What kind of alignment needs constant tending lest it fall apart?

Most people inhabiting this type of body dilemma have been excellent and dedicated students — and teachers — in the fitness and movement world.

{ I’ll just take a moment here to interject: it’s not my intent at all to paint any practitioner or teacher in a negative light. We’re talking about ideas, concepts, what we know to be true and how we grow.

{ Lord knows I continue to learn so, so much from other teachers, and at least once a year have a full-on revelation where I see so much of what I’ve thought was true was less true in an absolute way, but more in a contextual way … I just hadn’t seen the context.

{ So, too, with this idea of “alignment” being primarily a skeletal thing. It’s true, but only true in a very particular way. }

And so … we could really look at this kind of dilemma — aligned but in pain, and actually quite fragile (the constant tending) — as a kind of reverse engineering that’s no longer working.

I have a hard time buying into the micro-fidgeting with one’s pelvic position all the time.

What I * do * buy is that deep work — that wondrous mix of that which is physical training, emotionally battling and eventually making peace with our inner daemons, mental and intellectual clarity — tends to lead us towards a kind of bodymind inhabitance that does, indeed, appear quite aligned.

But it doesn’t happen by trying, only, to make the skeleton “stack” (which is a very limited metaphor anyway; take even a brief glance and tell me the tibia stacks on top of the bones of the talus and navicular; it most certainly does not).

It’s something else.