abdomen

This summer, Gokhale Method® teacher Donna Alden stepped in for Lang Lui and brought a unique and enriching twist to our daily 1-2-3 Move program. Drawing on her expertise in traditional Middle Eastern dance, Donna treated us to a beautiful blend of cultural movement and posture wisdom. It’s no coincidence that many traditional dance forms are rooted in healthy, natural posture—and Middle Eastern dance is no exception.

I have often written about the elegance of people in bygone years. The women, sometimes corseted, show striking deportment. The excesses of nineteenth-century fashion understandably gave corsets a bad name. Extreme tight lacing had some terrible effects, imposing some drastic anatomical remodeling: The stomach and liver are crammed down, with the ribs compressing into drooping S-loops. The neural spines of each vertebra, the little projections that stick up from the central body of each bone, are also pushed out of place. Normally they stack nicely one atop the other in a neat midline ridge, but in long-term corset wearers these spindles of bone jut to this side or that. Science writer Brian Switek in Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone.