How Posture Links To Your Identity?

Most people think posture is just about standing straight or fixing rounded shoulders. But after years of working with clients and healing my own body, I discovered posture is deeply tied to identity, survival patterns, and how we try to belong. In this track, I share my story of reclaiming my posture and my power after a life-changing accident, and how I learned to listen to my body instead of pushing through it.

You will explore how your emotional history, nervous system, and somatic patterns shape the way you carry yourself, and how to reconnect with a posture that feels both aligned and alive beyond just how it looks.

Transcript

Most people think posture is about how straight they're walking into a room.

If they have rounded shoulders or a forward hip posture or an overarched lower back,

They think they can fix their posture only by doing stretches,

Foam rolling,

Or mobility work.

Pretty much all the physical stuff.

But what I learned over the past 10 years of working with clients and also restoring my posture,

I realized that your posture is so much more than that.

There's a beautiful correlation between your posture and the identity you developed to navigate life,

To survive life,

To get what you want,

To belong,

And to be who you are,

Or you think you should be.

I want to share my own experience with restoring my posture,

Reclaiming my power as a sovereign individual,

As a woman,

As an immigrant,

As an entrepreneur,

And so much more.

And also share how you can discover what your body is trying to tell you today.

For the longest time,

My identity was defined by how much I could achieve in life.

I wouldn't be able to sit still even for a second.

I always needed to be doing something to feel worthy.

If I didn't do something or if I wasn't productive,

I felt like I was failing.

And I constantly pushed through my body's signal,

No matter how tired I was or how much something didn't feel right.

I kept pushing.

And in my head,

I had this story that there's something wrong with me,

So that's why this is good for me.

I need to push through.

So I dedicated my whole life to prove to myself how unworthy I was and how much I needed to push through to become worthy.

My emotional comfort zone was constantly feeling angry,

Suppressing that anger,

And then it will come out as waves of anger.

And then I felt guilty constantly.

And I had this impatience in me.

And these three things together was almost a fire that kept me going.

When I had my car accident in 2018,

That was when everything changed because my body's capacity after concussion and all the pain that I had was so low that I couldn't go at the speed that I was going for a very long time.

It felt like my body had failed me.

Even though I'd always been in the place of movement or body,

I only connected with my body through this rush that I was getting after a workout.

Like I did martial art,

I did yoga,

I did strength training,

All that stuff.

And I enjoyed them for that rush that I felt.

But I never had that intuitive connection with my body the way I do today.

And the accident finally made me listen.

And listening was my force of pain and discomfort.

A lot of movements that I was doing previously to get the rush,

I couldn't even do them anymore.

They all caused me pain until I got introduced to postural restoration.

And then I started restoring my posture.

And that was when my whole understanding of the body and the nervous system changed.

And along the way,

I also realized a lot of typical physio or chiro work wasn't really practical for me.

And I started going to more modalities that are nervous system oriented,

Like craniosacral therapy,

Tonal chiropractic,

PDTR,

Neural rehabilitation,

And so much more.

And it just really opened me up to this new world that I didn't know existed.

I constantly heard about nervous system,

But I didn't know what nervous system actually was until I went through what they did go through.

And after that,

So much has changed the way I work,

The way I train bodies today,

Whether it be strength training or restoring their posture or embodiment practices to be able to really tap into the body's wisdom.

I learned that posture is not limited to how you look.

There are such deeper connections between your posture,

Your somatic experiencing,

And your emotional landscape.

And yes,

Doing postural work,

Or at least the way I did it,

Could create enough safety in the system so you can allow yourself to process all that emotional stuff that will come up for a true sense of healing and understanding.

And the beautiful thing has been how much overlap I experienced between my spiritual practice and the postural work,

And then also how I build strength in my life and reclaim my power as I navigate life.

And I think we live in this world that we just separate all of that,

But I feel like there are deeply interconnected.

And I've been sitting with this interconnectedness of it all.

And I was wondering,

How can I actually bring this forth as a message,

As a brand,

Without saying that I have all the answers?

But I am one like you who is curious,

And I've been through a lot figuring this out for myself.

And that deeply reflected in how I do work with clients today.

And I've cultivated a lot of tools to be able to improve my craft and make it more practical for a lot of people with a world that is extremely tired,

Overstimulated,

And exhausted these days.

One of my favorite spiritual practices is conscious connected breastwork.

And when I started conscious connected breastwork,

I was noticing a lot of stuff coming up around my womb.

A lot of stories of being a woman coming from a culture that oppression was the soil that I was grown up in,

Even though I was pretending that didn't exist.

And so much release would happen through my womb,

Through my ovaries.

And it was mind-blowing the way I experienced it.

And then when I started doing posture work,

I noticed how much stuff was going on in my pelvis that I didn't know beforehand.

Because before,

My definition of strength was,

Well,

Building those glutes muscles,

Doing all the squats,

Doing all the deadlift,

And lift as heavy as you can.

But when the pelvis is not stabilized the way it meant to,

You still will be carrying the same kind of issues,

But with more muscle.

And then I learned about the connection of the pelvis and the jaw and how it changed my jaw when I started doing pelvis work.

And then the more I did posture work,

The deeper in my work with conscious connected breastwork got in.

And I started seeing this beautiful synergy.

And then also,

Even if you want to look at it from the lens of chakras,

That also makes so much sense with the work of posture,

That in a true alignment sense,

We're not upright.

We're actually naturally getting into that upright position that feels relaxed,

That feels fully embodied.

But so often in this world nowadays,

We're pushing that upright position that's actually causing more stress in our already stressed bodies.

When I did the posture work with the pelvis and the jaw,

My expression started to change.

I felt like there was this deeper desire for me to speak up and share my experiences with the world as someone who constantly had this fear of I might be hurting people by sharing my experience because I constantly nuanced my way through every message that I want to share because I feel like truth is a lot more fluid than we think.

So we can't constantly try to be an expert while there's so much that I'm sure I don't know about.

And I'm always curious to learn more and more.

But then I realized there was so much in here that wanted to be expressed.

And I also associate that a lot with the posture work that they did.

And then now,

Because I know where my resting position is,

Every time I get into that hyper extended,

Which was what I lived for the longest time,

I would push through everything.

My pelvis was tilted forward.

I had this arch in my lower back.

I had this chest up and faking confidence and faking the fact that I got it all figured out,

Which the truth is none of us got it all figured out.

It's this dance with the co-creation process that we move through and we never know.

And that fear of unknown got me into that position of overextension.

We adopted certain postural patterns,

Not only because of lifestyle.

Yes,

Lifestyle is a factor.

But then at the same time is the way we adapted to life,

Maybe as a kid,

How we decided to belong,

Right?

Which part of ourselves did we decide to diminish to be part of a greater community or a family or whatever that might be?

Or even sometimes we might have a healthy family,

But the perception of the kid out of that scenario creates those narratives and those emotional experiences for the kid that the kid feels like we need to get into this specific position to survive or to belong or to create or whatever that is.

And today,

As soon as I go into that pattern,

I know,

I know I need to take a moment of pause to reflect on what's actually going on emotionally for me.

And this somatic practice of connecting the emotional experience of a thought or a worry or an anxiety,

If you want to move through your experiences,

Your negative experiences through the body's language,

Rather than constantly doing the mindset work.

And I always say we worship mind,

But so many of us haven't really experienced the true mind with a capital M.

What I'm practicing these days is showing up as I am.

Today,

I have plenty of energy,

So I stay really comfortably here and I don't feel like I'm working really hard to sit upright.

But there are days that I'm a little bit lower in energy.

And yes,

I have practices to be able to return to center softly.

And I used to do a lot of breastwork or doing a lot of activation to create that kind of energy in myself.

That was one way,

But still it was me pushing through.

But now today I practice to show up as I am.

Let's say if I record a video or I have an event coming up before,

I'd be like,

Let's go.

I got this.

But now I'm like,

How am I actually feeling?

Maybe I'm a little bit anxious.

Maybe I'm not even sure.

And I surrender all of that and I allow myself to return to that relaxed center and show up as I am.

The most interesting part is on days that I'm especially feeling low,

Especially feeling a little bit of humanness is taking over.

You know,

I might not feel confident.

I'm not necessarily feeling that I'm on top of my life or I feel worthy.

But when I do show up for my clients or for my work,

I show I take myself through my body to that centered position and then I surrender all of it.

I surrender my humanness to that greater thing that is around us.

Whether you believe in God,

Goddess,

Energy,

A divine source,

Whatever that is.

If you do believe in it,

I find that really,

I can't really do this practice without believing in that.

And I feel like the more we do embodiment work,

The more we know the truth of it in our bodies.

And it's just so hard to say that I don't believe it or I doubt it.

Again,

It's really your experience with the divine or with the journey of life to figure out what your life force meant to express through you.

If you're having a lot of pains and aches or you're going through a challenging life chapter,

We need to take a moment and notice how does your posture feel like right now?

Are you collapsing in?

Are you staying extended and keeping yourself upright with force?

And can you find a relaxed position right in the middle?

And perhaps if you've done my posture work,

Can you find that length above your head,

That energy of the divine pulling you upwards towards the ceiling as your feet remains planted on the ground?

And can you relax into that direction?

And notice what has been your pattern.

Are you pushing through,

Performing confidence?

Or are you hiding away and feeling helpless and incapable?

And in that softness,

In that recognition,

There might be some emotion coming up.

And can you bring yourself back to that place of soft center and let yourself be there for a moment?

And notice if you can show up to life as you are.

Come to life as you are.

We've been so trained to perform our way through life,

Or feeling that we should be in a specific way to be worthy of showing up.

But my friend,

Today,

Remember that you're worthy.

Take a soft breath in and a full exhale out.

Thank you so much for joining me on the path of unconditioning.

My name is Hedi,

And I see you in the next experience.