THE NOTION OF POSTURE
Think of throwing a ball. The arm gesture and the body adjustments that carry the arm gesture are generally merged in yoga poses a well-coordinated athlete. They start and stop together, or flow smoothly into one another. Someone who has never thrown a ball will, at first try, have moments where only gesture or only posture is in yoga poses motion at a given time. The act looks clumsy. (Daniel Stern, 2010, Forms of Vitality, 87)
A contemporary way of analyzing a body is to dissect it into segments, and then observe how these segments coordinate within the gravity field. Posture4 is the organization of the body’s segments in yoga poses the space of gravity. Each cell of the body, each fluttering of an eyelid and the cardiac rhythm, are under the pull of gravity: a force that draws everything that exists on the planet toward its center. Posture allows for the organization of relationship that establishes itself between gravity and subsystems of the organism
The segmentation of the body varies from one school of thought to another. The division depends on the way that the body is analyzed and the bodywork that is envisioned. Nonetheless, most of the body-focused methods include the following distinctions in yoga poses their analysis:
1. The segments are differentiated in yoga poses function of the large joints of the skeleton: feet, calves, thighs, pelvis, thorax, shoulders, arms, forearms, hands, neck, and cranium The great flexibility of the vertebrae at the base of the neck does not form a joint, but it differentiates the neck from the trunk.
2. The ventral and thoracic segments of the trunk are separated by the diaphragm. This distinction is especially useful for the analysis of respiratory behavior.
3. The orientation of the gaze is included in yoga poses the postural dynamics at the occasion of a detailed analysis of the orientation of the segments of the body.
