are probably a lot more spiritual than you thought you were, too…
Lastly, many folks ask what other types of exercise they can do to really supercharge their lower back, once they come to love the sensation it gives them. My advice, keep it natural – walk, run, swim, mock fighting, sex even. DON’T start to do partial exercises, particularly ones that involve sitting down or equipment, like Cycling or Gym work. They don’t have the ‘complete’ effect we are looking for here, and cycling (you are sitting down!) particularly is closer to the issues you get from driving than it is to the beauty of walking. Much as it’s excellent for your heart and lungs, cycling does not really work for your posture, you are hunched over on a metal frame so it can make your posture even worse. Prone Hyperextensions lying face down if you must but that is it..
Humankind as a race stopped physically ‘improving’ many tens of thousands of years ago, when we got to the top of the food chain on this planet, and we have been quietly regressing ever since. The changes we see now are to do with food, personal lifestyle choices, even selective breeding (the primary force of evolution is actually partner choice, NOT the meaningless crap that is ‘natural’ selection, which Darwin actually said). As a race we actually need to get back to where we once were, so we can run and jump like we once could. Therefore keep it simple and keep it natural for spiritual work, indeed outside of focused leg squats, there are not very many exercises you actually need to do here.
Why not walk as much as you can – concentrate on walking and FEEL GOOD ABOUT LOOKING GOOD WHEN YOU WALK. From time to time, go check yourself in that full-length mirror again, hold your back up, drop your shoulders and straighten your legs – THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE ALL THE DAMN TIME. You are not supposed to look like a duck, see ducks can fly and swim way better than they walk, walking comes a very poor 3rd in duck world, hell, ducks can actually swim x10 faster than they walk. YOU ARE NOT A DUCK, WALKING IS YOUR PRIMARY MEANS OF TRANSPORT AND IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TO ENABLE YOUR BODY TO WORK CORRECTLY – MAKE IT COUNT.
Want to know what the biggest single complaint I’ve heard about not being able to STOP sitting down for hours at a time? ‘I always sit down when I go out to meet my friends, in a bar, at the restaurant, the coffee shop, I can NEVER STOP SITTING DOWN IN CHAIRS, it’s ridiculous to suggest it!’ Poor you… so get old, get weak, get stupid, do it, it’s your life baby… Cram a huge meal into your compressed and folded belly over several hours so it hates you later, crack on. OR.. learn to move whenever you can, and when you can’t then maybe just stand at the bloody bar, dance even, strut about the place. Or lie down, recline like a God or Goddess, like a Roman General, like Cleopatra, like a Persian princess, like everyone on this little planet used to do before some mad bastard invented chairs and made our society dependant on them.
More than anything else, do the exercises above, and I promise you this – you will START TO HATE SITTING IN FECKING CHAIRS. And that will change your life forever…
Quote to end as always, this time from my favorite Freemason, Grand Master no less, a very clever man, known for his dislike of the English and his love of the French. Yeah.. go figure that one eh.
‘Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What’s a Sun-Dial in the shade!’ Benjamin Franklin.
Laters..
TOB
