Mindful Body Podcast

Natural Alignment and Mindfulness serve to build upon and. . enhance each other. Putting them together at the same time is one of the best thing you can ever do for yourself, and you will never regret it.

Mindfulness and Natural Alignment can be practiced, each on its own, but if you study them together, you will never regret it. The benefits of each are compounded when we consciously choose to merge these two seemingly different practices.

With natural alignment, we focus our awareness on certain boney landmarks and how they relate to each other to provide foundational support through our feet, legs, or pelvis. This solid support allows relaxed elasticity through the spine, shoulders and neck—and applies to whatever we are doing—whether we're resting, climbing a ladder to clean our gutters, or running a race. 

Mindfulness requires a willingness to pay attention and notice what is happening, without judgment or reactivity.  Beyond noticing the movement of the breath and observing thoughts and the sensations that arise from them, focusing awareness on the support of our bones serves as an anchor to being present with not just having a body, but being a body. 

The foot is a masterpiece of engineering, designed to support an aligned body through the decades of a lifetime. Sadly, few people enjoy the benefits of having naturally aligned feet, which contributes to a long list of problems throughout the entire body.  Kathleen Porter guides the listener of this episode through a series of exercises for how to begin strengthening and rebuilding feet, along with a comprehensive visual summary as a study guide.

You can download the visual summary handout at www.https://kathleenporter.com/podcast5

You can also watch a short video about how newborn infants begin working their feet as soon as they make their appearance from the womb:  www.https://kathleenporter.com/newborn-breastcrawl

And finally, here's a fascinating video that explains how arches work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP3fMa9iq8w

I’ve never interviewed anyone before. This was fun and easy to do, because Patra Conley is someone I already know, and she loves to talk and share her thoughts and ideas, and she has a great sense of humor. Best of all, she is as big a fan of natural alignment as I am, having reaped many benefits from learning how to apply this to her own life.

Patra was living and working on the Big Island of Hawai'i when she had to stop working due to the pain she was experiencing in her neck and shoulders. She subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon, to explore other work opportunities.

In this episode she tells her story about how learning about principles of natural alignment took her from early 'retirement' back to being able to resume here career as a massage therapist.

After Patra learned principles of natural alignment and began to apply them to how she inhabited her body and moved in the course of her daily activities, big changes took place that led to a transformation in her life. In time, she was able to return to work as a massage therapist, as well as enjoying hiking and playing music without difficulty or pain.

The visual summary handout that can be downloaded with this episode at katleenporter.com/4 includes some great photos of Patra “before” and “after” her transformation, which she was kind enough to share with us.

Our human connection with Nature and Science can be directly experienced through our own individual body—a body that we don't just have as a possession, but a body that we are—as a way of being in the world.

Modern day posture and innate posture are very different. One is an adaptation, something contrived, while the other is as old as the hills.

This episode focuses on the relationship between old-as-the-hills Nature and its relationship with Science, which, it can be argued, always existed even before humans came along and discovered it, building a language and field of study around it. It's in these and countless other ways that Nature and Science converge and overlap. It's easy to think of Nature and Science as being very different from each other. Nature is all about magnificence, mystery and splendor, while Science is precise, factual, and predictable.

This episode includes a guided exercise for experiencing Ground Reaction Force, a scientific phenomenon that relates to Newton's Third Law of Motion.

GRF explains an energetic exchange between the human body and the Earth, which is the driving force for movement of humans and all other animals.

Sad dogs tuck their tails between their legs, causing their spines to collapse and their backs to round. Happy dogs, on the other hand, wag their tails behind them, from a position that supports a naturally elongated and supple spine.

Dogs and people have very different anatomical designs, but Kathleen found this one analogy came in very handy when working with children, who could readily understand this concept and apply it easily to themselves.

Episode 2 of AlignNOW breaks down some basic details about the role of the pelvis in supporting an aligned, upright spine, and guides listeners through a step-by-step experience of moving from slouched collapse, to the common over-corrected stance (which so often passes for “good” posture in our part of the world) to the relaxed, comfortable and genuinely strong center that is built into our human design.

Access the visual summary handout for this episode can be accessed at kathleenporter.com/blog/podcast2

To learn more about Kathleen's online course, visit kathleenporter.com

"Good" posture is not what we have all been taught. It requires much less struggle and effort, and it's a lot more comfortable and relaxed. Truly good posture relies on the support of aligned bones that allow us to be more authentically strong, and to move with flexible, fluid ease in the world.

This being the first episode of AlignNOW, provides an overview of basic natural alignment concepts and leads the listener through a guided exploration of what it feels like to come to rest at that quiet, peaceful center—between slouching and over-correcting—that place where we are able to surrender and trust in the experience of our skeleton holding us up, rather than muscles having to struggle to do the job.

Kathleen Porter discusses how she rid herself of decades of chronic stiffness and pain by learning how to re-learn the natural posture that she, like most everyone else, originally discovered as a baby and a toddler. Now 72-years-old, she continues to reap the benefits of inhabiting her body in this naturally aligned way.

LINKS RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:

Visual summary handout that includes images and other details related to this topic can be accessed using the link below.

AlignNOW Podcast web page where you can listen to this episode and other episodes to follow.

Kathleen's website

Kathleen's Online Course — Watch a video tour of the course and read the details of what's included. 

Find Kathleen on Instagram