Body Archetypes and How to Counteract Them
Lesson 2 from: Align Method: Move Your Way to a Stress Proof LifeAaron Alexander
Body Archetypes and How to Counteract Them
Lesson 2 from: Align Method: Move Your Way to a Stress Proof LifeAaron Alexander
Lesson Info
2. Body Archetypes and How to Counteract Them
Lessons
The 5 Daily Movements Overview
03:56 2Body Archetypes and How to Counteract Them
06:27 3Floor
07:30 4Couch Stretch
02:39 5Breathing
15:07 6Hip-hinging
10:52 7Hanging
07:22 8Walking
14:29Lesson Info
Body Archetypes and How to Counteract Them
So, why does any of this stuff matter in the first place? One of the main reasons is, the way that you move affects the way that you think, the way that you feel, and the way that people perceive you. So we're gonna go through an overview of the Align Method five postural archetypes. The first one that we're all a little bit at and we're striving to get closer to, would be aligned. So what is an aligned postural archetype? It's a person that's generally speaking, when you're standing in place, your feet are gonna be stacked underneath your knees, underneath your hips, you're not flaring your ribs, you feel stacked, aligned, comfortable, full expansive breath, your eyes are going forward, you're open to looking up, you have full functional range of motion through your whole body. You're not focused on the future, you're not stuck in the past, you feel calm, you feel open, and it's nice to be around people that are in that place of kind of like balance or equal points. The next place tha...
t we're gonna go, which is where I come from, is the small archetype. Small archetype is a person that feels pretty insecure, and they end up compensating by showing the world that they're very strong, very empowered, they have it all put together. And so the tendency with these small archetype as a person to kind of puff the chest up, pull the shoulders back, and kind of have this strut like they've got it all together. Meanwhile, what's happening with that is they're putting a lot of imbalance and tension, they're stuffing it down into their lower back. So as opposed to being stacked, balanced, aligned, they're overcompensating and kind of having this strut which actually creates great instability lower down in the body. Next thing we're gonna talk about is the bendy archetype. So the bendy archetype is a person that tends towards hyper mobility. How that affects the way that we show up in the world is a person that is overly mobile in their body, they might overextend themselves, for example. Oftentimes you see those similar patterns in the way that they show up in the world, from their personality, and the way they interact in their business and their relationships. So an example of that be a person that's maybe super bendy, flexi, burning man, new age kind of vibe, fun to be around, very creative, but oftentimes they might have trouble getting their ideas off of the ground. They might have trouble maybe showing up to things on time. So they're very flexible, very dynamic, but very ungrounded oftentimes. So the bendy person, it's supportive for them to find someone that has more structure and more stability and support their lives. They integrate together, it's actually very strong. The next postural archetype that we're gonna touch on is the anxious archetype. The anxious person is a person that their shoulders are kind of they have like a love affair with their ears, are drifting up. As they're walking around it's almost like they're on on tippy toes, like they're walking on eggshells. They just have this general hypertenicity or tension throughout their nervous system. They're always kind of waiting for the shoe to drop. They're kinda like, oh, right? So there's a lot of stories or reasons of how a person might develop those postural patterns and that nervous system balance or lack of balance. But what's important with it is we can start to tap into the way that that person thinks and feels and the way that the world perceives them through starting to calm the physical body down. And so throughout this course, we're gonna give you guys actionable practices on how to downregulate that anxiety or stress or tension that we might feel in our bodies and bring us back into a more aligned state. And the final postural archetype that we all likely know far too well, is the mopey archetype. The reason I say that is depression is the number one leading cause of disability worldwide. There's a lot of different reasons why that may be happening. One of the reasons may be a lack of exposure to natural sunlight, it could be an excessive exposure to maybe radiation, and EMF, and various different things. Could be a nutritional conversation. It could be an addiction to our cell phone, and to our screens. It could be a consumerism conversation where we're always yearning to be something other than ourselves. And it's likely associated to the way that we move. There's been a ton of interesting research around the way that our postural patterns affect the way that we think and we feel. The 50 cent term from this is called postural feedback. And one of the main ones comes from Harvard, Amy Cuddy, conducted some research that suggested that just spending two minutes in a hunched over or mopey postural archetype would actually increase cortisol levels, a stress hormone, and decrease testosterone levels. Then the inverse would happen when we'd be in an upright, stacked, aligned, confident position, suddenly testosterone goes up and cortisol goes down. So we're continually sending this information through our body through the way that we move onto the way that we think, the way that we feel, and also sending information out in the world to the way that people perceive us. So if you care about effective communication, if you care about your relationships, if you care about your business, if you have anything to sell, or any reason to create rapport, connection with people in the world around you, the way that we communicate with our body language is one of the main focal points of how we actually communicate. It might be a little bit excessive but there's more research from a fellow called Albert Moravian, who is a professor in Stanford, in the '60s. And what he came up with was a thing called the 55-38-7 principle. And what that means is 55% of our communication comes from body language, the way that we communicate. 38% comes from the tone of our language. And then the last little bit, that 7% is the actual words that we're speaking. And so what he meant with that, or what he was suggesting with that, is if there's any incongruence between the way that we say things and what we say, about 93% of the time, the individuals that we're speaking to will trust the way that we set it. So it makes a ton of sense to start to integrate more effective movement practices into your daily life because then that spills out into who you are as a person. So I'm excited to tap into these movement practices and let's go.