Wednesday, March 1: Healthy Backs, 3

HEALTHY BACKS, 3
And what is health, anyway? Is it perfection? Never being ill or sick? The absence of disease? Or something else?

Well, perfection is for fiction or the dead, so that’s not health. Never being ill is nice, but that’s not it, either. The opposite of disease is not health, but ease.

So, health is this: vitality and learning and improving. And the ability to recover from trauma. Some cold germs come along and you are healthy, you don’t let them get to you. That’s health. Your boss yells at you, and it either doesn’t get you down, or it does for just a little while, and then you see that it’s the boss’ problem, or you consider a new job, but you bounce back with going into a downward spiral. That’s health. You want something and things happen not the way you expected. You feel bad a little and then figure out what to do next. That’s health.

A healthy back likes to move, and if stresses come, it (the whole system, the brain/body/back) know how to deal with them, or to recover. Here’s another clue to healthy backs: they know how to use all the vertebrae, not just the ones at the top or the bottom. Use them all, all at once, a team effort. Health is coordinating the self to work well, and to learn to work even more efficiently and pleasantly.

So, taking the mid-back from yesterday, try this: move it right and left. Right and left relative to the head and pelvis, so the mid-back goes farther right than the head and pelvis when you move to the right, and farther left on the other side.

Notice what’s happening in the pelvis, a shift from one sit bone to the other, a shift from one side of the pelvis to the other.

And let the head do this interesting thing, let it tilt sideways to the hip that is lifting. I won’t tell you which hip that will be. You discover. That will be healthy.