PostureYou know you’ve seen yourself hunched over in a reflection walking on the street in New York city many times. So you pull your shoulders back, suck in your stomach, and get your head on straight and hold this posture for about three storefronts before you are slouched back over in the next reflection down the block.

It’s not your fault. You can’t easily present yourself the way you would like to be seen – your fascia is holding you back. Fascia, or connective tissue, exists everywhere in your body and forms a 4-dimensional spider web – yes it changes over time so let us not forget this important dimension. It determines your structure, your posture, the placement of everything in your body. It may not be technically “alive”, but it does have an enormous amount of living cells within its matrix and we would be an amoeba without it. It is primarily composed of collagen fibers, extracellular matrix, fibroblasts, and mechanoreceptors (cells that measure the pressure and stretch in tissue and tell the brain what is happening). Your brain creates a sense of proprioception (where you are in space) from this communication. What you think and experience as balanced and aligned probably is not so. Bad habits, joint misalignments, and muscle weakness can overpower your brains desire for proper balance and you end up with you debauched kinesthesia (confusion of proper balance). This is where Structural Integration serves us best. Shortened tissue needs to be physically lengthened, the joints suffering from misalignment need to be unwound, and your brain needs to re-learn what straight is.