What happens if you treat your body as a tube?

What happens if you treat your body as a stretchy tube? Your body straightens out, that’s what happens.

So what am I talking about? Imagine your body from the tops of your legs to the top of your head as a tube. You’d like it to straight and long, wouldn’t you? In fact it bends and sticks out in places making you shorter than you’d like. Your belly sticks out and so does your neck — and your upper back has a stoop.

What would you have to do to a straight tube to make it bend like that? On the in-side of the bend, the tube would either buckle or splay out sideways. That’s because you have less space vertically so the material of the tube has to either squash up or spread out horizontally.

What about the outside of the tube. That would be either stretched very thin or narrow down at the bend. That’s because you have to make the material of that part of the tube cover a greater length. To do that, it must become either thinner or narrower.

What I’ve just described is exactly what happens to your body.

Let’s take, for example your lordosis (sway back). Don’t have a sway back? Try putting your hand on the small of your back. Notice how it’s hollowed out? It’s not called the small of your back for nothing. And what’s on the other side, in front, why that’s your protruding belly, my friend.

Let’s do an experiment

Let’s see what we can do about your sway back and your protruding belly. If my tube analysis is correct, then your sway back is too wide and your protruding belly is too narrow. Let’s see what happens if you use your power of thought to encourage that to change.

For this is to work it’s vital that you don’t deliberately try to do the things I’m going to ask you to think. Just think them, imagine them, intend them but don’t do them.

Let’s start with the belly. I want you to think of it opening out and spreading sideways. Yes, I know, that’s exactly what you don’t want to let it do but bear with me and try the experiment.

Sit on an upright dining chair for the experiment. Don’t lean back in the chair. Now, as your belly spreads sideways, so your sides are able to move backwards a little. And the small of your back is able to narrow and firm up. So think of all that happening: your belly spreading sideways, back and around to your lower back which narrows and firms up.

Do you notice something? Do you notice how you’re beginning to sit taller? Feel your back. Notice how it’s flattened itself. Feel your belly. That too has flattened itself a little. Hallelujah!

A final word of warning

If you’d like to repeat this experience, make sure you don’t try and do it. It won’t work. It won’t work because you’ll do all wrong things. Instead, repeat the experiment exactly as I’ve set it out.

Let me know how you get on.

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