How Your Posture Matters For Work-Life Balance
Balancing like a pink flamingo for two full minutes changed me, and it can change you too. Forever.
The benefits of an upright posture for physical health are well-documented and well-researched. A random search on Google Scholar throws up over a 100,000 articles in renowned scientific journals and books. The popularity of standing desks and their cool designs over the last couple of years prove the relevance of good ergonomic posture in our day-to-day work lives.
However, it was only when I stood up on one foot at a time for several minutes, did I have an epiphany about the true reason why posture is so important. As they say, experience is the best teacher.
Why Posture (Really) Matters
The real and the most important reason why our posture matters is because
The body and the mind are one.
I truly understood this while struggling in the Pink Flamingo exercise in the Buddha Balance Journal club.
The Buddha Balance Journal club is a daily 15-minute online space, where we work together on one exercise from my latest book, Buddha Balance Journal. As a community of work-life balance seekers.
The exercise called upon us to unseat ourselves for a couple of minutes by standing up. However, we were meant to stand up on only one foot at a time, changing the resting foot one by one, and imagining that we were pink flamingoes. Hilarious, isn’t it?
As I did this exercise, in full view of the participants watching me on Zoom, my mind was chattering away instructions to me on what to do to achieve this posture,
“hey, don’t put that other foot down! wait wait, find a spot to fix your gaze on…tch, I told you not to…” ~ Prajakta’s mind
However, the moment I “balanced” on my left foot, my mind went quiet too.
I wanted to see if it stays quiet if I changed the resting foot. So I slowly put my right foot down and lifted the left, without losing balance.
My mind stayed quiet.
Soon enough it became a virtuous cycle, my balanced posture led to a quiet mind and that fed back into mainatining my physical balance. Alright, fixing my gaze helped too. (Thanks, mind!)
Experiential Truth
Stillness of the body helps the mind calm down. I have known this theory for aeons, that to study, meditate, or do anything cognitively demanding, it is important to sit still. It is just part of the upbringing in an Indian family.
I have also practised being still in meditation retreats as a way to still the mind. With lots of success, but not with much mindfulness, as I now realise. There, I had been following an instruction that was so ingrained in my conditioning anyway. It happened on auto-pilot.
My direct experience of a balanced posture, with pointed awareness, makes my experience this particular time, my knowledge, my truth.
This 5-minute exercise from the Buddha Balance Journal made me truly understand why posture matters — because when I build a balanced posture in my body, it creates the same balance in my mind. The body and mind are one.
Give yourself a chance at a direct experience of inner balance by getting yourself a copy of the Buddha Balance Journal, here.
