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Poise and the Art of Lengthening
By Ron Dennis, Ed.D.
"Poise" is a curious word. A bit regal in tone and suggesting nowadays a certain personal command, it originated more prosaically in the language of weights and measures. It can be traced back through the Middle English and Old French pois, weight, to the Latin pensum, something weighed, and pendere, to weigh.1 Thus, poise has its basis in definite physical action, a specific balancing of mass for mass, as in acrobatics, tight-rope walking, and similar skilled performances.
Perhaps few would consider standing up on two legs a particularly skilled performance, but it is in fact a most prodigious balancing act, as you can verify through recalling the infant's concentrated struggle to master it. Yet how many adults have a concern for, or even an intimation of, the distribution of their various body weights--head, arms, trunk, legs--over their base of support and around their center of gravity? For if these weights--the heaviest that most of us are ever required to lift--are not maintained in balance relative to each other within fairly narrow limits, the resulting strain on muscles, ligaments, and joints to keep the body upright leads inexorably toward the creaks, aches, and fatigue that all-too-familiarly herald and accompany the advancing years. From this point of view, we should see poise as an active physical process, an efficient managing of body weights, with an eye to what has been called structural hygiene.2
The hygiene of poise is clearly what Joel E. Goldthwait, M.D., a former president of the American Orthopedic Association, had in mind in saying: An individual is in the best health only when the body is so used that there is no strain on any of its parts. This means that, when standing, the body is held fully erect, with no strain on the joints, the bones, the ligaments, the muscles or any other structures. There should be adequate room for all the viscera, so that their function can be performed normally unless there be some congenital defect.3
One might thus be led to think that poise is simply a matter of standing up straight and being done with it. Reality will prove otherwise. Resolve for a day to "stand up straight"and generally attend to the use of your body. You will find embarrassingly few moments of awareness during the day's full round, and you will find that whatever change you can bring to bear in one position disappears as you move to another.
The attainment of poise is rather a matter of learning the art of lengthening. Lengthening means pre-eminently that in standing, sitting, walking, bending, or in any activity whatever, one must prevent both unnecessary muscular effort and the very common distortions of the natural curves of the spine. Encompassing a broad field of knowledge and practice, lengthening is an art rather than a precise technique because it involves skill and the application of principle on the basis of experience as contrasted with rigid adherence to arbitrary rules or so-called correct positions.4, 5 It should also be added that lengthening is a process practiced primarily by and not on the individual.
Obviously, the giving of precise, or even of general instructions is beyond words alone, so here a hint must suffice. One first experiences lengthening, usually with the aid of a teacher, and then, like a gardener, one cultivates the conditions that tend to promote it. Much as a wind player keeps the breath going or a string player the bow, in lengthening one sustains the muscular tone that keeps the body up while inhibiting that which pulls it down. Indeed, the great secret is not to be pulling down on one's up, a principle that may be seen by some to extend farther than the present discussion.
It is crucial--though at the outset difficult--to realize that one's lifelong habits, in both thought and action, form the sole standard of what feels right and correct within the self.6 Against this omnipresent background, new responses are bound to seem unfamiliar, sometimes startlingly so. Students of lengthening can thus easily find themselves in the strange situation of being right and feeling wrong, quite the reverse of the usual order of things. In any case, in the inevitable encounter of desire, habit, and the will that arises in all serious practice, one has the possibility of gaining not only that which was initially sought but something more, an inner process of knowing at once dependent upon yet transcending the original goal.
Notes
1. R. A. Dart, "The Attainment of Poise," S. African Med. Jour. (21, 1947), pp. 74-91.
2. M. E. Todd, The Thinking Body (Hoeber, 1937), pp. 41-42.
3. J. E. Goldthwait et al., Essentials of Body Mechanics in Health and Disease, 5th Ed. (Lippincott, 1952), p. 1.
4. E. Langer, Mindfulness (Addison-Wesley, 1990), p. 6.
5. F. M. Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (Methuen, 1924), p. 110.
6. Alexander, The Use of the Self (Dutton, 1932), Chap. 1, "Evolution of a Technique."
© 1991 by Ronald J. Dennis |