sinking the chest, forward rounding and wrapping

[Anonymous]

Some of the alignment principles seem to be problematic for people with kyphosis or desktop workers who have a forward rounded posture. Are there any modifications you recommend to the classic alignment principles or additional exercices you recommend specifically for those people?

I use yoga as additional practice to cope with those problems. If I only trained Tai Chi I fear I might aggravate those problems. But I am very interested in the Taoist perspective/additional Taoist exercices as well.

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

I’ve always been quite hunched forward and have the forward rounding of the shoulders too much. It helps me in order to get my shoulders in position to think of both a forward and backward wrapping. This is just something I have worked out for myself so don’t take it as something you should definitely try.

First I raise my spine. 2nd I take the energy from a vertebrae in line with my collarbone and bring the energy of that vertebrae into the collarbone. I then take the energy of the collarbone and wrap it in an arc back into my shoulders. I don’t think it, I feel for the connection. After a few minutes they are back sitting where they should be and it doesn’t really take any effort to keep them there until I start going back to bad habits.

To correct the hunching of the neck I just try to raise my spine more, and I think my previous point helps a little too. Bring the energy of the back of the neck directly forward and wrap it back.

If you just do tai chi I feel like you’d get there eventually anyway. It seems to lengthen the spine even if you aren’t even trying to do it, but at a slower more gradual pace.

[Anonymous]

Since my teenage years I’ve had a similar postural problem: my head tends to go too far forward due to the collapsing of the vertebrae in my neck and upper back (sometimes referred to as “chicken neck”). The instructions that I was given was to keep my shoulder blades back (but not scrunched back and together) and the chest lifted (but not puffed out). Actually, we should feel the lifting should start from the bottoms of the feet and rise through the ankles, backs of the knees, kwa, and up the front of the spine, and at the same time up through the solar plexus and throat notch, through the top of the head. Another way to look at it: you don’t want the rounding of the chest to pull your head forward or cause anything to collapse. The instruction to “round the chest and hollow the shoulders’ nest” is probably given earlier to those with the opposite tendency of pushing out their chests and arching their backs.

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