We’re all aware of the idea of “good posture.” It usually conjures images of soldiers at attention, being “pulled up straight,” or bracing ourselves against a relentless force dragging us down. The common narrative frames posture as an anti-gravity system, a constant, wearying battle we must wage to keep from collapsing. No wonder posture feels exhausting.
But what if this whole idea is backwards?
What if, like a fish in water, or a bird in the air, we are exquisitely evolved to thrive within our physical environment, not in spite of it? What if posture isn’t something we do against gravity, but something that works with it? This is the radical and liberating perspective offered by the Alexander Technique, viewed through the lens of a simple scientific truth.
The Fish and the Bird: Masters of Their Medium
Imagine telling a fish that swimming is an anti-buoyancy system. It would be absurd! The fish doesn’t fight the water; it uses buoyancy and water pressure to propel itself with grace and efficiency. Its structure and movement are a conversation with the support the water provides.
Similarly, a bird’s flight isn’t an anti-air pressure system. The bird uses the very pressure and lift of the air, working with its wings’ shape and airflow, to soar. It yields to the air to rise.
So why do we, as humans, insist that our upright mobility is an anti-gravity system?
How posture became a struggle
Most of us learned posture as a kind of self-correction project. Tighten the stomach. Pull the shoulders back. Lock the hips and knees. Hold everything in place.
These instructions quietly assume that gravity is the enemy, and that our muscles must heroically resist it all day long.
The result? Bracing, compression, fatigue,
Einstein’s Gift: The Ground is Rising to Meet You
We tend to imagine gravity as a downward force we must resist. Yet from a physics perspective, something subtler (and kinder) is happening. The ground beneath you is not passive. It is constantly accelerating upward to meet you. That upward support is why you’re not falling endlessly through space.
Here’s the paradigm shift, courtesy of Albert Einstein’s General Relativity: Gravity is not an attractive “force”, like magnetism, pulling you down (Isaac Newtons equations describe and predict what we see, but don't explain why, and he knew this). It is the curvature of spacetime. If that's news to you, don't worry too much about the physics, but it's implications. A by-product of this is that when you stand still on the ground, you are, in fact, accelerating upwards. OK, I accept that for most people that's an odd and counterintuitive statement, but is a fundamental and proven axiom of modern physics.
Think about it. When you’re in an elevator that first accelerates upward, you feel heavier, pressed into the floor. Einstein realized that standing on the Earth feels the same way because the ground is constantly accelerating upwards (at 9.8 m/s²) to meet you, preventing you from following the straight-line path through curved space you’d otherwise take (which we call "falling").
The ground is actively supporting you. It is providing a continuous, positive, upward thrust.
So why, you ask, are you not moving upwards? A reasonable question for which the answer, even if it's hard to comprehend, is that in curved space-time you need to accelerate just to stand still. Crazy eh?! On the off chance you're intrigued by tall this, this is my favourite video on the subject titled What Everyone Gets Wrong About Gravity.
As it happens, you can directly measure this acceleration with an app on your smart phone (Accelerometer Pro on Google Play). Your phone uses built-in internal accelerometers to tell which way is up, such as when it flips the screen from portrait to landscape view when you physically turn your phone. The blue arrow on this screenshot shows the direction the acceleration is coming from as I held my phone up to view it.
Don't worry too much about the science behind all this, the important thing is to change your relationship with earth beneath your feet, or pelvis when sitting. It's not the academics that will change your behaviour, but an emotional belief in the support you are being provided. But know that belief is rooted in reality.
Alexander Technique: Becoming Pro-Gravity
This is where F.M. Alexander’s discoveries become brilliantly practical. The Alexander Technique teaches us to stop interfering with this natural support system. Our habits, slumping, tightening, pulling our heads back and down into our spines, are like a fish frantically trying to swim against its own buoyancy. We are actively sabotaging the elegant, pro-gravity evolution of our bodies.
In other words, uprightness isn’t something you have to manufacture. The environment already provides the conditions for it.
Our skeleton is structured as a stack of balanced, and mobile segments (head, torso, pelvis, legs). When we inhibit our habitual tension and direct our thinking towards length and width (e.g. the classic Alexander Technique phrase “let the neck be free, to let the head go forward and up, to let the torso lengthen and widen”), we are not adding an anti-gravity force. We are simply getting out of the way and allowing the body’s natural design to interface efficiently with the upward acceleration of the ground.
We are not holding ourselves up. We are gently moving to let ourselves be supported. Posture is a movement, not a position. A movement that helps us to keep re-finding support from moment to moment as we're a fundamentally unstable structure. What are postural reflexes if not movement? With all the joints of ankles, knees, hips, spine and head/neck relationship we're a fundamentally unstable structure. And that's a good thing as the trade off is greater mobility. If you want to be stable, be a tortoise!
Resist the temptation of going inwards to try and "fix" your posture, you won't find your posture there. Your posture is a relationship with your external environment, a unity in fact. as is all functioning. That includes the way you use your attention with external stimuli, and your reactivity to external stimuli.
Posture, seen this way, isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about undoing the habits that block your natural cooperation with the environment. You don’t need to “try harder” to be upright. You don’t need to hold yourself together.
Practical Takeaway: Change Your Metaphor
The next time you think about your posture, discard the old battle metaphor. Replace it with this:
“I am not fighting to stand up against gravity. I am using the upwards support of the ground, and I am organizing myself to receive that support with ease and lightness.”
Notice what happens when you think this way. Just let it be a thought experiment. Do you feel less braced? Less willful? More open to height and movement? More poised? Poise is an attitude. Develop this attitude.
In the Alexander Technique, posture isn’t a fixed position or a muscular achievement. It’s a living relationship between you and the ground.
Instead of "holding yourself up", you begin to notice how the ground supports you. Instead of pulling upward, you allow an upward direction to emerge naturally.
This isn’t passive collapse, and it isn’t rigid control. It’s responsiveness.
Stop being an anti-gravity warrior. Start being a pro-gravity organism. Your fish-like grace and bird-like lightness are waiting to be rediscovered, not by adding effort, but by subtracting the habitual interference that hides them. Channel the upwards support of the ground up through your feet into the base of your skull.
The support is already there. The ground is literally rising to meet you. Your job is simply to let it. When you stop organizing yourself as if gravity were a threat, something surprising happens:
you become lighter, more adaptable, and easier to move.
"Every single thing we are doing in the Work is exactly what is being done in nature where the conditions are right, the difference being that we are learning to do it consciously." - FM Alexander
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